2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: I wouldn't be at all surprised if Mitt dropped out of the race. Hear me out... [View all]amandabeech
(9,893 posts)George Romney, governor of Michigan, was a serious presidential candidate in 1968. He left the campaign after he was beat up by the media for changing his position on Vietnam, saying that he had been brainwashed by the conservatives and military types.
Mitt and his dad got along, so we don't have a case of Mitt trying to outdo Daddy by getting Saddam, like we had with the Shrub. Rather, Mitt may be running to fulfill his father's dream. I would suspect that Mitt thinks the media treated his dad unfairly, and maybe they did. I have some memories of the elder Romney's run--I was a young, politically aware teen living with my family in Michigan at the time.
The elder Romney was a reasonable moderate Republican, and I think that if he had secured the Republican nomination instead of Nixon, and won, we would have had a better situation in the US then, which in my opinion means that we would have a better situation now. RFK or Humphrey would of course been superior, but compared to Nixon, Romney was a peach of a guy. Things that happened in the Nixon years still haunt our nation and our politics. The elder Romney's wife was a real old fashioned liberal Republican who favored choice, if you can believe that. Mitt really isn't up to his parents' standards.