Campaign Notes: Nixon and Romney

By John Barron

The way former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney keeps plugging away to win over Republican voters brings to mind a story about the love life of a young Richard Nixon. The story was told by Nixon and others as an example of his persistence and (unintentionally, in Nixon’s case) his strangeness.

It goes something like this: In the late 1930s, a young law graduate named Dick Nixon met the attractive and slightly older Pat Ryan when they were cast together in an amateur play in Wittier, California.

Nixon would offer her lifts home, which she would sometimes accept, and eventually he summoned up the courage to ask her on a date. She declined his advances.

But Nixon wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, and he kept offering Pat lifts home and elsewhere — including to go on dates with other beaus.

After a while Pat started to see past the humourless, hangdog Nixon exterior, and realised she was having a better time talking to her persistent chauffeur than her other dates.

Richard and Pat Nixon in Washington D.C., Spring 1947.

They married in 1940 and stayed together for 53 years until her death. (Pat endured much, including, some have claimed, physical and verbal abuse when Nixon was depressed and drinking heavily at the height of Watergate.)

And persistence rather than immediate lovability was the hallmark of Richard Nixon’s astonishing and self-destructive political career, as well as his love life. As a Senator he grabbed headlines as an anti-communist — enough headlines to have him elected Vice President while still in his thirties. He came very close to beating the charismatic John Kennedy for the presidency in 1960 and famously failed to win the governorship of California in 1962. That’s when Nixon seemed washed up, snarling to the Sacramento press corps that they “don’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” Six years later, he was elected President of the United States and re-elected in 1972 in a landslide, before his web of lies over the DNC break-in unravelled.

What does all of that have to do with Mitt Romney?

In a way the two men could hardly be more different. Nixon the son of dirt-poor Quaker parents, Romney the Mormon son of a wealthy industrialist, governor and presidential candidate — ironically, against Nixon.

Mitt Romney is as golf-gear catalogue–handsome as Nixon, with a five o’clock shadow that appeared from around 11am, resembled a small town gangster. Yet Mitt Romney, for all his good looks, good connections and good money, like Nixon, is kind of hard to like.

Having watched Romney up close campaigning in 2007 and 2011 I still can’t put my finger on what’s lacking — but something is, and people sure notice. His mechanical stiffness has earned him the unkind nick-name “Mitt Rom-bot” — which nonetheless carries with it a kernel of truth.

Perhaps that’s why more than 70 per cent of Republican voters still aren’t sold on Romney, and why they have flirted with so many other beaus.

But eventually, like Pat Ryan, those Republican voters may take another look at this awkward character who they decided quite early “wasn’t their type,” and conclude that Mitt’s the marrying kind after all.

25 October 2011