[Memory is fallible. I could have taken the time to look up the details below to be sure I had them right, but what the heck, the following is what I *remember*, whether it's a confabulation of disparate events or an accurate record of the election season(s) in question....]

I was recently asked for my thoughts about Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. My response was:

Mitt Romney was not governor when I lived there, but he did run for Senate (against Ted Kennedy) while I lived in Massachusetts. I was somewhat active in the Republican party leadership at the time, and he phoned me once to ask for my endorsement leading up to the highly contested Republican primary (which he won).

Here's what I remember in talking with him: very little. He asked for my endorsement, I asked what made him a better candidate than the other republicans, and he gave me the standard pat answers that made absolutely no impression whatsoever. If I ended up endorsing him for the primaries, as I seem to recall, it was because, well, he was the only one who asked.

But once he won the primary and went after Kennedy, then I got to see him in action. There were several televised debates between the two, and I watched. Romney was the first challenger in a very long time who had a shot of beating Kennedy, which made it an exciting race.

The debates were a bit unsettling, however. Romney's message was, ultimately, this: I'll do everything that Kennedy would do, the only difference is, I'm not a Kennedy.

Keep in mind that Kennedy's politics still play very well in Massachusetts, even though they voted several Republican governors in a row following Bill Weld's taking the seat away from Democrat Michael Dukakis (remember him?). Romney essentially said, hey, I can champion those Massachusetts-y politics just as well as Kennedy can, but at least I'm not a bloated drunken embarrassment. Nationalized medicine? Sure, why not! (But no one will die in my car, wink, wink.) Etc., etc.

Kennedy was suffering from an image problem even worse that year than usual; he was involved in a rape trial (the alleged rape having taken place in his beach house in Florida, I think, and allegedly being perpetrated by his nephew) and did not look so good; and his nose was glowing even redder than usual in his television appearances for much of that year. But, as he always does for his campaigns, he cleaned up quite well during the debates.

Kennedy's message that year was: well, if there's no difference between Romney and me in terms of politics, you have to vote for me because I'm a senior ranking democrat, and we own the Senate! If you re-elect me, I'll continue to chair important committees, etc. Romney won't be able to do that.

Romney lost (obviously), and deservedly so. There were a few funny ironies that came out of this, however. The biggest irony was that this was the year that Newt Gingrich led the charge for Republicans to (successfully) re-take the House and the Senate, so that Kennedy was no longer a senior-ranking majority party Senator. He was a senior-ranking *minority* party Senator, which means no chairmanships, and his entire campaign was based upon a false premise. Likewise, Romney thought that all he had to do to win was not be Kennedy in name. It turns out, he also needed to not be Kennedy in his politics. He learned this lesson.

As you know, Romney was eventually elected Governor of Massachusetts, and from what I've heard, he did an okay job. As it turns out, he's not as liberal as Kennedy -- his message to that effect when he ran against Kennedy didn't play well enough to win that race, so he modified his positions to be less liberal -- but he wasn't necessarily as neo-conservative as George W. Bush, either. In pursuing the national nomination, he has further moved toward the neo-conservative camp, but that was not how things played during his governorship.

My opinion, having seen his career develop, is that he is more interested in holding the office than he is interested in what he can do with it. In this respect, he reminds me of Bill Clinton. He is pragmatic, which is good, and a competent administrator once elected, but he does not appear to me to be a man of strong conviction, so what you see in him may change as the political winds shift. He's more likely to keep his pants zipped; but otherwise, he strikes me as rather Clintonian in his opportunism.

This may not necessarily be a bad thing, but I tend to want my candidates to at least stand for *something*. I think that if he is elected, he'll likely be a competent caretaker of the office, but that's about the best I could hope for from him.

...and THAT is my Mitt Romney story. Let the incendiary comments begin!