This Opinion Column was posted 7 hours ago in Boston Globe. So powerful, I decided to share parts of it. Title: Ann Romney overstepped by playing poor
APPEARED IN BOSTON GLOBE TODAY
August 31, 2012|Joanna Weiss
Mrs. Romney said they ate tuna and pasta and she was on her knees cleaning the floor. Helps if you don’t insult people’s intelligence. There Ann Romney was, reminiscing about her newlywed days, when she lived in a basement apartment (sample from my Twitter feed: “NOT A BASEMENT APARTMENT!”) and cleaned her own floors and “ate a lot of tuna fish and pasta.” Plus, her grandfather, lucky for her, was a coal miner in Wales. O, the humanity!
As most people know by now, the Romneys’ “poverty” was temporary, and born of choice; rather than hold down jobs, they sold stock to get by while he was in graduate school. But this was one of many glossed-over facts in a campaign that seems to gravitate toward gloss — see Paul Ryan’s fiery, factually challenged speech.
Did Ann Romney really need to stretch the truth? There are plenty of real humanizing details in her story, which is why she performed so beautifully during the media rounds this week. Her interview with CBS’s Scott Pelley was mesmerizing: As her husband looked on adoringly, she talked about how a miscarriage had affected her youngest son, Craig, how she hadn’t had a chance to tell him what was happening, how the boy came home from school and burst into tears. Mitt Romney said he’d never heard that story before.