Gosh, Who Talks Like That
Now? Romney Does
GOFFSTOWN, N.H. — At a campaign stop in Rockford,
Ill., not long ago, Mitt Romney
sought to convey his feelings for his wife, Ann. “Smitten,” he said.
Not merely in love.
“Yeah, smitten,” he said. “Mitt was smitten.”
It was a classic Mittism, as friends and advisers call the verbal quirks
of the Republican presidential candidate. In Romneyspeak, passengers do not get
off airplanes, they “disembark.” People do not laugh, they “guffaw.” Criminals
do not go to jail, they land in the “big house.” Insults are not hurled,
“brickbats” are.
As he seeks the office of commander in chief, Mr. Romney can sometimes
seem like an editor in chief, employing a language all his own. It is polite,
formal and at times anachronistic, linguistically setting apart a man who
frequently struggles to sell himself to the American electorate.
It is most pronounced when he is on the stump and off the cuff, not on
the stuffy and rehearsed debate stage. But Mr. Romney offered voters a dose of
it during his face-off with President Obama last week, when he coined the
infelicitous phrase “binders full of women.”
Mr. Romney’s unique style of speaking has distinguished him throughout
his career, influencing the word choices of those who work with and especially
for him. Should he reach the White House, friends and advisers concede, the
trait could be a defining feature of his public image, as memorable as Lyndon
B. Johnson’s foul-mouthed utterances or the first President Bush’s tortured
syntax.
Mr. Romney, 65, has spent four decades inside the corridors of high
finance and state politics, where indecorous diction and vulgarisms abound. But
he has emerged as if in a rhetorical time capsule from a well-mannered era of
soda fountains and AMC Ramblers, someone whose idea of swearing is to let loose
with the phrase “H-E-double hockey sticks.”
“He actually said that,” recalled Thomas Finneran, the speaker of the
Massachusetts House of Representatives when Mr. Romney was governor. “As in, go
to ‘H-E-double hockey sticks.’ I would think to myself, ‘Who talks like
that?’ ”
Mr. Romney, quite proudly. In fact, he seems puzzled by the fascination
with something as instinctive (and immutable) as how he talks, as if somebody
were asking how he breathes. “It’s like someone who speaks with an accent,” he
said in an interview. “You don’t hear the accent.”
His Mormon faith frowns on salty language, and so does he. A man of
relentless self-discipline, he made clear to lawmakers in Boston and colleagues
in business that even in matters of vocabulary, he “held himself to a high
standard of behavior,” said Geoffrey Rehnert, a former executive at Bain
Capital, the firm Mr. Romney started in the 1980s. Mr. Romney’s father, George,
whom he idolized, shared the same style of refined and restrained speech.
Those around him are so accustomed to his verbal tics that they describe
them in shorthand. “Old-timey,” said one aide. “His 1950s language,” explained
another. “The Gomer Pyle routine,” said a third.
Asked about his boss’s word preferences, Eric Fehrnstrom, a veteran
Romney adviser, responded knowingly: “You mean like ‘gosh, golly, darn’?”
For Democratic strategists, Mr. Romney’s throwback vocabulary feeds into
their portrayal of a man ill-equipped for the mores and challenges of the
modern age. David Axelrod, a top adviser for an Obama campaign that has adopted
“Forward” as its slogan, once quipped that Mr. Romney “must watch ‘Mad
Men,’ ” the hit television show set in Manhattan in the 1960s, “and think
it’s the evening news.”
His exclamations can sound jarring to the contemporary ear — or
charming, depending on whom you ask. Midway into a critique of Mr. Obama’s
economic policies a few months ago, Mr. Romney declared: “They’ve scared the
dickens out of banks,” he said. “They’ve scared the dickens out of insurance
companies.”
He declared, “To heck with it!” while urging reporters
to use their fingers to dig into a box of pastries he was passing around on a
plane. “Darn good question,” he replied to a voter in Kalamazoo, Mich., who
asked how he would work with Congress if elected. (His wife also got the “darn”
treatment in Michigan, when he enthused, “Gosh, darn, she is amazing!”) “Thank
heavens” is another favorite.
For people used to peppering their speech with four-letter words, time
with Mr. Romney can prove an exercise in self-control. A half-dozen people recalled
the precise moment when they swore — almost always accidentally — in his
presence.
When Robert Travaglini, then the Democratic president of the
Massachusetts State Senate, would curse in front of Mr. Romney, the governor
would frown and interject, “Well, I wouldn’t choose that diction,” Mr.
Travaglini recalled.
Mr. Rehnert, the former Bain executive, was mortified when a potential
client he took into Mr. Romney’s office promptly dropped a string of
profanities. “Mitt wanted to know what cats and dogs I was dragging in here,”
Mr. Rehnert said.
His cussing colleagues said Mr. Romney took pains not to judge them
publicly. “He did not impose his language preferences on us,” Mr. Finneran
said. “But I wonder if we became a little bit more restrained because we knew
this about him.”
Mr. Travaglini recalled lawmakers’ discussing how Mr. Romney “should be
more in tune with the vernacular of the day and express himself more
passionately.”
“But,” he added, “that’s not who he is.”
Mr. Romney does have his own distinctly G-rated arsenal of angry
expressions — “Good grief,” “flippin’,” “good heavens” and even the occasional
“crap.”
Perhaps the most intriguing of these is “grunt.” Most people just grunt.
Mr. Romney, however, talks about grunting. “Grunt” he says, onomatopoetically,
when annoyed with a last-minute change in his campaign schedule.
Many of Mr. Romney’s verbal habits can sound like those of a
hyper-literate graduate student who never left school. (In college, he majored
in English.) He favors the gentlemanly qualifier “if you will,” which he
invoked three times during a recent speech.
On how to reduce the debt: “You have to start accumulating, if you will,
reserves.”
On speaking to a group of soldiers: “The cadets were all lined up and
sitting at attention, if you will.”
On his business background: “I’ve had the experience of working in the
real world, if you will.”
In interviews, voters expressed an equal measure of admiration for and
curiosity about his quaint dialect, which many described as a conspicuous break
from the normally harsh tone of politicians.
“It’s a wonderful change,” said Irene Sperling, a retiree from
Allentown, Pa. “He’s a gentleman.”
Wendy Tonn, 63, a Romney supporter who splits her time between Michigan
and Florida, said she found comfort in his vocabulary, comparing it to the
simple innocence of “Leave It to Beaver.” “We are of that era, and we’d like to
be returned to that kind of era,” she said.
Even Dennis Miller, the comedian, has weighed in, suggesting that after
four years of having a “hipster president” in the White House, Americans craved
a “gosh president.”
A few acquaintances have tried to drag him linguistically into the 21st
century. Mr. Finneran, an admitted serial curser, said that after years of
working closely with Mr. Romney, he began to fantasize about provoking him to
utter a particularly crude word.
“It got to the point where I started to think that my greatest
achievement of all time would be if I somehow or other got him to say the
word,” he said.
Once, Mr. Romney seemed on the cusp of fulfilling that wish during a
heated discussion. But he caught himself. “And I thought, ‘Oh, God, my closest
moment ever,’ ” Mr. Finneran said. “But it’s not going to happen.”
(Fuente:
http://www.nytimes.com)
