unlike father, unlike son

This is the moment that George Romney, Mitt Romney's father, destroyed his own political career:

The interview is from 1967. Until then, Romney, a popular governor of Michigan, was a very credible contender for the 1968 Republication presidential nomination. But after he allowed that word, 'brainwashing', to escape his lips, his reputation took a massive blow, his campaign struggled to make headway, and he was forced to withdraw from the race before a vote was cast. The nomination was won, of course, by Richard Nixon, who went on to win the general election. George Romney's political career never recovered. 

Mitt, it is said by those who know his family, worshipped his father. Like George, he became a Mormon missionary, and he later followed him into politics, emulating his success by becoming governor of a state (Massachusetts). The closest  Mitt gets to displaying real emotion in public is when talking about his father.

But Mitt and George are very different personalities, and very different politicians. You might not have guessed it from watching his son on the campaign trail, but George Romney was a highly gregarious, loose-limbed campaigner who liked to shoot from the hip and talk off the top of his head. He wasn't always the most articulate guy (one of his opponents said that watching him campaign was "like watching a duck make love to a football") but he had spontaneity and eccentric charm in buckets.

Having won the Florida primary by a thumping margin, Mitt Romney is about to go one further than his father. He hopes to go one further still. In the months up until November, we're going to see even more of this tightly-wound personality attempting to do what his father failed to achieve, while acting in the opposite manner to him.

The 'brainwashing moment' doesn't explain why Mitt Romney is ultra-cautious in his speech, manner and decisions - he was probably just born that way - but the knowledge of it must have been a formative factor in his political persona. It's the closest we get to Romney's Rosebud.

Comments

[Arapaho415]

In a recent debate (don't recall which one, there's been so many), Romney was asked whether he would release his income tax returns as his father did in 1967, setting the precedent for such disclosure. Romney's expression was amazing; his features softened at the mention of his father's name, and suddenly he was no longer Romneybot.

Pundits need to be careful when comparing 1967-1968 to 2011-2012. Tumultuous doesn't begin to describe those years. I was 14 years old and devastated when Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot immediately after winning the California winner-take-all primary in June, 1968 (just two months after Martin Luther King's assassination). Among the general populace, the most popular Republicans were moderate Yankees (Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney). I'm still not sure how Richard Nixon got the 1968 Republican nomination, but his closest competitor was George Romney.

[ejoch]

I wasn't even alive in '68 but I was under the impression, probably from Theodore White's book, that Rockefeller was the biggest threat to Nixon? At least after the 'brainwashing' interview, when Romney's ratings suddenly dived.
I think the debate you're referring to was the first Florida one; he was asked about releasing 20 years' worth, and he said he disagreed with his father on that.