TAMPA, Florida — At 5:40 p.m. Tuesday, when the New Jersey
delegation cast all 50 of their votes for Mitt Romney, it gave the
former governor of Massachusetts 1,150 votes — six more than the
1,144 necessary for a majority — and he at last became officially
the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. Choosing a
nominee is, after all, the actual purpose of the convention, but
the roll call that marked the culmination of Romney’s long campaign
(which has been effectively continuous since 2006) was not a
primetime event. Instead, TV viewers saw a night of speeches that
culminated with back-to-back speeches by the candidate’s wife, Ann
Romney, and the keynote speaker, New Jersey Gov. Chris
Christie.
It was a powerful one-two punch to cap the opening night of the
Republican National Convention, which saw its first day’s schedule
cancelled by fears of Hurricane Isaac, the storm that turned away
from Tampa and instead headed west across the Gulf of Mexico. The
delayed beginning did not lessen the power of the speech by Ann
Romney, who told a story of her husband’s success that contradicted
the narrative the liberal media have constructed about him.
“Tonight I want to talk to you about love,” Mrs. Romney told the
thousands of GOP delegates gathered inside the Tampa Bay Times
Forum. “I want to talk to you about the deep and abiding love I
have for a man I met at a dance many years ago.”
Republicans in love? Whoever heard of such a thing? The media
would have us believe that Republicans are soulless automatons
incapable of love. At certain points during Mrs. Romney’s speech,
one could hear a few reporters in the Media Filing Center
sarcastically mocking her words. The liberal media have spent
months pushing the Obama campaign’s message that the GOP is the
Anti-Woman Party, but liberal journalists are scarcely able to
conceal their contempt for Republican women like Ann Romney, who
used her speech as an opportunity to appeal directly to women
without the media filter.
“It’s the moms of this nation — single, married, widowed — who
really hold this country together,” Mrs. Romney said. “We’re the
mothers, we’re the wives, we’re the grandmothers, we’re the big
sisters, we’re the little sisters, we’re the daughters.” Mothers
“are the best of America. You are the hope of America. There would
not be an America without you.”
The candidate’s wife used her own biography to push back against
the media’s narrative of the Republican as overprivileged: “I am
the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his
kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six
years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon,
cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms. When he was 15, dad came to
America. In our country, he saw hope and an opportunity to escape
from poverty. He moved to a small town in the great state of
Michigan…. My dad would often remind my brothers and me how
fortunate we were to grow up in a place like America.”
Ann Romney also reminded listeners how she and her husband began
their married life: “We were very young. Both still in college.
There were many reasons to delay marriage, and you know? We just
didn’t care. We got married and moved into a basement apartment. We
walked to class together, shared the housekeeping, and ate a lot of
pasta and tuna fish. Our desk was a door propped up on sawhorses.
Our dining room table was a fold down ironing board in the
kitchen…. Then our first son came along. All at once I’m 22 years
old, with a baby and a husband who’s going to business school and
law school at the same time, and I can tell you, probably like
every other girl who finds herself in a new life far from family
and friends, with a new baby and a new husband, that it dawned on
me that I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into.”
After recounting her husband’s record of success, Ann Romney
drew a standing ovation when she told the Republican delegates,
“This man will not fail. This man will not let us down. This man
will lift up America.”
When she ended her speech and was briefly joined onstage by her
husband, Mrs. Romney had seemingly provided the highlight of the
evening, and it seemed improbable that Chris Christie could top it
— but he did.
Christie, a politician famous for speaking bluntly, began by
recounting his own humble origins and praising his own mother: “She
was tough as nails and didn’t suffer fools at all. The truth was
she couldn’t afford to. She spoke the truth — bluntly, directly
and without much varnish. And I am her son.”
A cynic might understand this maternal homage as reflecting the
same polling data that has inspired Democrats to accuse Republicans
of waging a “war on women.” Mothers are a crucial swing-vote
segment and, with just 10 weeks remaining between now and Election
Day, the Romney and Obama campaigns will fight hard for those
votes.
Christie’s speech was full of fight and patriotic sentiment.
“We’ve never been a country to shy away from the truth,” the New
Jersey governor told the delegates. “History shows that we stand up
when it counts and it’s this quality that has defined our character
and our significance in the world.” Contrasting the policies of
Democrats and Republicans, Christie said: “I know this simple truth
and I’m not afraid to say it: our ideas are right for America and
their ideas have failed America.”
Criticizing the failures of the Obama administration, Christie
said: “It’s time to end this era of absentee leadership in the Oval
Office and send real leaders to the White House. America needs Mitt
Romney and Paul Ryan and we need them right now.” He pounded away
with rhetorical sledgehammer blows, finishing with a call to “stand
up for Mitt Romney” and “stand up once again for American
greatness.”
Most Republicans left the opening night of the convention in a
fired-up mood. The question is whether the message conveyed by Ann
Romney and Chris Christie would reach beyond downtown Tampa,
leaping over the prejudices of a biased liberal media to gain a
fair hearing from the voters who will decide the election now
just 69 days away.
