The proverbial “electricity” was palpable in the crowd at the
Pensacola Civic Center on Saturday, but candidate Mitt Romney was
talking about electricity of another kind. Romney, a onetime Boy
Scout leader, was speaking about a major national Scout ceremony
from years ago in which a Scout leader from Monument, Colorado, was
telling a story while he, Romney, was there on the dais.
The Monument scouts had created a special American flag (with
gold trim, or something like that), had it flown at the U.S.
Capitol, and then somehow convinced NASA to send it on a space
shuttle. The shuttle was the Challenger; the flight was in
1986.
Lo and behold, after many months of random discoveries of debris
from the tragically exploded Challenger, somebody actually
found the Monument flag, and NASA returned it to the Scouts in
Colorado. The flag, amazingly
enough, remained in perfect condition. And the Scout leader
unveiled it at the ceremony — and then handed it to Romney.
“I touched it,” Romney told the Pensacola crowd, “and it was as
if electricity was running through my arm.”
The way Romney told the story was masterful. The
hyper-enthusiastic audience, 12,000 strong, was suddenly completely
hushed. And Romney continued to weave this story, this moving, true
story, into a broader narrative, quite seamlessly, about heroes and
honor and big ideals — a story told in the context of honoring
heroes like the Navy pilots based there in “a city of heroes,”
Pensacola, and those pilots who had been based there in the past,
like a man named John McCain. And Romney suddenly was quoting,
perfectly, a lesser-known verse of “America the Beautiful,” the one
that goes “O beautiful, for heroes proved, in liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than
life.”
Romney continued: “This is who we are as a people…. We live for
things beyond ourselves.”
None of this speech seemed awkward or canned. None of it seemed
forced. Every single bit of it rang true, and flowed naturally and
conversationally, a testimony from the heart.
My wife, a tough critic of political speeches, agreed with me:
Never, ever, had either one of us seen Romney like this —
not this effective, not this genuine, not this naturally
inspirational.
It wasn’t just the crowd’s enthusiasm that was electric, and it
wasn’t just the sensation the Monument flag sent through Romney’s
arm that was electric; Romney himself was electric, in the very
best way — a source of energy and of what certainly seemed like
light, coming from a candidate I’ve often in the past derided as
stiff and awkward and overly postured. In Pensacola on October 27,
2012, Mitt Romney was electric, and he exuded warmth. He was
slipping the surly bonds of politics, touching something truer.
He did it amidst a crowd that exuded a vibe the likes of which I
haven’t felt since Ronald Reagan was around. Oh, it still wasn’t
quite Reaganesque, but it was wonderfully close to it.
This crowd really seemed to have taken Mitt Romney to its heart;
the feeling wasn’t so much visceral as it was
embracing. There was a sense of welcome and warm energy,
somewhat like that which Reagan inspired, rather than of the more
virulently animal spirits that sometimes mar political
gatherings.
In turn, Romney seemed remarkably at ease, his delivery fluent
and eminently real. Again and again, in a natural and
unforced way, he worked local references into the narrative arc of
his speech on big, decidedly national issues such as military
spending, trade, and Obamacare. (Without breaking a sweat, he also
managed the politically effective feat of working in references to
people in other places — Monument; and Waukesha, Wisconsin; and
New Hampshire — that just so happen to be swing states.) And his
speech had the right cadences, too: Most of it easy and
conversational prose, but with just the right amount of obviously
prepared sound bites that were semi-catchy without being
ostentatious, with just enough of a “speechified” feel to keep the
audience’s attention.
Barack Obama, said Romney, “is out of ideas, he’s out of
excuses, and this November we’re gonna put him out of office.”
American needs to make “big choices, with big consequences, which
is why this is a big election.” And so on. Nothing brilliant. But
quite obviously effective.
This was a candidate not just “hitting his stride,” but rather
one elevating his own game and elevating the entire campaign’s
sense of what American aspirations should be. Gov. Romney suddenly
has the look and feel both of a winner and, more importantly, of a
true leader, worthy of the nation he would serve. Turn on the
lights; the good work is just beginning.
