by Ann Romney
* * *
My horses made it easier for me to get through the 2008 presidential campaign. No matter what I was feeling, when I was riding I could tune it out and focus on the moment: Find the right seat. Relax. Balance your weight. As it had in the past, riding made a difference. I rode all the way through the 2008 election. I didn’t spend any time at all thinking about what might have been. Then, in early December, I went for a regularly scheduled annual mammogram at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and was stunned when something showed up on the X-ray. I was diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). I didn’t know what that meant, either. In fact, it’s somewhere between pre-cancer and early-stage cancer. But if it isn’t discovered, if you let it go, it can be fatal. Mine was detected so early that it was considered stage 0, the best of all possible stages. I immediately had a lumpectomy, a procedure that went smoothly.
It was a sobering time. First MS, and now this. Either my bag of rocks was getting heavier, or the hill was getting steeper.
After the lump was removed, my doctors recommended radiation. It was interesting. I hadn’t worried too much about the cancer. I knew it had been caught early, and I thought, Well, I’ll have surgery and we’ll go from there. I’m not going to worry about it until I need to worry about it. But the prospect of radiation made me very anxious. My father had suffered from prostate cancer for which he had received radiation—and it was that treatment that caused the rare side effect, angiosarcoma, that eventually killed him.
I called my brother Jim, the doctor, to discuss it with him. Having watched my father die from the radiation side effect, I was reluctant to risk following the same path.
Jim told me, “Look, what happened to Dad was so rare.”
I said, “I know, but I am clearly his daughter.”
“I think you should go ahead with it,” he said, maybe a little firmly, as a brother would do.
A lesser concern, but more likely, was that the radiation might affect my MS. Radiation has been shown to attack the immune system, although not nearly as severely as chemotherapy. No one was really sure whether it might trigger an attack. Radiation also causes fatigue, as your body wages an internal war. But I followed my brother’s advice and had the therapy. They blasted my cells. And as I guessed would happen, it knocked me off my feet—literally and figuratively. Oh shoot, I thought. Here we go again.
I was getting awfully tired of being tired. But this time, at least, I had a strategy that I knew worked. I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel; the old one still worked fine. I knew what made me feel better and I knew what made my condition worse. Still, the fatigue would last more than six months before I got my health on balance again.
Among the many people who offered support was the newly elected president, Barack Obama, who called to wish me well. It was a gracious and welcome call.
Each experience, whether it was my health, that of a friend or associate, or one of the many people I met during a campaign, only reinforced what I had learned: there is so much we know about protecting our health, so many things that we now know are good or bad for us, so many different types of precautions we can take and examinations available, that it is not just silly but dangerous not to take advantage of them. Get a mammogram. Get enough sleep. Eat healthy foods. But there also is so much we don’t know about protecting our health that it makes great sense to open yourself to the nontraditional options. There was a time I easily dismissed holistic medicine and the alternative therapies that, since I was first diagnosed, have become part of my recovery and part of my life. Nobody really knows what therapy will work for an individual or, if or when it does, why it works. The fact that it does is enough. For me, reflexology, yoga, acupuncture, meditation, horses, and faith, as well as a healthy diet consisting of organic foods and little meat—with a healthy dose of vitamin D from sunlight—have made all the difference. It’s a jumble that resulted from trial and error. I’ve tried therapies that worked for people I knew but did not seem to make a difference for me. Who knows why, and honestly it makes no difference. Western medicine had stopped the progression of MS, it helped me battle cancer, but I had learned other strategies to help with my energy; I had found my balance. That balance was precarious, and I knew that I was still vulnerable.
Within a year following the 2008 election my health was good and life was good. As soon as an incoming president raises his right hand and takes the oath of office, the clock begins ticking on his four-year term—and the speculation begins about the next election. It isn’t simply idle talk: gearing up to run is a long and very expensive process. Millions of dollars have to be raised. A lot of people have to be hired to build and run a campaign. If you wait too long, it becomes impossible. There also are a lot of very good people busy trying to hitch a ride on what they believe will be the winning campaign. Only a few weeks after the 2008 election, Mitt began receiving feelers from people trying to discern his interest in making another run. Many people perceived him to be a very strong contender for the nomination.
But there were a lot of alternatives for us. Almost immediately after dropping out of the 2008 race, Mitt also began receiving offers to get back into the business world. One of them was an offer to run a hedge fund with an annual salary of twenty million dollars. He turned them all down. Somewhere deep inside, I knew what that meant. When it’s an important cause where Mitt thinks he can make a difference, he does not walk away easily—and when he does lose, he doesn’t like to walk away.
Mitt and I rarely spoke of making another run for the presidency. We make decisions together, we have to talk through everything, but this topic we let sit there. It wasn’t until it was time to make a go or no-go decision that we talked through how we felt. We considered all the positives and all the negatives. We knew all the risks. Did I believe he would make a good president? Yes. So the answer to running again, despite that I had said “never again,” was yes. Mitt, however, needed a push to get to the same place.
In December 2010, the family gathered to discuss whether Mitt should make another run for president. Surprisingly, there was no mention of all the time and work each of us had put into the last campaign, though I’m sure Josh had not forgotten his ninety-nine-county RV journey through Iowa. We talked about the high points: the surprising come-from-behind win in Michigan, the scores of new friends we had made among supporters and donors, the political and other leaders we had come to know. We also were honest about the low points: Florida’s Charlie Crist going back on his word, the loss in New Hampshire, and the less-than-adoring press. The political environment had changed since 2008. President Obama’s administration had led some Republicans to be more strident, even angry, in their opposition to the direction the country was heading in. One former governor said that while he had considered running for president in 2012, he felt that the primary electorate had become so toxic that he would not be a fit with our voters.
Mitt pointed out that if he were to run again, he would have to carry the baggage that had been placed on him by Senator McCain’s 2008 primary campaign, joking that he had been branded as a “flip-flopping Mormon.” He also noted that removing an incumbent president is a rare and difficult thing to do. Yes, he said, the economy was a problem for President Obama, but because many people placed the blame for the great recession on President Bush, it did not impact Obama’s reelection prospects as much as would have been expected. Noting that every recession ends and that every recovery reduces unemployment, he predicted that if the rate of unemployment stayed above 8 percent, the president would lose, but if it dropped below that level, Obama would probably be reelected. Beating President Obama would, to a significant degree, be out of our control.
There was also the primary to consider. The primary opponents would blame Mitt for showing President Obama the path from Romneycare to Obamacare. And good people were looking seriously at the race: Governor Tim Pawlenty was a capable and accomplished leader, Newt Gingrich had been Speaker of the House, Governor Rick Perry had ov
erseen impressive economic growth in Texas, and while they would eventually decide not to run, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, and Haley Barbour were all thinking about a run.
With all this in mind, we put it to a vote. The 2006 family vote had been unanimous in favor of running. This time the vote was 10–2 against. Only Tagg and I voted in favor. Even Mitt voted against, wondering, “Why go through the process just to lose again?”
All his preparatory work had convinced him that it would be incredibly difficult to defeat an extremely well-funded incumbent president, even if he did win the nomination. But in addition to Tagg and me, a lot of other people kept pushing him to change his mind. This wasn’t a matter of Mitt being coy, as some journalists suggested; he was being logical, realistic. His career in business had shown him the downside of making ego-driven decisions. He didn’t need to make this run to prove anything to anyone.
Over the coming weeks, Mitt came around to my way of thinking. There were several things that led him to his decision. First, he was increasingly concerned about the direction the country was taking under President Obama. Internationally, Mitt felt that President Obama had seriously underestimated the intentions of Russian president Vladimir Putin, minimized the reality of the growing threat of radical Islam, distanced America from our most loyal friends, and was walking away from Iraq and Afghanistan in a way that would ultimately result in chaos and bloodshed. At home, he felt that the president had done nothing to make American businesses better able to create the jobs that would raise incomes and provide opportunity for the middle class.
Mitt had also come to believe that among those considering a run in 2012, he would have the best chance of beating the president in the general election. Winning the nomination, however, he knew would not be a foregone conclusion. As his strategist Stuart Stevens observed, Mitt was Mormon in a party that was more evangelical; he was rich in a party that was more populist; and he was northern in a party that was more southern. Added to that was Romneycare.
In the final analysis, Mitt and I agreed: get in and give it our all.
This time, Mitt had the national campaign experience he lacked in the 2008 race. He reviewed the lessons learned from his loss to Senator McCain and from the senator’s loss to Barack Obama. He assembled a cadre of some of the nation’s prominent authorities on foreign and domestic policy and tasked them with preparing thorough briefings. He assembled a campaign team that not only was expert but comprised people of character and caring. Win or lose, these people would be the kind who would remain friends—his friends and friends with one another.
His prior experience was not all positive, however. In the 2008 primaries, his opponents branded him a flip-flopper, an epithet the media was happy to keep alive. Our wealth and Mitt’s career as a private equity CEO would also be dragged out, to foster the continuing narrative that he didn’t care about everyday people. Nothing was further from the truth, of course. It was his concern for the everyday people of America that had led him to decide to run for president. And it was the warmth of his heart that we had seen in our home, that members of his church had seen in the congregations he pastored, and that his colleagues had seen in the places he had worked. It could not have been lost on the people who follow campaigns closely that Mitt was being vigorously supported by the people who knew and had known him best.
Before the campaign got under way, we made decisions about my participation. We agreed that I would spend two or three days a week campaigning, and then take time off. I would do some light interviews whenever possible, but as I reminded everyone, I couldn’t work as hard as Mitt. This came as no surprise: not a lot of people work as hard as Mitt. When necessary, I once again would become the Mitt Stabilizer. While most of the time Mitt and I campaigned separately, at least once a day the campaign tried to get us together by phone, even if only for a few minutes. I did sit in on a lot of strategy sessions, where my main function was to be Mitt’s sounding board. We’d spent our lifetime together discussing every important issue that affected our family, and this was no different. It was just a little bigger family.
This time the things that had gone wrong in 2008 went right for us. As we approached Super Tuesday, it looked like we were going to win the nomination. My competitive nature kicked in, I got caught up in the excitement and enthusiasm, and I overdid it. I couldn’t quit, and I didn’t want to tell anyone how tired I was. But I started to reach that point where I begin to lose my words—when I’m that fatigued, I can’t find the words to express what I’m thinking. Then I started to stumble a little bit, losing my balance when I shouldn’t have. I finally accepted the fact that I had to take a break.
In fact, two weeks later, after we won the Illinois primary, I had to take ten days off, spending as much of that time as possible on horseback. While the emotional distance between my normal life and my life in the barn had always been significant, it really was nothing compared to what we were going through. On the campaign trail, every moment of our lives was planned, every single minute counted. Every word carried great weight, and even the smallest mistake could prove consequential. It was the greatest game of gotcha anyone could possibly imagine. It was almost impossible not to make mistakes. Once, for example, when I was asked during a Baltimore radio interview if Mitt came across as too stiff, I responded that if that was true, then “we better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out.” The communications folks on the campaign didn’t think this was the most ideal response.
Later during the campaign, my airplane was forced to make an emergency landing in Colorado after some wiring caught fire and filled the cabin with smoke. It was scary for several moments, but no one was hurt. After our plane was safely on the ground and I’d spoken to Mitt and assured him we all were fine, he told a Los Angeles Times pool reporter that smoke in an airplane was especially dangerous because “you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that.” While the Times reporter made it clear that Mitt was very relieved and was joking, other reporters took his comment seriously—and they used it as a basis for questioning Mitt’s intelligence. Such is the nature of the sound bite in the hands of a less-than-adoring press.
So, as you can imagine, the contrast between the endless cameras and microphones of the campaign and then being alone, mucking out a stall, grooming an animal, sitting on a horse, being in a quiet and safe environment, was indescribable.
The primaries were as exhausting as we knew they would be, but the outcome was as exhilarating as we had hoped. Mitt received a resounding vote of confidence from Republicans across the country. He would formally accept the nomination of the Republican Party at the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August 2012. And I would be a prime-time speaker.
Mitt was a little concerned about my speaking to an audience of millions. He hadn’t seen me very often on the trail, as we generally spoke at our own separate events. But I had spoken to large audiences and had no trouble finding my voice and speaking my mind. So as I stood in front of the convention hall I wasn’t in the least bit nervous. That may sound a little unbelievable, but it is true. I was actually looking forward to my speech. This was my chance to tell the American people why Mitt should be president and why he would be a great president. This was also my chance to thank the millions of mothers who were helping raise the next generation of Americans.
In preparing what I would say, I thought back to the remarks I had made at Harvard Business School decades before. I had noted that being a mother and actively raising a child was every bit as demanding as other important professions, and surely just as rewarding. There had been a lot of changes in the home and workplace since I’d made that speech. A lot more women were trying to find the balance between a career and their children, but there still was a stigma attached to putting your children before your job. In fact, several months earlier a Democratic spokesperson had criticized me on CNN for suggesting t
hat women care about economic issues, saying, “Guess what? His wife has actually never worked a day in her life.” Whoa. That comment really surprised me. To suggest that raising children is not work was disappointing to me and, I suspected, to many millions of other American women. But it reminded me of how many people still believed it. I decided I would address the merits of motherhood in my speech.
Let Mitt talk about economics and foreign policy. My speech focused on the thing about which I was an undeniable expert: being a mother. I also wanted it to be a thank-you note to the mothers who had worked so hard and felt so underappreciated. “It’s the moms who always have to work a little harder to make everything right,” I said. “It’s the moms of this nation—single, married, widowed—who really hold this country together. 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 …
“You’re the ones who always have to do a little more.
“You know what it’s like to work a little harder during the day to earn the respect you deserve at work and then come home to help with that book report which just has to be done.
“You know what those late-night phone calls with an elderly parent are like and those long weekend drives to see how they’re doing.
“You know the fastest route to the local emergency room and which doctors actually answer the phone when you call at night.