by Ann Romney
“You know what it’s like to sit in that graduation ceremony and wonder how it was that so many long days turned into years that went by so quickly … Tonight we salute you and sing your praises.
“I’m not sure if men really understand this, but I don’t think there’s a woman in America who really expects her life to be easy …
“And that is where this boy I met at a high school dance comes in. His name is Mitt Romney …
“I read somewhere that Mitt and I have a storybook marriage. Well, in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once. And those storybooks never seemed to have chapters called MS or breast cancer. A storybook marriage? No, not at all. What Mitt Romney and I have is a real marriage. I know this good and decent man for what he is—warm and loving and patient…”
And … we were off.
* * *
The memory that we had once believed that a presidential campaign was just a magnified version of a gubernatorial campaign was laughable. I had my own campaign staff—or, as it became known, Ann World. I had the most wonderfully supportive people working with me, and we made a stressful situation as much fun as possible, trying always to find the humor in a very serious situation. We also were fortunate in that the media coverage we got was not as strident as before; it was a little more relaxed and feature-story oriented. Mitt was on the front pages every day; we would have been just as happy to be in the Home section. In Mitt’s “bubble,” when his staff found themselves with an extra few minutes, they used the time to go over the talking points for his next appearance or deal with campaign strategy. In Ann World we all laughed a lot and had a great time together. The only time we even heard from the campaign was if I said something that maybe I shouldn’t have: Ann, you shouldn’t have responded to this remark or that newspaper column. And on occasion senior members of the campaign would pop into Ann World for a day or two to decompress.
The events we did in Ann World were people-oriented rather than policy-oriented, and as many of those people as possible were women. On Rachael Ray’s TV show, for example, we cooked Mitt’s favorite meal: mini-meatloaf cakes topped with a sauce spiked with brown sugar. At another kitchen show appearance, I made my well-known Welsh cake cookies, and then, without thinking about it, started stacking the dirty dishes on the TV set. In Jacksonville, Florida, I read a Dr. Seuss book to a kindergarten class and then spoke at a rally of mostly women. When I was asked on Live! With Kelly and Michael about my statement after the previous election that we were not ever going to do this again, I told them that Mitt had laughed and responded, “Do you know what? You say the same thing after every pregnancy.”
My role in the campaign was pretty straightforward: allow the public to know the private Mitt Romney. When asked during an interview in Good Housekeeping, for example, what was the biggest misconception about Mitt, I responded, as I did every day, “He is so warm and approachable, very spontaneous and funny in his private life—which is not what you see in his public life.”
We were always on the move. It was a whirlwind of media appearances, rallies, and fund-raisers, countless fund-raisers. And as before, I was touched by the many people struggling with their own issues who identified with me and wanted to meet me. They rarely, if ever, wanted anything more than an opportunity to say hello and to tell me that they were supporting our campaign. My message to them was always the same: Hold on, help is coming. I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, but in the back of my mind I had begun thinking about those initiatives I would focus on if we won. Obviously MS and breast cancer research were near the top of my list. Coincidently, Michelle Obama’s father also was afflicted with MS, which caused him to spend most of his life walking with two canes. That wasn’t going to be my whole platform, but I certainly wasn’t going to ignore it. Encouraging research, conversation, and communication about those diseases was going to be a big piece of what I wanted to accomplish.
My disease became an issue only once during the campaign. There were reporters who mocked the fact that a horse I owned was going to be ridden in the London Olympics dressage competition, which was simply another way of attacking Mitt as being out of touch with the average American. One group actually made an ad about it. Another journalist decided that it would be better for our campaign if the horse lost, as it would get too much publicity if the United States won a gold medal. When I was warned years earlier that politics was really tough and everything you did counted, I don’t think I suspected it would get down to that level. When it was pointed out to the media that riding was an important therapy for me, the attacks faded away.
When anything like that happened, Mitt immediately wanted to protect me. That was funny, of course, because while he was busy trying to protect me, I was trying to protect him. At the same time that he was calling my staff and telling them not to work me so hard, I was telling his staff not to work him so hard. There were times when we hadn’t seen each other for a while, and Mitt got wound up and became frustrated and his staff said, “Okay, it’s time for Ann to come back again. Get the Mitt Stabilizer in here.” We just worked better as a team. Always have, always will.
But there finally did come a time when everything caught up with me. At a major event in Naples, Florida, I introduced Mitt, went backstage, sat down, and said, “I’m done.” I was empty, I couldn’t go another step. They put me in a car and drove me across the state, and I spent three days recharging.
There isn’t a college course called “running for president.” There are very few people who have had the experience, and there isn’t much advice they can give you. You just get up every day and do it. And then you do it again, and again. As I was learning, a presidential campaign is the biggest roller-coaster ride in the world. The ups are incredible, and the lows are devastating. If you let yourself go for the ride, within a few hours you can go from exhilaration to depression. We learned pretty quickly not to let any news, good or bad, affect us. Oh, that was hard to do sometimes. Sometimes all the emotion wells up inside and you just want to let it out in a huge burst—and you can’t. Well, you shouldn’t. On a couple of occasions, I probably said more than the campaign would have liked, and I was criticized for it in the media. Instead, you have to keep smiling.
There were a few times when I did feel it was necessary to speak up. The polls before the first debate with Barack Obama showed we were still behind and didn’t seem to be gaining traction. So finally, before the debate, we all sat down to discuss what we hoped Mitt would accomplish in it. I emphasized that Mitt needed to let the American public see that he was a lot more than a collection of policies. We wanted people to see him for who he really was, not for who the Obama campaign and its surrogates had made him out to be.
From the very beginning, the opposition’s strategy had been to attack Mitt not for his policies, but for being a rich, out-of-touch plutocrat who didn’t care about everyday people. His being a CEO and rich helped their narrative. And perhaps his being Mormon amplified the image that he wasn’t like you and me, that he couldn’t connect with people. Mitt is the first to admit that he helped this unfortunate narrative along with some of the things he said during the campaign, as when he explained famously that to win he didn’t need to get 100 percent of the vote because 47 percent were sure to vote for the opposition. He needed to win the swing voters, he explained. That “47 percent” comment hurt him.
Mitt saw the debates in exactly the same way I did: as an opportunity for people to see that what the opposition had said about him simply was not true. President Obama, for example, had been saying that Mitt would lower taxes for the rich—again, painting him as a plutocrat. Mitt would correct that untruth and argue for tax reduction for the middle class. Most important, he would explain his positions by drawing on personal experiences and by telling the stories of real people he had met during the campaign.
My job during every debate was to be visible to him. The first thing Mitt did wh
en he walked onstage was to find me in the audience. As I stood there, anticipating the first time America would see my Mitt and President Obama face off, I thought about a lot of things. I thought about how lucky we were to have come so far. I thought about how lucky I was to have regained my strength, to have my MS in check. About how much love and strength and faith Mitt had given me. About listening to the right rein. About being quiet, and letting God show us the path. About my father, on the roof, and the grand design.
Mitt must have been thinking about a lot, too. I know for one thing he was thinking about his father. As he stood at the lectern at that first debate—and as he would do in each debate thereafter—he wrote one word, encircled, at the top of his notes: Dad.
And they were off. The first question in that debate was about the economy. Mitt began his response with a story I’d told him: “Ann yesterday was at a rally in Denver, and a woman came up to her with a baby in her arms and said, ‘Ann, my husband has had four jobs in three years, part-time jobs. He’s lost his most recent job, and we’ve now just lost our home. Can you help us?’ And the answer is yes, we can help, but it’s going to take a different path, not the one we’ve been on, not the one the president describes as a top-down, cut taxes for the rich. That’s not what I’m going to do.”
For the next hour or so, Mitt was at his best. He was clear, empathetic, sensible, logical—he was all the things that his family, friends, and colleagues knew him to be.
That debate was a high for us. Mitt won it resoundingly, as polls and pundits uniformly attested. It injected a whole new enthusiasm in the campaign, which carried through all the way to Election Day. It was amazing: the more people had seen of him, the larger the crowds became.
The second debate focused on foreign policy, a place where a sitting president has an obvious advantage. President Obama mocked Mitt’s assertion that Russia was America’s number one geopolitical foe, saying that the eighties were calling and that they wanted their foreign policy back. It was as good a line as it was as bad a reading of Russia, as subsequent events would prove.
Later, there was an exchange between the president and Mitt about the attack on our ambassador in Libya. The president said he had called the attack “terrorism,” and Mitt argued that his administration had tried to characterize it not as terrorism but as the spontaneous reaction to a video shown in Egypt. Shockingly, the moderator, Candy Crowley of CNN, injected herself into the exchange, saying that the president was right. Mitt was nearly speechless.
I don’t recall ever seeing Mitt angrier than he was after that debate. He was angry that the moderator had interrupted the exchange. Of course, the administration had done exactly as Mitt had argued: it had claimed for several days that this was not a planned terrorist attack. Mitt was right in principle, as Candy Crowley later confirmed. But he did not look like he was right during the debate itself, particularly given Crowley’s intrusion.
Polls after the debate gave the president the win, but by a relatively small margin. It looked like Republicans sided with Mitt, Democrats with the president, and the plurality of Independents with the president as well.
The final debate was perhaps the least memorable. Mitt’s personality showed through, however, and it won him even greater enthusiastic support. When Mitt came off the stage, his staff and friends met him in the hallway, clapping and cheering that he had won another great debate. We felt like we were on cloud nine.
During the last few weeks of the campaign, you could feel the enthusiasm and energy growing. One factor in winning an election is to peak enthusiasm as close to Election Day as possible, in order to generate the largest possible turnout. In a country that is so evenly divided politically as the United States is, the election can depend on who gets their voters to the polls.
On Election Day we felt calmly confident. Our internal polls showed the trends moving in our direction in key swing states. Independent voters in Ohio, for instance, were solidly for Mitt. While the campaign carried out extensive planning for a transition, which was traditional and necessary, we didn’t talk about it at all. We returned to Boston to await the results.
And then the numbers started coming in. It slowly became clear that we did not get the turnout we had anticipated. The president’s ground game was better than ours. There really is no way to describe what we were feeling. I know it is a cliché, and I’ve read these words often myself and doubted them, but the truth is I felt worse for what America had lost than what we had lost. More than anyone else in the world, I knew the kind of president Mitt would have been.
I suppose there are some people who might suggest that I should not have taken the loss with much difficulty. There was a time a decade earlier when I thought my life was over or that I would be spending the rest of it in a wheelchair. Instead, I was living a full and wonderful life. We were blessed with five sons, five daughters-in-law, eighteen grandchildren, and one more on the way. As had become well known in the campaign, we were financially set. The life we would return to was one full of love and laughter. All that was true, but I knew what had been possible for this country, so I knew what was lost.
I cried.
Other people might remind me that I had my faith for support, which remained unshaken. There is truth to that, but honestly that night it made little difference.
An incredible mix of emotions ran through me: sadness, anger, relief, disbelief, depression, acceptance, and just about anything else you might mention other than happiness. While the returns from Ohio had made the result clear, some members of our campaign staff didn’t want to concede. The field teams in Ohio, Virginia, and Florida reported that the races there were still very close and were urging Mitt to ask for recounts. But Mitt shook his head and said, “It’s not going to happen.”
When Mitt asked his assistant to make the call to the Obama headquarters, I couldn’t hold it in any longer and I began crying. When you pour as much of your life and your energy and your passion into an effort and it doesn’t turn out the way you hoped, it’s unbelievably sad. Crying is the appropriate response in that situation. We were with Paul and Janna Ryan, and Janna cried with me.
Eventually Mitt had to go give his concession speech. Mitt is always at his best in the most difficult times. After thanking all the people who had given so much of themselves for so long, he said, “I also want to thank Ann, the love of my life. She would have been a wonderful First Lady. She has been that and more to me and our family.” Boy, standing on that stage, I found it hard not to cry in front of all those cameras.
It had been the most incredible experience imaginable, impossible to describe, really, but it was over. A day later was another sad good-bye when our Secret Service detail hugged each of us, got in their cars, and drove away. They had become a part of our family, and we loved them.
In the coming months, we stayed away from the media as much as possible. A picture of Mitt pumping his own gas was published, as if Mitt had never pumped his own gas before. Another one showed us in a movie theater seeing the film Twilight. In other words, we were living our normal life. The adjustment back to normal life is instant, but it takes some time to get used to it again. I went riding as often as possible, but it often wasn’t enough. We actually didn’t spend any time wondering about the what-ifs: you can spend a lifetime living with regrets if you allow that to happen. The most frustrating part for me is that people didn’t get to know Mitt for who he is. To watch him portrayed in a negative light was maybe the hardest thing for me.
It took a couple of months before we got completely back on track. I remember the moment perfectly. It was February 15, 2013. The phone rang at 6:00 A.M. Mary, Craig’s wife, was due to give birth so we were anticipating this call. It was Craig and he was elated. “Craig,” I said, “what did you have? A boy or a girl?”
Craig and Mary had told us they wanted to surprise us with the sex of their child; even they weren’t going to find out until the birth.
“A boy,” he said.
Oh darn, I thought. Selfishly, I had been hoping for a girl. We are a family full of males. “That’s wonderful,” I said.
“And a girl,” he added.
That’s when I began screaming with joy.
Eight
IN A “LIFE TO-DO LIST” Howard Weiner has compiled over years of seeing patients struggle with neurologic diseases, he emphasizes giving—in dealing with MS in particular, but really to deal with all challenges. Maybe where I was fortunate is that in my family serving others has always been part of our lives. Certainly Mitt has been doing it for decades as part of his participation in our Church and working with charities close to his heart. Our boys have each found a way to give back for what they’ve received, but the contribution of my brother Jim stands out.
Jim and Becky have seven children of their own, three through birth and four by adoption, but they got involved, seriously involved, when the children of close friends were diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. This is an awful disease in which the victim’s lungs eventually get so scarred that they cease to function, causing the victim to suffocate. It’s awful. Worse, these children had a secondary, rare and deadly form of something called Burkholderia cepacia bacteria, which made treatment even more difficult and complicated.
At nineteen, Justin Sabin, an Eagle Scout who loved to laugh and would have given so much to the world, died at home. Two years later his sixteen-year-old sister, Jennifer, began exhibiting some of the same terrible symptoms. To survive, she was connected to oxygen tanks; she lived with an IV in her arm, lost her appetite, and suffered fevers and nausea. She had so little energy that even brushing her teeth was a monumental task. Every breath she took, she said, was like gasping for air through a straw.
The only hope was a lobar lung transplant, a procedure in which a living donor gives a lobe of his or her lung to the patient, which will eventually replace the damaged lung. The Sabin family didn’t qualify as donors, so they needed to find two people who would volunteer to have this difficult and sometimes dangerous surgery. It would require that an incision be made in the donor’s back and several ribs be broken to remove the lobe. Complete recovery would take as long as ten months, maybe longer.