Obama v Romney in U.S. election
IS this woman the next First Lady of the U.S?
Ann Romney made her case in the biggest speech of her life in Florida on Tuesday night.Her husband Mitt Romney will go up against Barack Obama in the presidential race in November.
And it was Ann’s task to defrost her famously icy husband while making her fantastically wealthy family seem normal.
Impossible? Probably. Yet most commentators reckon she was a major success.
Clad in a cherry-red Oscar de la Renta dress at the Republican National Convention in the Gulf of Mexico city of Tampa, Ann came across as giggly, warm, disarming and surprisingly girlish — for a grandmother of 18.
With Mitt trailing among women voters in various polls, it fell to Ann to bring a woman’s touch to the Republican party.
At her most appealing, she touched on economic uncertainty and how, for most women, their working day never seems to end.
She said: “It’s the moms of this nation — single, married, widowed — who hold this country together.”
Somewhat more unconventional was her frank (but very American) declaration: “Tonight, I want to talk to you about love.”
Her love for Mitt, their five sons and the American Dream were evident as she told how her dad, the son of a Welsh miner, was six when he began washing bottles in a pub in Nantyffyllon. Coming to America at 15, Edward Davies served in the US Navy, founded a heavy equipment firm and raised his kids in prosperity.
Ann was at a fee-paying school for girls near Detroit, Michigan, when she met Mitt, a student at the boys’ school on the campus.
The defiantly old-fashioned blonde — who has never had a career outside the home and whose secondary education was “finishing school” — provides plenty of contrast with the woman she seeks to elbow aside.
Michelle Obama, who grew up working class in Chicago, holds degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law School. Until recently she had a top job in the University of Chicago Hospitals system.
In her speech, Ann said she and Mitt, who went on to be Governor of Massachusetts, lived on “pasta and tuna fish” as students.
It was a somewhat misleading attempt to cast her husband’s staggering riches as rags-based.
When they wed, Romney’s late father George had already made his fortune as the chairman of American Motors. But Ann pointed out that Romney senior started out as a carpenter.
US politics can seem like a contest to sound the most convincing note of woe, but Ann alluded only briefly to her 2008 battle with breast cancer and the multiple sclerosis she has had since 1997.
She also dismissed the idea that hers is a “storybook marriage”.
Ann said: “A storybook marriage? Not at all. What Mitt and I have is a real marriage.”
She went on: “It has been 47 years since that tall, kind of charming young man brought me home from our first dance.
“Not every day since has been easy. But he still makes me laugh.
“And never once did I have a single reason to doubt that I was the luckiest woman in the world.”
Obamas
MUM-OF-TWO MICHELLE, 48BACKGROUND: Descended from slaves. Her dad was a water plant employee, her mum a secretary
EDUCATION: Princeton University, New Jersey; Harvard Law School, Massachusetts
MARRIED: To Barack Obama since 1992
OCCUPATION: Lawyer
RELIGION: Protestant
Romneys
MUM-OF-FIVE ANN, 63BACKGROUND: Granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner whose son was a pub bottle-washer from age of six
EDUCATION: Brigham Young, Utah, the USA’s largest religious university, run by Mormons
MARRIED: to Mitt Romney since 1969
OCCUPATION: Homemaker and part-time equestrian
RELIGION: Mormon
No comments:
Post a Comment