The Romney Campaign And Radical Republicans...In 1968

Benjamin Wallace-Wells delves into the 1968 campaign of George Romney, searching for ways the father of Mitt Romney had to deal with the conservative wing of the Republican Party, just as Mitt has had to fight off challenges from the right in 2012.

Wells acknowledges it is not a perfect comparison. One difference is the way George Romney excited progressive members of the GOP.

"In Michigan, particularly to the young men who clustered around him, George Romney seemed to embody the party’s future," Wallace-Wells writes. "Romney had the classic Republican convictions—enthusiasm for the market and for a less intrusive federal government, and a moral core to his politics. The labor-backed Democratic Party, for him, “was politically corrupt, morally wrong, economically unsound, and socially indefensible.” When he ran for office it was always as a modernizer. In 1963, President Kennedy had confided to his close friend Paul Fay, “The one fellow I don’t want to run against is Romney.”