The British have never been especially keen on enthusiasm, either in its modern sense, or in the older meaning of ‘seized by religious fervour’. Americans – ideological descendants, in many ways, of those regicides – differ from us perhaps more in this than in any other regard.
When I took my seat in the Tampa convention hall with a group of MEPs, our Republican friends said: ‘You might be on camera, so try to behave like Americans: no eye-rolling’.
What followed could not have happened in any other country. One after another, friends and colleagues of Mitt Romney lined up to tell us about the many acts of kindness which he had performed unremarked. Parents choked back their tears as they recalled the time he had spent with their dying children. Former employees spoke of his humility, his industriousness, his quiet charity. In a stroke of genius, one of his sons told us that, as boys, he and his brothers had always had to go to their mother for pocket money, their father being tightfisted – which, given America’s present circumstances, strikes me as the best possible recommendation.
We overseas politicians, whether from Europe or the Anglosphere, all agreed that such things couldn’t happen at our own party conferences. Testimonials would dismissed as mawkish, sugary, downright embarrassing. But here’s the thing: the mood they generate is infectious. The optimistic air of the new world, even in muggy Florida, gets to work on the visitor. You find yourself carried along by the sheer artlessness of the schmaltz. I might have imagined it, but I think I saw Sayeeda Warsi singing along to America the Beautiful with everyone else.
Indeed, the one person who seemed slightly uneasy about the public lauding of Mitt Romney was Mitt Romney.
Unlike many politicians, he is uncomfortable talking about himself, and especially about his charitable work. An obviously devout man, he doesn’t want to be like some Pharisee clanking his coins into the collection bowl from a great height. I didn’t know until Thursday, because he had never made an issue of it, that he took no salary as governor of Massachusetts. No one was aware, until his tax return was dragged out of him, that he had given 16 per cent of his income to charity.
‘The greatest pleasure I know’, wrote Charles Lamb, ‘is to do a good action by stealth and have it found out by accident.’ A lot of us have just learned, almost by accident, about several of Mitt Romney’s good actions. We are building up an image of the man which is rather more appealing than we had expected: workaholic, uxorious, quiet, prayerful, more than a little dull, but fundamentally decent. What a relief after the soaring but (in both senses) vain rhetoric of the past four years.
Modest, calm and obsessively private, Mitt Romney seems more British than American. He is obviously fond of this country, making it the first place he visited on his tour as a candidate. Whether or not one of his staffers referred in so many words to our shared Anglo-Saxon heritage, Romney plainly understands the concept.
Before you rush to tell me that he is set apart from us by his Mormonism, consider the following (for which I am indebted to Mr Anglosphere himself, James Bennett). No religion develops in a vacuum, and the Church of Latter Day Saints has roots in some of the sects that grew up in seventeenth century, notably the Muggletonians. Muggletonians had a strong presence in Preston, Lancashire, whence Joseph Smith’s maternal ancestors had emigrated. Mormons plainly retained a folk memory of the old country, because their first overseas mission was to Preston – which is where the Romneys originate.
We have had four years of a president who scarcely troubles to hide his disdain for Britain. What a pleasure it would be to have one committed, as John Adams put it when presenting his credentials to George III, to ‘restoring an entire esteem, confidence and affection, or in better Words, the old good Nature and the old good Humour between People who, though separated by an ocean and under different Governments have the same Language, a similar Religion and kindred Blood’.
Incidentally, just to anticipate the comment thread, the fact that Mitt Romney is not Gary Johnson or Ron Paul doesn’t make him a socialist. He would not have been my first choice in the Republican primaries – though he has grown on me over the past week – but that fact is no longer pertinent. On any measure, he will be an improvement on Barack Obama. If you are older than 20, you no longer have any excuse for failing to grasp that two people can separately disagree with you without their views being equally disagreeable.
Source
No comments:
Post a Comment