The New York Times
In “The Story Behind the Story,” the Times’ email newsletter to its subscribers, political reporter Ashley Parker describes what it’s like to cover Mitt Romney. A lot is not new: lukewarm takeout meals, long bus rides, early-morning luggage checks, nights at the bar with sources. But she also reveals something you’d only know if you had followed a candidate around for months:
Mr. Romney loves guessing the ages and ethnicities of voters — often incorrectly. Whenever Mr. Romney bends down to chat with a little kid, the whole press corps giddily inches forward, waiting for the inevitable moment when he asks a boy who is clearly 4 or 5, “How old are you? 9? 10?” (His favorite guess for nationality is French-Canadian, which was a reasonably safe bet in New Hampshire, but became more precarious in more recent primary states, like Florida and Ohio.)
In a December story, Parker and Michael Barbaro went into more detail on Romney’s penchant for guessing people’s ages, nationalities and relationships:
“Sisters?” he asked. (Nope, stepmother and stepdaughter.) “Your husband?” he wondered. (No, just a friend from the neighborhood.) “Mother and daughter?” he guessed. (Cousins, actually.)
The results can be awkward. “Daughter?” he asked a woman sitting with a man and two younger girls at the diner in Tilton, N.H., on Friday morning. Her face turned a shade of red. “Wife.”
Oh, Mr. Romney said. “It was a compliment, I guess,” said the woman, Janelle Batchelder, 31. “At the same time, it was possibly an insult.”
Countries of origin are another Romney favorite. When a man in Bethlehem, N.H., stood and introduced himself as Randall Loiacono, Mr. Romney asked, “Now, is that a Northern European name?”
“Sicilian,” Mr. Loiacono said, before standing and spelling his name at Mr. Romney’s request.
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