You know how Shark Week feels like it lasts for at least a month?
Well, Tuesday night was only the first night of the Republican National Convention.
Since this is kind of the biggest party of the Republican Party for every election cycle, the convention planners scheduled Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to speak.
The whole point of having those two give speeches on the opening night of the convention, when the public would probably be paying the most attention, was to add human flesh to the robot skeleton that is Mitt Romney.
And that’s fine, right? That’s what his campaign needed, we’d say. After all, when a presidential nominee says things like “I stand by what I said, whatever it was,” the campaign could use any boost it can get.
Ann Romney took to describing her and Mitt Romney’s humble beginnings as a young couple.
“We got married and moved into a basement apartment,” Ann Romney said. “We walked to class together, shared the housekeeping and ate a lot of pasta and tuna fish.”
That sounds like almost everyone here at UF.
What she didn’t mention in her speech, however, is the fact that they were living off of stock options.
“Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time,” she said in a 1994 interview with Jack Thomas of The Boston Globe, when Mittens was running for a Senate seat.
Huh. All right.
During Tuesday evening’s speech, she also said that “Mitt Romney was never handed success.”
But in her 1994 interview, she said that the house they bought together in Boston for $42,000, thanks to a loan from Mitt’s father, cost less to pay the mortgage for than it did to rent. They sold it for $90,000 seven years later.
“So we not only stayed for free, we made money,” Ann Romney said to Thomas. “We had no income except the stock we were chipping away at. We were living on the edge, not entertaining.”
At the RNC, she said their “desk was a door propped up on sawhorses” and their “dining room table was a fold down ironing board in the kitchen.”
That statement matches what she said in 1994, but she said then “the funny thing is that I never expected help.” She never had to expect help, because they had plenty of investment money to live off of instead of scrambling to find employment.
Listen up, guys, because this is actually important.
By now, we’ve all been on this planet long enough to smell when something’s fishy.
Does the story of the young lovebirds, Mitt and Ann Romney, sound humble? Living off of stock options does not a struggling young couple make.
Her speech sounds plausible — until you check the facts.
