Romney’s first step into political arena, vs. Ted Kennedy in 1994, was a cautious one

Romney had grown up steeped in campaign rallies and victory parties. He had also seen the pain politics could cause. George Romney’s trouncing in the presidential campaign of 1968, followed by the defeat of Mitt’s mother, Lenore, in a race for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat, deeply disappointed Romney, according to his son Tagg. But a quarter-century had passed to heal those wounds.

In addition to Romney’s father’s words weighing on him, Romney also now had the dying wishes of his wife’s father to consider. In a period of emotional upheaval for Romney’s family in which Ann suffered a miscarriage, her father, Edward Roderick Davies, fell ill with cancer. More skeptical of organized religion than his children, who had been converted to Mormonism by the Romneys, Davies beseeched his daughter to make the most of her life now, and to capi­tal­ize on the opportunities bestowed upon her and her husband, Ann told the Boston Globe. In September 1992, Davies died, and months later Romney accompanied his brothers-in-law to a Mormon temple, where, donning white robes, he solemnly watched as they posthumously baptized their father through a proxy, according to a person present at the ceremony.

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In the Romneys’ telling, it was this personal loss that put their lives in perspective.

“I thought, ‘Mitt, are we going to die someday and then say, Mitt, you never did it! You never tried?’ That’s why Mitt’s running,” Ann said. Widespread reports that depicted Kennedy as a man of sloth, gluttony and alleged infidelities provided an impetus for Romney’s candidacy.

This version glosses over the basic political calibration of an ambitious man sensing and seizing his opportunity. But while George Romney proscribed the political formula by which Mitt Romney has led his life, friends and even some closely placed detractors of Romney say Ann, with a strong sense of her husband’s political pedigree and destiny, was the enzyme.

When Kem Gardener, a Utah developer and the Boston church’s former mission president, tried to recruit Romney to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, Gardener went first to Ann, who had just had multiple sclerosis diagnosed.

“She insisted he go out and take on the Olympics,” said Mitt’s sister Jane Romney. Years later, during her husband’s first presidential campaign, Ann told a family friend and fellow Mormon, Dennis King, that Mitt’s running was something “God wanted him to do.”

After his defeat, Romney sought to step back and bow out of the 2012 race, according to son Tagg. “We had to convince him hard to run, my mom and I,” he said. “I know some people don’t believe us.”

At the time of her husband’s first foray into electoral politics, Ann recounted how she had turned to Romney in bed one morning in the summer of 1993, frustrated by her husband’s grousing about Kennedy’s poor example, and with her father’s advice fresh in mind.

“If you don’t stand up and do something about it, then, you know, shut up and stop bothering me,” she said, according to “The Real Romney,” a biography by two Globe reporters.