Romney’s son touts his dad’s values

Like his father, Josh Romney has great hair, perfect teeth and chiseled features. And like his father, he is working relentlessly to get Mitt Romney elected president.

The third of the Republican candidate's five sons was in Nevada on Wednesday and Thursday campaigning for his father. He toured a gold mine in Elko, had Basque food in Winnemucca and got lost on his way to the Fallon Naval Air Station, where he watched planes drop bombs over the desert.

On Thursday evening, Josh Romney was at Green Valley Ranch Resort in Henderson to host a "Rally for Romney," part of a nationwide effort to bring supporters together to raise last-minute campaign cash. The fundraising quarter ends Sunday, and the campaign-finance reports released two weeks from Sunday will be scrutinized as a metric of the candidates' relative strength.

The "Five Brothers," though they sound like a pizza chain, are an emphasis of their father's campaign, which is making a pitch for the family-values vote. Wedding that old-fashioned virtue to newfangled technology, they have a joint blog on the Romney campaign Web site, where Tagg, Matt, Josh, Craig and Ben recount their travels and give each other good-natured guff.

"We have the unique opportunity to help people get to know my dad a little better," Josh Romney, a 32-year-old Salt Lake City developer and father of three, told the Review-Journal. "Many people may be familiar with what he's done in the business world, or with the 2002 Olympics, or as the governor of Massachusetts. But the five of us can talk about what kind of dad he is, what kind of family man."

As illustrated by the preceding quotation, Josh Romney says he's there to talk about Mitt Romney the person, but actually spends most of his time promoting Mitt Romney the politician, with an affable, rote slickness similar to that of his father.

Asked what kind of dad the candidate is, the son struggled to come up with an adjective. "Fun-loving" was part but not all of it, he said, and devoted. He repeatedly stressed how important it has always been to his father to spend quality time with his family.

Josh Romney easily ticked off the three main points of his father's campaign message (strong economy, strong military, strong family values). He made the case that his dad, who trails in national polls but is ahead in the latest Nevada survey, is the best candidate for the Republican nomination because he "creates the strongest contrast" with Hillary Clinton. He explained his father's strategy of focusing on the states that vote first, including Nevada.

The candidacy of former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, announced earlier this month, is thought to be a threat to Romney as Thompson seeks the same hard-core conservative support as Mitt Romney. Josh Romney, however, said Thompson's presence was a good thing: "It's good to have Fred in, because he creates buzz and energy on the Republican side. For some reason, the Democrats seem to get more of the headlines."

Josh Romney says he doesn't have his father's "incredibly intense" energy for campaigning, but is getting used to it, although he said it's "doubtful" he'd ever run for office.

"I think the one of us who'd be most likely to do that is Tagg," he said. "But he's a Republican who lives in Massachusetts. So he's the most likely to try, but the least likely to succeed."