Momma's Boy. Words From Mitt Romney, last night:

Here’s a word I’d like to see banned from future speeches at national political conventions: “Mom.” Here’s another: “Dad.”

You will search in vain for these words through the acceptance addresses of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. Ditto those of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. Pericles, Cicero, Washington, Lincoln, Disraeli, and Churchill were similarly reticent regarding their parental units.

Mitt Romney, last night:

My mom and dad gave their kids the greatest gift of all—the gift of unconditional love… every day, Dad gave Mom a rose, which he put on her bedside table… My mom and dad were true partners… When my mom ran for the Senate, my dad was there for her…

And this, lauding his running mate:

I love the way he lights up around his kids and how he’s not embarrassed to show the world how much he loves his mom.*

All very sweet, but not exactly Henry V at Agincourt. Or even Edward Everett (let alone Lincoln) at Gettysburg.

Romney racked up a total of twenty “mom”s and “dad”s, divided equally. Two perfect tens. An Olympic record.

To be fair for a moment, Romney is not the first nominee to lurch down the mommy track, merely the most lachrymose. For example, a previous Massachusetts technocrat, Michael Dukakis, may not have mouthed the actual words “mom” or “dad” in his acceptance speech, but, in a similar effort to humanize himself, he said that it was “the American dream” that “brought my father to this country seventy-six years ago, that brought my mother and her family here one year later—poor, unable to speak English, but with a burning desire to succeed,” etc. The second George Bush, in his 2000 acceptance, whiffed on “mom,” but he did score two “dad”s, one denoting himself (he hoped his daughters, about to leave for college, would “e-mail your old dad once in a while”), the other referring to “the most decent man I have ever known” (“Dad, I want you to know how proud I am to be your son”). At the 2004 conclave, Dubya got “mom” and “dad” two times each into the same sentence. But the sentence was about fallen soldiers, not Poppy and Bar.

As a bleeding-heart liberal, I’m generally permissive when it comes to cornball softness. As a doting father and uxorious husband, I’m anything but hostile to home and hearth. As a patriot, I understand that encomia to motherhood are as American as the flag and apple pie. As an ex-speechwriter, I am full of admiration at the skill with which one of the greatest convention orators of modern times, Mario Cuomo, built his famous 1984 “Tale of Two Cities” keynote around a metaphor of the nation as a family.

But a speech accepting a major-party nomination for President of the United States is perhaps a less than ideal venue for a person who stands an even chance of becoming (or remaining) the most powerful human being on earth to go all teary about how much he loves his parents and his children and his spouse and how much they love him. At the risk of telling the post-Oprah world to get off my lawn, I wish our political speakers would get themselves a bit more Roman grit and cut down on the chin-trembling about mommy and daddy.

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*As Romney said this, the TV cut to the V.I.P. box for a reaction shot. Ryan’s wife’s lit up at “show the world how much he loves…” but froze slightly at “…his mom.”

Photography by Lauren Lancaster

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