De tal padre...

The Washington Post:

The candidate speaks about his beacon in the incandescent terms that sons reserve for idolized fathers.

“He’s the real deal,” Mitt Romney says, his use of the present tense indicative of how his late father’s legacy lives on for him.

The lessons handed down by the mentor included everything from a near-ascetic discipline to a low-key approach for defusing skeptics’ suspicions about their religion to the political principles that would shape the younger Romney’s life.

“He has been my greatest influence,” Romney says with a soft solemnity.

A popular Michigan governor, an evolving critic of the Vietnam War and a 1968 presidential candidate who led his Republican rivals in early polls until political catastrophe struck, George Romney often brought his youngest son along while campaigning. Former advisers admit to being stunned by how much Mitt looks like their old boss, marveling over the same square jaw and the thick, swept-back hair. But the memory of their relationship is complicated nowadays in Mitt Romney’s case, because his dad was a moderate with occasionally liberal fiscal positions, and Mitt Romney is trying to convince his Republican base that he likes none of those things.

At this moment, over the telephone, he is momentarily a son making the point that he is not his father’s clone. With some of his father’s old advisers arguing that he lacks his dad’s steadfast convictions, Mitt Romney tries to turn the force of their criticism to his advantage in a bit of political jujitsu. It speaks to his campaign’s pressures, and to his skeptics’ persistent doubts about his conservative bona fides, that Romney sometimes distances himself from his father’s political philosophy.

“I’d say that my positions are not identical to those of my dad,” he explains. “I learned a lot from my dad. But I did not always agree with him.”

Nor does Romney still tout the pro-choice sentiments of his late mother, Lenore, in helping to explain the underpinnings of his own support for abortion rights during the 1990s, a position he has long since abandoned. He has settled now on an issue illustrative of a fundamental difference with his dad. “My father fought [successfully] to introduce a state income tax [to Michigan],” he says. “That’s not something I would have done. I am more conservative. But he’s the person I have admired most in political life. He’s the real deal, yes.”