Israel Matzav

Mitt Romney's random acts of kindness

Either way, there’s no escaping the fact that Romney’s many kind acts — some of which were first reported in the recent book “The Real Romney” — are sharply at odds with his persona on the campaign trail.

Take the story of Ellen Hummel, whose father died of a heart attack when she was 5. Ellen turned to the Romneys to learn more about her dad, a close family friend who worked with him at Boston Consulting Group and later, the private equity firm Bain Capital. Later, she also asked Romney for a loan to help her pay tuition at Columbia Medical School.

“I went to him asking him for help and he freely gave it,” said Dr. Ellen K. Hummel, today a general practitioner at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Just before graduation, she received a note from Romney, forgiving the loan. “It was a Christmas letter,” she said. “It was something caring and it was something saying ‘This is a gift.’ ”

Then there’s Kim Clark, the president of Brigham Young University-Idaho. When an adverse reaction to medication landed his 16-year-old son Michael in the hospital in 1997, Clark turned to Romney.

“I called Mitt because I wanted to give Michael a blessing,” Clark told The Daily. “Whenever in our family we had situations arise we always called Mitt because we knew he would always come.” Even after it was clear the teenager would recover, Romney remained at the hospital with the family through the night.

One story surrounded by considerable lore and unknown to most advisers — Romney seems to only have alluded to it once publicly, in 2007 — concerns a cold December Sunday in the 1980s. Romney got a phone call from a Mormon bishop in Utah who said the adult daughter of one of his members — a single mother who did not belong to the church — needed help. The woman’s heating oil had been turned off in the dead of winter.

Enlisting his young sons to help, Romney loaded up his Gran Torino with firewood and drove the car from the family’s generous house in the leafy Boston suburb of Belmont to the woman’s home in the hardscrabble Dorchester neighborhood downtown.

“I remember well loading it all up,” Tagg Romney recalled. “And we drove it to her house and made a fire for her and dropped off quite a bit of firewood so [the family] would be able to keep warm.”

The Daily was unable to locate the woman, but people familiar with the story described it in similar terms.

Stories like these are legion. Romney gathering neighbors in a quick effort to clear out a burning house until firefighters arrived on the scene. Showing up unsolicited to clear a hornet’s nest near an injured church member’s house. Organizing a New York City search for a business partner’s missing daughter — a story actually told by Romney’s campaign in a 2008 ad reprised by a super PAC supporting him this year.

Labels: Campaign 2012, Mitt Romney

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:26 PM