Mitt and Newt

I’ve watched all the Republican debates.  I’ve listened to all the give and take, good and bad.  I’ve researched some on the two main candidates, Romney and Gingrich.  Here’s what I’ve found out:

Mitt Romney comes from wealth, position and privilege, mostly through marriages.  He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School.  He married Ann Davies who also came from wealth, position, and privilege.  He received student deferments during the Viet Nam war.

Gingrich was not so fortunate.  He was the product of an early broken marriage, then the adopted step son of a career army officer and was an army brat having lived in foreign and domestic locations.  He attended Emory and Tulane Universities.  None of his three wives came from wealth, position and privilege.  He received student and professor deferments during the Viet Nam war.

The following was taken from Wikipedia on the Internet: 

Mitt Romney’s father, George, watched his parents fail financially in Idaho and Utah[25] and having to take a dozen years to pay off their debts.[26] Seeing their struggles influenced his life and business career.[24]

In Salt Lake City, George Romney worked while attending Roosevelt Junior High School and, beginning in 1922, Latter-day Saints High School.] In his senior year, he and junior Lenore LaFount became high school sweethearts;] she was from a more well-assimilated Mormon family. Academically, George Romney was steady but undistinguished.[32] Partly to stay near Lenore, he spent the next year as a junior college student at the co-located Latter-day Saints University, 

Romney (after a missionary mission in England) returned to the U.S. in late 1928 and studied briefly at the University of Utah and LDS Business College. He followed LaFount to Washington, D.C., in fall 1929, after her father accepted an appointment by President Calvin Coolidge to serve on the Federal Radio Commission.

With one of his brothers, George Romney opened a dairy bar in nearby Virginia during this time. The business soon failed, in the midst of the Great Depression. He also attended George Washington University at night.[40] Romney did not attend for long, or graduate from, any of the colleges in which he was enrolled; instead he has been described as an autodidact. He became an apprentice for Alcoa in Pittsburgh in 1930. When LaFount, an aspiring actress, began earning bit roles in Hollywood movies, George Romney arranged to be transferred to Alcoa's Los Angeles office as a salesman. LaFount had the opportunity to sign a $50,000, three-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, but Romney convinced her to return to Washington after he got a position there with Alcoa and with the Aluminum Wares Association as a lobbyist. He would consider his wooing of her his greatest sales achievement. The couple married on July 2, 1931, at Salt Lake City Temple. They would have four children: Margo Lynn (born 1935), Jane LaFount (born 1938), George Scott (born 1941), and Willard Mitt (born 1947).

George Romney joined the National Press Club and the Burning Tree and Congressional Country Clubs.  Lenore's cultural refinement and hosting skills helped him in business, and the couple met the Hoovers, the Roosevelts, and other prominent Washington figures. He was chosen by Pyke Johnson, a Denver newspaperman and automotive industry trade representative he met at the Press Club, to join the newly formed Trade Association Advisory Committee to the National Recovery Administration. The committee's work continued even after the agency was declared unconstitutional in 1935. During 1937 and 1938, Romney was also president of the Washington Trade Association Executives.

Mitt Romney married Ann Lois Davies.  She was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, by parents Edward R. Davies and Lois Davies. Her father, originally from Caerau near Bridgend, Wales, was a self-made businessman who became president of Jered Industries, a maker of heavy machinery for marine use.  He also was mayor of Bloomfield Hills.

Ann Davies knew of Mitt Romney since elementary school. She went to the private Kingswood School in Bloomfield Hills, which was the sister school to the all-boys Cranbrook School that Mitt attended. The two were re-introduced and began dating in March 1965.  They informally agreed to marriage after his senior prom in June 1965.

Gingrich was born at the Harrisburg Hospital in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on June 17, 1943, as Newton Leroy McPherson. His mother, Kathleen "Kit" Daugherty; (1925–2003), and father, Newton Searles McPherson (1923–1970) married in September 1942, when she was 16 and McPherson was 19. The marriage fell apart within days.  In 1946, his mother married Army officer Robert Gingrich (1925–1996), who adopted Newt.

Newt has three younger half-sisters, Candace Gingrich, Susan Gingrich, and Roberta Brown. Gingrich is of German, English, Scottish, and Irish descent, and was raised a Lutheran.[10] Newt was raised in Hummelstown, near Harrisburg, and on military bases where Robert Gingrich was stationed.

In 1961, Newt graduated from Baker High School in Columbus, Georgia. He became interested in politics during his teen years while living in Orléans, France, where he visited the site of the Battle of Verdun and learned about the sacrifices made there and the importance of political leadership. Choosing to obtain deferments granted to students and fathers, Gingrich did not enlist and was not drafted during the Vietnam War. He expressed some regret about that decision in 1985, saying, "Given everything I believe in, a large part of me thinks I should have gone over."

Gingrich received a B.A. degree in history from Emory University in Atlanta in 1965, and an M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1971) in modern European history from Tulane University in New Orleans. He spent six months in Brussels in 1969-70 working on his dissertation entitled "Belgian Education Policy in the Congo: 1945–1960" In 1970, Gingrich joined the history department at West Georgia College as an assistant professor. In 1974 he moved to the geography department and was instrumental in establishing an interdisciplinary environmental studies program. Denied tenure, he left the college in 1978.

Gingrich has married three times. In 1962, he married Jackie Battley, his former high school geometry teacher, when he was 19 years old and she was 26. They have two daughters from their marriage: Kathy Gingrich Lubbers is president of Gingrich Communications and Jackie Gingrich Cushman is an author, conservative columnist, and political commentator whose books include 5 Principles for a Successful Life, co-authored with Newt Gingrich.

In the spring of 1980, Gingrich left his wife after beginning an affair with Marianne Ginther, who was nine years his junior. In 1984, Jackie Gingrich told The Washington Post that the divorce was a "complete surprise" to her. According to Jackie, in September 1980, Gingrich and their children visited her while she was in the hospital, recovering from surgery, and Gingrich wanted to discuss the terms of their divorce. Gingrich has disputed that account. In 2011 their daughter, Jackie Gingrich Cushman, said that it was her mother who requested the divorce, that it happened prior to the hospital stay, and that Gingrich's visit was for the purpose of bringing the couple's children to see their mother, not to discuss the divorce. 

In 1981, six months after the divorce from Jackie Gingrich was final, Gingrich wed Marianne Ginther. In 1993, while still married to Marianne, Gingrich began an affair with House of Representatives staffer Callista Bisek, who was 23 years his junior. Gingrich and his second wife were divorced in 2000 having produced no children. 

In 2000, Gingrich married Callista Bisek shortly after his divorce from second wife Marianne was finalized. He and Callista currently live in McLean, Virginia. In a 2011 interview with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Gingrich addressed his past infidelities by saying, "There's no question at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate."] In December 2011, after the group Iowans for Christian Leaders in Government requested that he sign their so-called "Marriage Vow", Gingrich sent a lengthy written response. It included his pledge to "uphold personal fidelity to my spouse".


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I’m more inclined to favor Newt for president, though I will vote for Mitt if he is the candidate against Obama.  (I’d vote for a can of peaches before I’d vote for Obama.)  Frankly, I’m a little weary of the wealthy, positioned, and privileged, as well as graduates of the Harvard Law School, holding the highest office in the land.  

The Romneys married into wealth, position, and privilege, as well as politically well connected in-laws.  Moral of the story is marry well.  Gingrich did not marry into wealth.  A reading of his life on Wikipedia shows he made it very much on his own, though one may not entirely agree how he did it and his infidelities, but then who in high echelons of government is clean of sexual infidelities and proclivities, think Bill Clinton, LBJ, JFK, FDR, and probably hundreds we don't even know about.