Romney Soars in Pensacola!

[link to spectator.org]

By Quin Hillyer on 10.29.12 @ 6:09AM

Mitt-mentum becomes him, as he elevates his game.

The proverbial "electricity" was palpable in the crowd at the Pensacola Civic Center on Saturday, but candidate Mitt Romney was talking about electricity of another kind. Romney, a onetime Boy Scout leader, was speaking about a major national Scout ceremony from years ago in which a Scout leader from Monument, Colorado, was telling a story while he, Romney, was there on the dais.

The Monument scouts had created a special American flag (with gold trim, or something like that), had it flown at the U.S. Capitol, and then somehow convinced NASA to send it on a space shuttle. The shuttle was the Challenger; the flight was in 1986.

Lo and behold, after many months of random discoveries of debris from the tragically exploded Challenger, somebody actually found the Monument flag, and NASA returned it to the Scouts in Colorado. The flag, amazingly enough, remained in perfect condition. And the Scout leader unveiled it at the ceremony -- and then handed it to Romney.

"I touched it," Romney told the Pensacola crowd, "and it was as if electricity was running through my arm."

The way Romney told the story was masterful. The hyper-enthusiastic audience, 12,000 strong, was suddenly completely hushed. And Romney continued to weave this story, this moving, true story, into a broader narrative, quite seamlessly, about heroes and honor and big ideals -- a story told in the context of honoring heroes like the Navy pilots based there in "a city of heroes," Pensacola, and those pilots who had been based there in the past, like a man named John McCain. And Romney suddenly was quoting, perfectly, a lesser-known verse of "America the Beautiful," the one that goes "O beautiful, for heroes proved, in liberating strife, Who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life."

Romney continued: "This is who we are as a people…. We live for things beyond ourselves."

None of this speech seemed awkward or canned. None of it seemed forced. Every single bit of it rang true, and flowed naturally and conversationally, a testimony from the heart.

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