Call me a sentimental slob and a sucker for romantic tripe, but this got to me, too:
The only real coup came with its surprise tear-jerking moment, when Romney related a heretofore-unknown story about his father putting a rose on his mother’s pillow every day — and told how his mother realized his father had died on the only day in their 64 years of marriage that the rose was not there.
It was one of those anecdotes meant to "humanize" Mitt Romney, and I guess it did, but it mostly reminded me that people once treasured small gestures because the very act of remembering to do them said so much.
And we can't leave last night behind without considering the Clint Eastwood appearance, can we? Richard Fernandez thought Eastwood gave "a cutting delivery" of a presentation filled with "rhetorical cleverness." But Roger Ebert thought the performance was "sad and pathetic." I wouldn't go either way. It just struck me as one of the oddest things I'd ever seen. I do agree with John Podhoretz that those valuable prime-time minutes might have been better filled with the earlier series of tributes to Romney's personal generosity.
