Romneys appear on daytime TV

By Karen Tumulty and Philip Rucker, Friday, September 14, 1:51 PM

Here’s something that you might not have guessed about Mitt Romney: He is, he revealed Friday, “kind of a Snooki fan.”
“Look how tiny she’s gotten. She’s lost weight. She’s energetic. Just her spark-plug personality is kind of fun,” the Republican presidential nominee said during a taping of “Live!,” the syndicated morning show hosted by television personality Kelly Ripa and former New York Giants star Michael Strahan.

It hasn’t been a very good week for the GOP presidential candidate.

Romney was referring to the potty-mouthed reality television sensation Nicole Elizabeth “Snooki” Polizzi, who became famous on the MTV series “Jersey Shore.”
The appearance on the daytime show was part of the candidate’s continuing effort to show his softer side to women voters — a group with which he is struggling to connect. That was also a major thrust of the GOP convention in Tampa three weeks ago.
But timed as it was at a moment of international crisis, when U.S. embassies in the Middle East were being beset by anti-American protests, the television interview brought shudders from some Republicans, who fear the Romney campaign is running aground in its final stretch.
“Deaver is turning over in his grave,” said one prominent Republican strategist, referring to Michel Deaver, the late image-maker for Ronald Reagan. The Republican asked for anonymity, because he did not want to go public with his growing despair over the GOP ticket’s prospects for winning this fall.
In an interview with Ripa and Strahan that included a rapid round of wide-ranging questions, Romney and his wife, Ann, offered up a trove of surprising new information.
Asked what he wears to bed, Romney said: “I hear the best answer is as little as possible.” That inclination on Romney’s part is no doubt a challenge at times, given his wife’s predilection for hogging the blankets — another detail of their lives that he provided in response to one of Ripa’s questions.
Romney also offered that Gene Hackman is his favorite actor, especially for his performance in the movie “The Birdcage.” So impressed is he with Hackman’s range that he would even like to see the actor play Mitt Romney some day, should Hollywood ever green light a project about a buttoned-up former Massachusetts governor’s quest for the White House.
As for who should play Ann, Romney’s thinking Michelle Pfeiffer.
Ann Romney, meanwhile, recounted a time when she and Anita Perry, wife of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, went exploring in the White House. They opened a door and discovered then-President George W. Bush having a massage.
“He was covered up, but I was so embarrassed that the next time I did see him, I didn’t know what I was going to say to him,” she recalled.
“We were going down the elevator from the White House, going to an event together, and I walked up to the elevator and am just like blushing, blushing, blushing,” she said. “And he looks at me, and he winks as he does, and says, ‘I look pretty good, don’t I?’”