The Re-Re-Rebranding of Mitt Romney

STARKVILLE, Miss.—The Romney family has a predilection for reinvention. George Romney, the former governor of Michigan, made his name remaking the gas-guzzling American Motor Co. into a producer of fuel-efficient Ramblers. His son Mitt took that lesson into politics, remodeling himself from a self-described Massachusetts “moderate” to a “severely conservative” presidential candidate. Now, as he weighs a third effort to fulfill his father's dream of winning the presidency, Romney is attempting what might be the most audacious transformation in family history.

On Wednesday night in Starkville, Miss., the former private-equity titan stood on a stage in an antebellum plantation house refurbished into a university hall and cast himself a champion of the country's most vulnerable. “We need to lift people out of poverty,” he said. “Almost every week during my campaign, I met folks who had fallen into poverty.” It was a striking moment for a man whose last presidential campaign was undermined by a secretly recorded video of him standing before rich campaign donors and dismissing the 47 percent of voters on government assistance. Twenty-eight months later, in the country's poorest state, he ticked off a series of policies—stronger schools, encouraging marriage, better incentives for employers—designed to help that same population. “I want to help the poor and the middle class in this country," Romney proclaimed. "The rich in America, by the way, are fine.”