Mitt Romney’s ‘Curious’ Off-Camera Exchange With Charlie Rose

Stephen Morton/Getty Images

NASHUA, N.H. – Ann Romney recounted an exchange between her husband, Mitt Romney, and one of the Bloomberg-Washington Post debate hosts during a commercial break Tuesday night, saying she found it “quite curious” that her husband was asked off camera to explain how to fix the economic turmoil.

“Even in the break, I don’t know, I was watching and going, ‘What is going on?’” Ann Romney said, speaking today to a group of about 30 people dining at Martha’s Exchange Restaurant in Nashua. “Charlie Rose was asking Mitt, ‘OK, how do you solve this problem with the deleveraging in Greece and the Euro and everything else that’s going on?’”

“Mitt was telling Charlie what you had to do … and was giving a five-minute little explanation,” Ann Romney said. “It was quite interesting to me that Charlie was like, OK, we’re not having the debate right now but would you still tell me how this works and what’s going to happen.”

Ann Romney, 62, used the conversation between Rose and her husband to argue her point that she thinks “more and more people are figuring out that Mitt knows what he’s talking about.”

While admitting her bias, Ann Romney said she thought her husband won Tuesday night’s debate, even if one of his granddaughters could barely keep her eyes open during the two-hour event. “It was maybe a little boring for her and a little late,” Ann Romney said, laughing.

The granddaughter, 16, had spent most of the evening “shaking like a leaf” because she was so “worried and nervous about her grandfather,” she said.

Ann Romney told several stories about her more than 42-year relationship with her husband, describing her “mistake” in taking a poetry class with him during college. His responses were so detailed, she said, and he was such a standout student that she immediately regretted enrolling in the same class as him.

She also described how Romney had stood by her side after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998, a disease that had her convinced her “life was over.”

“He said, ‘I’m fine with you if you’re in the wheelchair, that doesn’t matter for me, I love you for who you are. I don’t care whether you can’t get the dinner on the table anymore, I don’t care, I can eat toast and cereal for the rest of my life. But together we can still do anything and you’re going to be OK because I’m not going to leave your side and I’m not going to abandon you and I’m going to stay by your side and we’re going to fight this together,’” Ann Romney recalled.

“Something just clicked and I knew we’d be OK,” she said.

Before leaving the restaurant, she promised that she and her husband will be “back often” to the Granite State. “We all know Mitt is doing well here but we don’t take that for granted. We know how hard you have to work for every vote in this state.”