Meet my favorite Romney and his imaginary friend.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Brothers From Another Planet:Nobody ever won the Republican nomination by quoting New York Times stories about Scandinavian social scientists. But when the Times reported on a Norwegian study that eldest children have higher IQs than their siblings, first-born Tagg Romney posted the link on the Five Brothers blog before dawn. His exact words were, "Duh, I could have told them that!"

Being first in line to the Romney throne is no easy burden. Father and grandfather alike made a fortune in business, were elected governor, and graced the cover of Time as presidential candidates. If there were a motto over the gates of the cyborg factory on Planet Romney, it might say, "Many are cold, but few are frozen."

Is the son of a square still a square—or a cube? As the eldest son, Tagg has dutifully followed his father's path, graduating from BYU and Harvard Business School and trying his hand in the business world at McKinsey, Reebok, and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

But if Mitt Romney comes across as a polished, robotic control freak, Tagg prefers to speak first and ask poll questions later. Ann Romney once told Greta Van Susteren that all her boys were "very naughty," but "equally as naughty as each other"—prompting Mitt to insist that their behavior was "nothing serious." Tagg gives hope that some Romneys are naughtier than others.

In the Romneys' fake Christmas video, Tagg broke with the grew-up-in-a-log-cabin-he-built-with-his-own-hands convention of presidential mythology by telling his father he had to run because his life has been "so lucky."

After the Washington Post wrote about the Five Brothers' wholesomeness, Tagg blogged about how to address the Romneys' "2 Good 2 Be True" problem: "Help us out by sending me some good suggestions on things we can do to make fun of ourselves a little better!"

One reader urged the brothers to hold a farting contest on YouTube. Tagg responded, "The farting contest is a great idea, but it's a foregone conclusion that Craig (king of stink) would win that one easily. My daughter used to call him Skunkle for good reason."

Naughty boy! If Tagg weren't such a spitting image of his father, we might wonder if this impulsive former baseball executive with a frat boy's sense of humor were really George W. Bush's lost son instead.

Judging from his MySpace page, Tagg is as much a speed reader as Bush, too. Forget Battlefield Earth. Tagg's book list includes Les Miserables and Harry Potter, the Book of Mormon and the Bible. He invited blog readers to send him book suggestions. Tagg is sure to ignore the advice to read "anything by William Bennett," but he must have enjoyed the post that said, "Read anything on Lincoln. Not to overblow things, but in some degree, the way your Dad is being treated by the media is oddly similar."