........."Running for President of the United States is an extraordinary experience. New profound friendships are unquestionably the greatest reward. They will last a lifetime. And there were moments of laughter, such as when Ann got up from a collapsed stage in Dubuque Iowa, dusted herself off and later ad-libbed, “Well, I fell on dubutt in Dubuque.” There were times of exhilaration. Winning the Michigan primary, the state where I was raised and where my dad had served three terms as Governor was one of them. Then there were the inevitable ‘lessons learned’. My dad, George Romney, use to say of his 1968 presidential campaign that it was like a mini-skirt: short and revealing. Mine was a little longer, but just as revealing.
I’ve run for office three times, losing twice and winning once. Each time when the campaign was over I felt I hadn’t done an adequate job communicating all that I intended to say. Some of that is because debate answers are limited to 60 seconds, ads are 30 seconds, and lengthy position papers are rarely read at all. This book gives me a chance to say more than I did during my campaign.
That being said, my interest in writing the book goes back well before my political life. My career in the private sector exposed me to developments abroad, and conditions at home, that were deeply troubling. At the same time, I saw that most of us were not aware of the consequences of blithely continuing along our current course. We’ve become so accustom to the benefits of America’s greatness that we cannot imagine any significant disruption of what we have known."........... Source
