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Romney Announces His Candidacy for 2008

Speaking at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney announces his candidacy for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. He introduced himself as a political outsider with the managerial skills necessary to fix a flawed government.

Romney highlighted his experience in government, as a businessman and in the nonprofit sector, where he ran the Salt Lake City Olympics Committee in 2002.

Despite his close ties to three states, Romney, 59, chose Michigan to announce his candidacy. His father was governor of the state, in addition to running an automobile company there.

But Michigan is also a key battleground state, and it hosts a relatively early primary with many delegates at stake.

Making his announcement Tuesday morning, Romney was joined by his wife, Ann, their children and grandchildren.

Behind the candidate were three big props: a vintage DC-3 propeller airplane, which Romney told the audience had transformed commercial air travel; a classic AMC Rambler, which his father pioneered as the first American high-mileage car; and a brand-new Ford hybrid SUV.

"Innovation and transformation have been at the heart of America's success," Romney said. "If there ever was a time when innovation and transformation were needed in government, it is now."

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.