Mr Romney is impressive on the stump, speaking with authority about his plans for the economy and sounding convincing about his conversion from a centrist governor into a much more conservative candidate.

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They would be working the fields and his father would turn around and Albert had disappeared and they would find him "on a stump somewhere speaking to an imaginary crowd, " recalled Donald Lee Hackett, an old family friend.

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Certainly, the Mitt Romney speaking somewhere on the stump last week in Ohio was not telling his audience that under a Romney presidency, nobody gets a tax cut if it adds anything to the deficit.

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