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This past Wednesday, during a "telephone town hall" with Wisconsin, after establishing that he has some connections to that state, presidential hopeful Mitt Romney elaborated.

"One of the most humorous, I think, relates to my father. You may remember my father, George Romney, was president of an automobile company called American Motors," he said, as though the town-hall participants were tucked into bed to hear the end of the story from the night before, and as though his father were Paddington Bear.

"They had a factory in Michigan, and they had a factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and another one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin," Mr. Romney said. "And as the president of the company, he decided to close the factory in Michigan and move all the production to Wisconsin. …"

I imagine that, on the day before the town hall, as Mr. Romney stood before his advisers rehearsing this story, one of them interrupted at this point and said something along these lines: "Pardon me, Mr. Romney, but do you have any anecdotes about you or your family that do not involve someone doing something Dr. Evil would have done?"

"Wait, wait. Let me finish," I guess Mr. Romney replied, breaking down into a fit of giggles, before continuing to tell the story, exactly as he would tell it the next day. "Now, later he decided to run for governor of Michigan, and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him. …"

"Sir," the adviser likely tried again. "Currently there's some concern about your image. Your numbers among voters aged 35 to 66 who've long dreamed of being governed by Thurston Howell III are good. You have all seven of those votes locked up. But a CNN poll released this week puts you a full 10 points behind Obama and I'm not sure this story is …"

"Say, how old are you?" Mr. Romney asked the speaker affably. "Around 32? Are you Dutch?"

"Fifty-three. Lithuanian, sir. Same as at lunch."

"I've never been to Lithuania, but a buddy of mine owns it. Says it's real fine," Mr. Romney responded cheerfully before explaining, as he eventually did in the telephone town hall, that the school marching band touring with his father on that campaign knew how to play Wisconsin's fight song, but not Michigan's.

"Every time they would start playing On Wisconsin! On Wisconsin!, my dad's political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because," Mr. Romney continued, laughing, just as he did later, during the town hall, "they didn't want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin."

"Why was a school marching band touring with your dad anyway?" another aide asked fearfully. "I mean where were all the schoolchildren of Michigan during all this? Did the band have to march from Wisconsin? And could they only play the one song? Was this band really good enough to be on tour? I just want to cover all the angles there, before you slay the crowd with this one."

But Mr. Romney had doubled over in laughter and was thus unavailable for comment for a while, although he eventually straightened up and, his story now told, began wandering jauntily about the room, shaking hands and patting shoulders.

"Hello, and how are you today?" he said gamely, shaking one bystander's hand. "Is that 'bling-bling' you're wearing?"

"It's my wedding ring," she replied with a sigh.

"Wedding ring! Excellent, excellent. And how long have you been married?"

"Forty-three wonderful years, Mitt. I'm your wife. From Michigan. Same as at breakfast."

"I have 14 cars!" he said, nodding warmly, before moving on to the next person in the room.

"I really think we should lock in the town-hall-meeting anecdote now, Mr. Romney," the adviser tried again. "It's noon."

"Same as at the Olympics!" Mr. Romney said happily.

"Uh, yes, same as at the Olympics," replied the 53-year-old Lithuanian adviser (who had, to tell the truth, begun viewing Mitt Romney less as a "presidential hopeful" and more as a "presidential eternal optimist"). "Do you have another story you could tell?"

"One time, I was swimming in my pool of money and …" Mr. Romney began merrily.

"Something else?" the adviser said.

"We used to have a pet …" Mr. Romney obliged, already giggling.

"No!" the aide cried out, along with the rest of the room. "Tell the one about your dad firing all those people. That'll be fine."

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