But as I look back on his biography, it seems to me that Romney missed one experience which changed the outlook and even the vocabulary of most of his schoolmates. This is a man who never experienced the '60s. You know what I mean: peace demonstrations, dope smoking, ironic detachment, all that.

He spent a year in Stanford when, despite the calendar, the '60s were just starting to arrive in Palo Alto; he debated the protesters. He then worked as a Mormon missionary in France (why doesn't some debate questioner ask him to speak some French for us?) and witnessed with disapproval the May 1968 upheaval in Paris.

When he returned to the United States, he married his high school sweetheart (from our school's female equivalent; the two have since merged). They went off to Brigham Young University, run by the Mormon Church. You can be sure that the '60s never arrived there.