The Trail of Tears

"Earlier in the day, after hearing from a voter who recalled his father, Mr. Romney choked up momentarily, according to a pool reporter who was present. “He was a great man, and I miss him dearly,” Mr. Romney said."
The above from this AM's New York Times. Mitt is such a copy-cat. First he adopts his "Washington is broken" theme in response to Barack Obama's call for change. And now that Hillary is opening the floodgates of tears, Mitt cries in Michigan, thinking of his father, the late Michigan governor George Romney.
Mitt reminds me a great deal of one of the justifiably forgotten candidates in American presidential history, Winfield Scott. Scott, a Whig, ran against Franklin Pierce in the election of 1852. He was a Mexican War hero who, like Romney, was tall, good-looking, and possessed of an unusually large head. But he was to put it mildly, a bit of a pompous ass. His Democratic opponents called him “Old Fuss and Feathers" for his love of ceremony (he was a man with a Napoleonic affection for a good, fancy uniform) and laughed at the way he would adapt his political stance to almost every need. Scott spoke to his audiences with the all unctuousness of the most politically correct twentieth-first century Presidential candidate: “Fellow citizens. When I say fellow citizens I mean native and adopted as well as those who intend to become citizens.” When Scott heard an Irish accent he would exclaim: “I hear that rich brogue. It makes me remember the noble deeds of Irishmen, many of whom I have led to battle and victory.” He liked to remind his Irish-Catholic listeners that his daughter, now dead, had been a nun. This was actually true, but was so blatantly pandering that most people thought it was a lie.
Scott lost to Franklin Pierce by a good margin. There is no record of him shedding a tear, but one wonders....