Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's wife Ann greets the crowd of supporters at the Tampa Bay Times Forum in Tampa, Florida, on August 28, 2012 during the Republican National Convention. The 2012 Republican National Convention is expected to host 2,286 delegates and 2,125 alternate delegates from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five territories. AFP PHOTO/Mladen Antonov/AFP/GettyImages
By Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY
TAMPA - Her mission was to soften her husband's image, but before she spoke about the "boy I met at a dance," Ann Romney made a strong pitch for the support by women that has so far eluded Mitt Romney's Republican party.
"I love you women! And I hear your voices," Romney said in her prime-time speech Tuesday. Emphasizing the toll of economic worries on women, she said, "We're too smart to know there aren't easy answers. But we're not dumb enough to accept that there aren't better answers."
Opinion polls show women support President Obama by a double-digit margin. Romney was straightforward in appealing to women to look again. "You can trust Mitt," she said. "He will take us to a better place, just as he took me home safely from that dance. ... Give him that chance."
In an unannounced appearance, Mitt Romney walked out onstage at the end of his wife's speech and embraced her. "Fabulous," he appeared to say.
Ann Romney reminisced about the couple's high school romance. "He was tall, laughed a lot, was nervous ... and he was nice to my parents, but he was really glad when my parents weren't around." She said Romney has become a man who "has tried to live his life centered on values of family, faith and love of fellow man."
"I've seen him spend countless hours helping others. I've seen him drop everything to help a friend in trouble, and been there when late-night calls of panic came from a member of our church whose child had been taken to the hospital."
Mitt Romney, formally nominated Tuesday, "will wake up every day with the determination to solve the problems that others say can't be solved, to fix what others say is beyond repair. This is the man who will work harder than anyone so that we can work a little less hard," she said. "This man will not fail. This man will not let us down."
Her speech was unabashedly emotional: "I want to talk to you from my heart about our hearts, about that one great thing that unites us, that one thing that brings us our greatest joy when times are good, and the deepest solace in our dark hours. Tonight I want to talk to you about love."
Although the couple's wealth has been a focus of criticism from the Obama campaign, Romney aimed to portray her family as real people: She joked that while her 43-year marriage has been described as storybook, "in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long, rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once."
She shot back at critics of their wealth, asking, "Do we want to raise our children to be afraid of success?"
USA TODAY