Mitt Romney tackles faith question in big speech

Mitt Romney was poised on Thursday to confront the questions over his Mormon faith and capitalist career that have dogged his campaign for the White House.

In a crucial prime-time speech at his party's convention in Florida, the Republican presidential candidate was to urge American voters to support his bid to unseat President Barack Obama.

For the first time, the 65-year-old was to be introduced by close colleagues from his work as a bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and a private equity boss at Bain Capital.

Romney has rejected calls to speak candidly about his devout faith, or to answer repeated attacks from Obama that he made his $250 million fortune as a heartless corporate raider.

Last night, Ken Hutchins, who in 1994 succeeded Romney as the top Mormon bishop in Boston, was to deliver the invocation - the first blessing of a party convention by a Latter-Day Saint.

Grant Bennett, who served alongside Romney as a senior Mormon cleric in Massachusetts, was set to tell the party convention that, like America, his religion had liberty at its core. "One of the core doctrines of our faith is the importance of the ability to choose, the importance of freedom," Bennett told his local radio station this week. He paid tribute to the US for allowing Mormonism to "grow and flourish, unfettered by government intervention".

Delegates were also to be shown videos highlighting Romney's work in the church, which supporters have urged him to cite as proof of his leadership skills.

Also due to introduce Romney was Bob White, his best friend and one of his former partners at Bain Capital. White, a 56-year-old Bostonian, has been one of the candidate's closest political advisers since his days in Massachusetts, where he served as governor from 2003 to 2007.

White, a multi-millionaire who owns the Boston Celtics basketball team, said this week that Romney was a "special person with conviction and passion" who had shown in his business career that he had the ability and temperament required of a president. "In a crisis, he knew where his priorities needed to be," White told CBS.

Describing Obama's claims that they had profited by bankrupting firms and laying off workers as "disappointing", White said: "Bain Capital is a true success story. Our mission was to invest in companies and help them grow".

Romney's speech was to mark the end of a four-year struggle in which he has tried to reconstruct a political personality that has won him only one election, for the Massachusetts governorship, in November 2002. A week after dropping out of the 2008 Republican primary race, Romney is reported to have held a meeting in Boston in which he dished out a pitiless one-page self-criticism about his failure to forge a coherent message about himself and his values.

As well as broadening his knowledge of foreign policy, Romney wrote a book - No Apology: The Case for American Greatness - in which he confessed his failure to connect with his public. "I've run for office three times, losing twice, winning once," he wrote. "Each time when the campaign was over, I felt that I hadn't done an adequate job communicating all that I had intended to say."

Four years later, Romney finds himself facing a moment that could determine whether he has succeeded in his mission to reinvent himself, or to reveal the core values he says were always there but hidden behind his awkward manner.

But polls show that, for all his efforts, Romney faces a difficult task. A Washington Post/ABC News survey this week found he was the least popular presidential candidate in nearly 30 years.

Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and younger brother of former President George W Bush, conceded that Romney had struggled to forge an emotional bond with American voters. "It's hard for him to show his heart, I respect that," said Bush. "Where it matters is connecting with other people's concerns."