Mitt Romney’s Dad Got Corporate Handouts: Free McDonald’s For Life

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Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney is too often accused of being stiff, awkward, soulless, hardly the type of guy you’d want to drink a beer with. (Romney, like most Mormons, doesn’t drink alcohol, anyway.)

And so it’s news when Romney offers up a new detail, however minor, about his personal life or childhood, as he did Wednesday with a group of donors in Chicago. At a fundraiser, ABC News reported, Romney recounted how, as a kid, he used to rifle through a sock drawer belonging to his dad, former Michigan governor George Romney, and how little Mitt once struck gold in that drawer:

You know how boys liked to go through their dad’s top drawer, just to sort of see what he has in there, maybe find an old coin he might not miss or whatever.

I found a little paper card, a little pink card, and it said this entitles George W. Romney to a lifetime of a hamburger, a shake, and French fries at McDonald’s. It was signed by the hand of [former McDonald’s executive] Ray Kroc. My dad had done a little training lesson or whatever for McDonald’s when there was just a handful of restaurants and I saw this thing and was like, ‘This is a gold mine, Dad! What are you doing?’ So I had it laminated. My dad, as you know, would go almost every day to a McDonald’s restaurant and get either a hamburger or a fish filet sandwich. And he would present this little card and of course the person behind the counter would look and say, ‘Well, what is that?’ They’d never seen something like that, but he said it was never turned down. They always honored it.

George Romney’s love of McDonald’s hamburgers and fish filets doesn’t seem to have worn off on his youngest son. Mitt’s preferred fast-food joint apparently is Carl’s Jr.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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