THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

We all know that he learned how to lose a presidential run from his father. Now the New York Times reveals to us that he also learned how to lose a Senate run.

A faithful Mormon and stay-at-home mother who eventually emerged as an advocate of women’s involvement in business and politics, Lenore Romney, who died at 89 in 1998, had a “steely will,” in the words of Phillip Maxwell, a childhood friend of Mitt’s. Her larger-than-life husband was blunt and candid, a fiery campaigner who burst into a room. Lenore was controlled and self-contained, traits that friends say they see in Mitt, her youngest child.

“George was very unlike Mitt — he was kind of a bull in the china shop, and he would speak his mind regardless,” said Mr. Maxwell, a classmate of Mitt Romney’s at the Cranbrook School, an elite private academy here. “Lenore was much more measured. Everyone is focusing on the father, but he is really much more like his mother in that he is much more private than his father was.”

Just two years after Mr. Romney learned the brutality of politics through his father’s failed 1968 presidential bid, he witnessed his mother’s bruising 1970 defeat. Then 23, and already married, he had taken a summer break from his studies at Brigham Young University to campaign for her, appearing on college campuses and county fairs — an experience that he later said “taught me how to get out and see people and listen to what people are saying.”

She was ill-equipped for the rigors of politics — “Lenore was no George as a political candidate,” says Bill Ballenger, the editor of a political newsletter here — and lost badly to a popular Democratic incumbent, Phil Hart, much as Mitt Romney would later lose his 1994 Senate race in Massachusetts to another entrenched Democrat, Edward M. Kennedy.

And though Lenore Romney expected a glide path to the Republican nomination on the strength of her family name, she faced a difficult primary challenge from her party’s right wing, just as her son faces in his race today.

Good to know that Mittens learned how to lose at his parent's knee. It won't hurt so much that way.