The former Massachusetts governor's elevation to
official challenger to President Barack Obama in the November election
comes more than five long years after he launched his first White House
bid.
But for Romney this will be new territory, and he will be
under intense pressure to show he has the best character, skills and
policies for the job in a pitch-perfect closing address at the
Republican National Convention.
He will aim to generate enough
campaign momentum to slingshot out of Tampa and through the grueling
10-week dash across battleground states like Florida, Ohio, Virginia and
Colorado, any of which could decide the race.
Romney has trailed
over the last few months, but the multimillionaire former venture
capitalist has recently drawn even in national polls with Obama, an
incumbent saddled with a sluggish US economy and stubbornly high
unemployment.
Romney has touted his business acumen, arguing he
has the skills necessary to steer the country back to prosperity, but he
trails Obama badly in terms of likability and can come across as stiff,
awkward, and aloof.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll carried out
ahead of the convention found that just 40 percent of Americans viewed
Romney "favorably overall" while 51 percent view him as unfavorable.
That's
considerably worse than Obama, who enjoys a 50-47 percent rating, and
Romney's is the lowest favorability rating of any major party nominee at
the time of the convention since at least 1984, the pollsters said.
A
killer acceptance speech that humanizes Romney could go far towards
reversing those numbers and blunting Democratic assaults on his time at
private equity firm Bain Capital, where he became fabulously wealthy.
But
last week he told The Wall Street Journal that he won't use his
campaign as "a way to personalize me like I'm a piece of meat."
Instead,
the job of humanizing Romney has largely fallen to his wife Ann, who
brought down the house Tuesday with a rousing speech about their high
school romance, their all-American family and his devotion to public
service.
"No one will work harder, no one will care more. No one
will move heaven and earth like Mitt Romney to make this country a
better place to live," she said to a standing ovation.
Romney
lost the Republican primary race to Senator John McCain, who went on to
lose to Obama in 2008. He must now convince Americans that the man they
voted for four years ago isn't up to the job.
Throughout the
three-day convention, one surrogate after another has made the case that
Romney is the only candidate who can guide America out of the malaise
that set in with the 2007-8 financial collapse.
Wednesday night it was running mate Paul Ryan's turn.
The
energetic deficit hawk laid out the case for replacing Obama, offering
searing criticism of the president and his policies and stressing Romney
was prepared to step into the world's biggest job on Day 1.
"Our
nominee is sure ready. His whole life has prepared him for this moment
-- to meet serious challenges in a serious way, without excuses and idle
words," Ryan said.
"After four years of getting the run-around, America needs a turnaround, and the man for the job is governor Mitt Romney."
On Thursday, it will be Romney himself who has to stand and deliver.
Senior strategist Stuart Stevens said Tuesday that Romney had already completed his speech.
"It
will be a clear vision of a Romney presidency, and very much from his
heart about America, and why he wants to be president," Stevens said.
Romney
said he was confident enough that he could set the speech aside for
several hours the day before and fly to Indianapolis to speak with
military veterans, which he described as "a privilege not to be missed."
In raw or unadjusted terms, headline
unemployment rose, with the total number of people out of work up by
29,100 in August from July to stand at 2.91 million, the Federal Labour
Agency said.
The unadjusted jobless rate stood at 6.8 percent in August, unchanged from July.
Unemployment
tends to rise in the summer as school-leavers sign on the dole and
companies close for the holidays but even adjusted for such seasonal
factors, unemployment is on the rise in Europe's top economy, the data
showed.
The seasonally adjusted jobless total rose by 9,000 in August from July.
But
here, too, the adjusted jobless rate, which measures the proportion of
people registered as unemployed against the working population as a
whole, was unchanged at 6.8 percent.
"The German economy did not
grow much in the second quarter. The slower growth is making itself felt
on the labour market," the labour agency said in a statement.
Van der Vaart has been strongly linked with a
return to his old club, where he spent three seasons between 2005-08
before moving to Real Madrid.
But the Bundesliga side's chairman, Carl-Edgar Jarchow, admits time is running out to convince Spurs to sell.
"There is not a lot of time - it is really up to Tottenham Hotspur," he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
"If we have a chance to sign him, we will do everything we can to make that happen."
That
opportunity could present itself if Tottenham complete the signing of
some of their own targets during what looks set to be another frantic
final 48 hours of a summer transfer window at White Hart Lane.
Moussa
Dembele is on the brink of sealing a move from Fulham after Spurs
triggered what was reportedly a £15million release clause.
New
manager Andre Villas-Boas has also renewed the interest he showed while
Chelsea boss in Shakhtar Donetsk forward Willian, who could fill the
void left by the departure of Luka Modric.
In the nearly 200 families tracked, kids
generally spent increasing amounts of one-on-one time with parents in
their early adolescent years. Time with the folks started to drop when
they were about 15.
The time teens spend specifically with their
dads may have critical benefits, the study from Pennsylvania State
University found. The more time spent alone with their fathers, the
higher their self-esteem; the more time with their dads in a group
setting, the better their social skills.
Your father, yourself: 4 women look back on their dads
"The
stereotype that teenagers spend all their time holed up in their rooms
or hanging out with friends is, indeed, just a stereotype," said Susan
McHale, director of the Social Science Research Institute at Penn State.
"Our research shows that, well into the adolescent years, teens
continue to spend time with their parents and that this shared time,
especially shared time with fathers, has important implications for
adolescents' psychological and social adjustment."
Researchers studied families with at least two children over a period of seven years.
"It's
very rare to have longitudinal data over such a long period of time for
four members of a family," said Ann Crouter, dean of Penn State's
College of Health and Human Development.
"It takes an incredible amount of time and effort to mount a study of this kind."
The
researchers caution that the study was not representative of the whole
country. The families studied are "almost exclusively European American,
working- and middle-class families living in small cities, towns, and
rural communities." Further studies are needed to look at more diverse
samples of the U.S. population, they say.
The study, published in
the journal Child Development, found that kids spend less and less time
with their parents in group settings as they go through their preteen
and teenage years. But one-on-one time increases up until about age 12
and then stays relatively flat before starting to decline a bit around
age 15, says Crouter.
Parents spend roughly seven to eight hours a
week in group settings with their kids ages 8 to 15, the study found.
Mothers get in about an hour and 15 minutes alone with their firstborn
kids and more than an hour and a half with second-born kids each week.
Dads get in just over an hour of one-on-one time with first- and
second-born kids each week.
Numerous other studies have found
benefits for kids who spend more time with their families, such as fewer
delinquent behaviors and less likelihood to give in to peer pressure,
the study notes.
In this study, the findings about fathers proved to be very interesting, Crouter said.
While
increased time with Dad showed key benefits for self-esteem and "social
competence," time with Mom did not show the same correlations.
"In
two-parent families, the mother's role as caregiver is so scripted that
her involvement can easily go unnoticed and unacknowledged,"
researchers note.
Meanwhile, kids whose fathers spend one-on-one
time with them "may develop higher general self-worth because their
fathers go beyond social expectations to devote undivided attention to
them."
Also, time with dad often involves "joking, teasing, and
other playful interactions," the study says. "Fathers, as compared to
mothers, were more involved in leisure activities" and had more
"peer-like interaction" with their children, which is "crucial for youth
social development."
Daughter's in love, Dad feels jilted
There's
also the possibility that time with dad goes hand-in-hand with
self-esteem for another reason: Some fathers may be more "drawn to"
their children who "have higher self-worth and social competence," the
researchers suggest. They point to another study that found dads are
more affected by their kids' personalities than moms are in how they
parent. So in some cases, dads spending more time with certain kids may
be the result of the kids being more social -- not the cause of it.
"This
doesn't mean that mothers aren't important!" McHale said. "The youth in
this sample were in general well-adjusted, suggesting that there were
good things going on in their families on the whole."
Another
previous study found that children who spent more one-on-one time with
their mothers were less often depressed; that correlation was not there
with fathers.
Parents who have a son and a daughter generally
spend more time alone with the child of the same sex, the Penn State
study found.
And parents generally spend a bit more time with
second-born children, bolstering previous studies suggesting that
parents learn from their experiences with their first children and are
better able to maintain close relationships with the younger children
during adolescent years, the study says.
Other studies have busted stereotypes about dads, including how much time they spend with their children.
The
Families and Work Institute found (PDF) that dads spend substantially
more time with their kids under age 13 than they did decades ago. As of
2008, employed fathers spent about three hours a day with their
children, while employed mothers spend nearly four hours.
Are you
a parent looking for tips on how to connect with your adolescent or
teenage children? We've collected some helpful links for you here.
