'ward, Something's Wrong With The Beaver'

At a rally in Ames, Iowa, on the eve of last weekend's straw poll, Mitt Romney invited his siblings onstage with his children and grandchildren. "Boy, we've got the whole gopher village up here," he told the crowd with a grin. "This is so much fun." "Whoop-de-do!" he says of John Edwards's proposal to let Americans save $250 tax-free. "Gosh, I love America," Romney said during one GOP debate. After hitting a long golf drive in one of his campaign videos, he shouts, "Holy moly!" Romney often sounds as if he has stepped out of a time machine from 1950s suburban America, golly-ing and gosh-ing his way across the nation, letting out the occasional "Holy cow!" after something really shocks him. When he won the straw poll, he pronounced himself "pleased as punch." On NBC's "Today" show a couple days later, he said his opponents would also "be pleased as punch if they could be in my position in Iowa today, no doubt."