Raucous Crowd Boos McCain At Romney Event
DENVER -- A boisterous crowd of several hundred people gathered at a Ford dealership here and gave Mitt Romney the warmest welcome he's received in some time. But they were not so generous to John McCain.
"Senator McCain is a wonderful person," Romney said, drawing loud boos from the crowd.
Romney continued that McCain is a national hero and a man he respects, but then he ran out of kind words for the Arizona senator.
"He happened to say that the economy was not his strong suit," Romney said. "Well, in a time like this—in a country like this—I think it's important to have a president for whom the economy is his strong suit.
The crowd later broke into a loud chant: "We want Mitt! We want Mitt!"
"You're getting the full monty," Romney said. "Don't worry."
At an outdoor press conference after the event, a small group of anti-abortion rights protesters who said they were Alan Keyes supporters held signs and chanted, "Mitt's pro-abortion," causing the hundreds of Romney supporters who remained on site to drown them out with their own pro-Romney chants. Romney supported abortion rights when he ran for Senate in 1994 and governor in 2002, but he changed his mind in office and had an anti-abortion rights record as governor.
At the press conference, Romney touted his endorsement by the Denver Post.
When asked if his campaign was now looking past Feb. 5th, Romney admitted that the race had not gone how he expected it to go.
"You know, I have been so wrong in predicting what would happen," he said. "I mean, I thought I would win Iowa, New Hampshire and Mayor Giuliani would be almost an impregnable force in Florida. And all three of those things ended up being wrong. This race has been so much more fluid then we would have expected that it's really hard to predict what'll happen."