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As Mr. Romney has rolled across the state on a three-day bus tour, he has been breaking into song — or at least reciting the lyrics of his favorite patriotic anthems.
“I love that song: ‘O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain,’?” Mr. Romney said of “America the Beautiful” at a stop in Mason City on Thursday. “If you count corn as an amber wave of grain, why, you have them right here. What a wonderful place this is.”
At a stop in Cedar Falls, Mr. Romney waxed poetic about the history of the national anthem. “I’ve been talking about music lately,” he said. “I happen to love the patriotic songs of America.”
Mr. Romney often eases into the musical portion of his speech while saying how much he loves the country, the unspoken assertion being that he cares for the nation in a way that President Obama never will.
“The president said he wants to fundamentally transform America,” Mr. Romney said on Wednesday in North Liberty. “I kind of like America. I’m not looking for it to be fundamentally transformed into something else. I don’t want it to become like Europe.”
He continued, “I want America to be more like America, if you will. I want the songs, that patriotism we have.” He then began quoting directly from his favorite verses of “America the Beautiful.”
But Mr. Romney is also using the patriotic songs to try to elevate his own political speeches — making them, in a way, more like Mr. Obama’s eloquent and inspiring rhetoric in the state four years ago. (Indeed, Mr. Obama became so famous for the soaring remarks he wrote himself that his rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, borrowing a line from former Gov. Mario Cuomo, remarked that you campaign in poetry, but govern in prose.)
And Mr. Romney does not just recite the lyrics — he annotates them, offering his interpretation of the meaning. “Most of the time when we sing a song, we don’t think much about the words,” he said. “But I’ve begun looking at these words and thinking about them.”
“O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife,” he said, is a reference to the country’s soldiers. (“Any veterans in this room here today?” he asked. “Thank you for your service.”)
And “O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years,” he continued, is an allusion to the nation’s founders. (The founding fathers, he said, “created something not just for their time, but that sees beyond the years.”)
Voters seem to be responding to Mr. Romney’s patriotic appeal. “For me, my father was killed in World War II, so those songs always tug at my heartstrings,” said Donald Good, 67, a dentist from Ames.
Mr. Romney’s performance has improved as well.
On Wednesday, when he first used the line about corn counting as an amber wave of grain, he was met with pin-drop silence. He tried it again at the next few events, to polite laughter. By Thursday night, at a rally in Ames, Mr. Romney had perfected his delivery.
”If corn qualifies as an amber wave of grain, we have it right here,” Mr. Romney said as the crowd applauded and cheered.
Mr. Romney exalted: “It does! It does!”
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