Of Mitt Romney’s political career, which he announced yesterday would end with the completion of his first Senate term in January 2025, I have one thing to say: He is right about Michigan’s trees.
During his 2012 run for president, Mitt Romney more than once attested to the aptness of Michigan’s arboreal adornments. “I love this state,” he said on one occasion. “It seems right here. The trees are the right height.” Not long after, he declared, “You know, the trees are the right height, the streets are just right.” And Romney was no flip-flopper on this question. Media outlets found pro-tree comments from Romney as early as 2008. Even a media that obsessively assailed Romney during that campaign (“What about your gaffes?”) could only treat such a random, innocuous Romney preoccupation as a mostly harmless curiosity, perhaps with just a slight undertone of mockery.
As an Ohio native living in Michigan at the time, I found Romney’s remarks perplexing if wholesome and sincere, albeit in that awkward and forced style that has marked much of his political career. But I had no reason to believe he was being deceitful on such an apparently obscure matter. Since he was born and raised in the state, it seemed far likelier that this was simply one of the many ways his affection and nostalgia for a place he knew well had manifested. We can all relate to that.
In the years since his initial comments, however, I have begun to wonder if Romney was drawing from something a bit deeper than nostalgia. Whenever I have returned to Michigan over the past decade or so, I have also noticed something ineffably pleasing about its fine foliage. Its autumnal beauty is stunning, of course, but similar to that of other Midwestern states. It’s something different, as even those typically set against Romney allowed. “The region’s red maples (40 feet at maturity) and butternuts (50 feet) — in contrast to the west coast’s ultra-imposing redwoods or the South’s live oaks or the iconic Southern magnolia — are somehow gentler and feel a bit more accessible,” read one contemporary account in the Washington Post. “Well, he does have that right,” Michigander and left-wing activist Michael Moore admitted. “The trees in Michigan are just the right height.”
I can testify to this. In summer 2016, my father and I drove from Cincinnati, where I am from, to a town on Lake Michigan for a family vacation. Most of the drive is through Indiana, a state of many charms and virtues, to be sure. But shortly after we crossed the border into Michigan, my father spoke up. “There’s something different about the trees here,” he said. I looked around. Maybe all that driving through flat Indiana plains had warped my perception. Maybe my own nostalgia for my time in Michigan had come to the surface. But as I looked at the trees, firm yet not daunting, plain yet pleasing to the eye, bending in the wind yet not breaking, the conclusion was obvious.
They were all the right height.