TAMPA, Fla. – Mitt Romney was looking for a second chance to make a first impression.

After more than a year on the campaign trail, he turned Tuesday to the person who knows him best – his wife, Ann.

Polls show that voters, especially women, find President Barack Obama more likable than the Republican.

So it was Ann Romney’s task at the Republican National Convention to patch up the cuts and scrapes her husband has suffered and reintroduce him to America as a caring husband and father.

Ann Romney, mother of five and survivor of multiple sclerosis and breast cancer, began with a salute to American mothers and empathy over their worries about gas prices, school sports fees and other middle-class struggles.

“It’s the moms who always have to work a little harder to make everything right,” she said.

She then turned to her life story with the man she met at a dance.

“He was tall, laughed a lot. He was nervous – girls like that,” Ann Romney said. “More than anything, he made me laugh.”

And she talked about her family’s modest beginning, when she and Mitt lived in a basement apartment and “ate a lot of pasta and tuna fish.”

“I read somewhere that Mitt and I have a ‘storybook marriage.’ Well, in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long, rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once. And those storybooks never seemed to have chapters called MS or breast cancer,” she said. “A storybook marriage? No, not at all. What Mitt Romney and I have is a real marriage.”

The candidate himself ventured on stage after her speech to give his wife a kiss.

Americans can trust Mitt Romney, his wife said.

“No one will move heaven and Earth like Mitt Romney to make this country a better place to live,” Ann Romney said, drawing the loudest applause line of her speech.

jhanel@durangoherald.com