Mitt Romney's last few Michigan stump speeches have included an unusual plank -- his appreciation for the apparently perfect height of the state's trees.
"I love this state," he told an audience Tuesday. "The trees are the right height."
On Friday afternoon, Romney reprised the comment, saying, “This feels good, being back in Michigan. You know, the trees are the right height."
But these statements are just the latest salvos in Romney's longstanding fascination with the stature of his home state's trees. HuffPost dug up some earlier comments along the same lines.
Here's Romney in November 2011:
“I love being in Michigan,” Romney said at the social club. “Everything seems right here. You know, I come back to Michigan; the trees are the right height. The grass is the right color for this time of year, kind of a brownish-greenish sort of thing. It just feels right.”
And back during the last presidential race, in January 2008:
"What a thrill it is to come back to Michigan, particularly in the winter, where the skies are cloudy all day, trees are just at the right height, almost all the cars you see are American-made -- the way they ought to be," Romney told an enthusiastic crowd at Lawrence Technological University in metropolitan Detroit.
Romney's relationship to Michigan's trees, however, wasn't always so cordial, according to his mother. As a teenager, he allegedly punched one.