For now, Josh Romney said, his father and mother, Ann, are taking a break from politics. This past weekend, they skied at Deer Valley, where they have a vacation home. Just after the announcement that ended the campaign, the family gathered in San Diego.

The end of his father's years-long quest for the presidency didn't come as a surprise, Josh Romney said. Mitt Romney had counted on winning the first two states to hold elections, Iowa and New Hampshire, but lost both as well as other key states, including Florida and California.

"My dad's a guy who understands the reality of a situation and can take a very unemotional approach, very objectively, and that's what he did," Josh Romney said. "Not winning isn't the end of the world."

Still, the loss in Iowa was especially tough, Josh Romney said. "It killed a lot of my dad's momentum, to be honest. That was really damaging," he said of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee winning Iowa after months of his father leading in the polls.

Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, brought out a surprising number of evangelical voters in Iowa. They weren't voting against a Mormon candidate, Josh Romney said, but he did run into some "pockets of bigotry" occasionally on the campaign trail.

"When it's religion, you definitely take it personally," he said. "It's highly offensive, but I think that the vast majority of people we saw were very accepting. They said, 'Your dad shares our values and we don't care about his religion."'

Only a few times, he said, did he hear voters say they couldn't support a Mormon candidate for president. "I said, 'That's a very un-American thing to say.' I mean, this is a country that based on religious freedom," Josh Romney said.

At the beginning of the campaign, he said, there was much more attention on Mitt Romney's faith, including a Newsweek cover story. "People, when all they knew about my dad was that he was a Mormon, they had a lot of questions about it," Josh Romney said.

That interest had lessened as the campaign season wore on, he said, until Huckabee raised the question of whether Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers during a New York Times interview in December.

That may have hurt his father's campaign, because "it highlighted the fact that his religious views were different" and turned attention back to Mormonism for a few weeks, he said. "It was a smart political move for Gov. Huckabee."

Although there's been some suggestion Mormons didn't benefit from the scrutiny the campaign brought to their faith, Josh Romney believes the attention was helpful. "We're a people who are proud of our beliefs and want to share our beliefs," he said.

Josh Romney said that while he was disappointed his father's campaign didn't succeed, he felt some relief, too. He said he and other family members had mixed feelings about giving up their privacy and not seeing much of Mitt Romney over the next four to eight years.

"I was not that upset," Josh Romney said. "I didn't cry or anything."

Don't look for Josh Romney to hit the campaign trail for McCain, even though his father likely will soon.

"It's one thing to campaign for my dad, someone whose principles I line up with almost entirely," he said. "I can't say the same thing for Sen. McCain."

---

E-mail: lisa@desnews.com