Not His Father's Party

"As the newly elected governor of Michigan, George Romney marched with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. Throughout the turbulent 1960s, George Romney argued, at considerable political cost to himself, on behalf of a Republican Party that would welcome newly enfranchised African-American voters and reject the coded language of Southern strategists and repurposed segregationists. In 1964, as one of the nation’s most prominent Republican elected officials, he refused to endorse Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy. He complained that Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was gearing his campaign toward disaffected Democrats in Southern states such as Alabama and Mississippi, had broken faith with party members who valued 'basic American and Republican principles.'
"While some Republicans responded to the outbreak of rioting in American cities by blaming Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty initiatives, Geoffrey Kabaservice recounts in his brilliant new analysis of the decay of the Republican Party, Rule and Ruin (Oxford, 2012), how Romney argued that government was not doing enough."

John Nichols at The Nation contrasts George and Mitt Romney.

As does Rick Perlstein in Rolling Stone.