I imagine that he has not. But I know that his running-mate Paul Ryan has. And since Ryan has made a personal fetish of the book, at one time setting it above the Bible in his estimation of the moral guidance to be discovered between its covers, I am...disturbed to see that he has not shared with Mitt this Randian "sermon" against, of all things, lying:
"People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.” ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged [This quote and all others in this diary come from "Quotes About Lying"]Finding that Ayn Rand could imagine a character who would condemn lying on such pragmatic grounds does not improve my opinion of her book so much as it makes me question Ryan's levels of reading comprehension and loyalty to Mitt. All those times poor Paul read his favorite book, did he skip this part because "self-abdication" has five syllables? Was he so focused on the bodice-ripping romance between Dagny and Reardon that he missed the character-forming message? How could he have missed so many opportunities in his relationship with Romney to warn his leader, his mentor of the difficulties created by lying?