At Romney's Side, a Determined Running Mate Ann Romney has become more visible on the campaign trail with and without her husband. WASHINGTON - Years before Mitt Romney ever ran in his first political race, his wife, Ann, beat him to public office. In 1977, Mrs. Romney, at 27, campaigned for town meeting representative in Belmont, Mass., where the young couple lived. She studied up on local issues and went around town talking to residents. She even printed placards - complete with a photograph of herself above a list of platform positions - that she handed out door to door and on street corners. The big campaign issue "was to move the fire station or not," Mrs. Romney recalled. I won. The Ann Romney on display before voters today is the warm mother of five, the devoted grandmother of 18, and the glowing presence beside her husband on election nights. But that determined campaigner more than three decades earlier provides a glimpse of the woman beyond the gracious helpmeet, someone with a competitive streak who enjoyed her early foray into politics, and who, friends say, has steel behind the smile. While her biography outlines a seemingly conventional course, one that is more Laura Bush than Michelle Obama, Mrs. Romney casts herself as someone who has defied others" expectations, not endeavored to fulfill them. As the 17-year-old Ann Davies, she said, she initiated her conversion to Mormonism because she was on a spiritual quest, not trying to please her then-boyfriend, Mitt Romney. She married young and started a family over the protests of her parents. She chose to become a homemaker, even though the newly emboldened career women of her era in Boston would, as she put it, "turn their noses down at me." She always planned, she disclosed in a recent interview, on having her own later-in-life career, but those ambitions were derailed - and reshaped - by her struggle with multiple sclerosis. "I consider myself a very strong person, a very independent-minded person and someone that just sets my own path and goes my own way," Mrs. Romney, 63, said. I don't worry about what other people think or do. For nearly two decades, Mrs. Romney has chosen to nurture her husband's political aspirations, and now that he has clinched the Republican presidential nomination, she is becoming more visible on the campaign trail, headlining fund-raisers and political events. Her husband's team is making her available for news media interviews and has surrounded her with minders to help her withstand the increasing scrutiny. Like Mrs. Obama and Mrs. Bush, she once had deep reservations about politics and has learned the perils of being a combatant. Her husband's first race, unlike her contest in Belmont, ended in a bitter defeat, losing in a Senate run against the incumbent, Edward M. Kennedy, and she came off in the news media as a frivolous lady who lunches. Afterward, she told The Boston Globe: "Never. You couldn't pay me to do this again. Since then, though, she has become her husband's chief promoter, willing to plunge into the political fight and prodding him into his current race, even though most of her family was against it. While he was enumerating all the possible hurdles, she recalled, she frustrated him by cutting him off and saying, "No, I'm not going to consider those things because those change every day." Mrs. Romney has provided a few glimpses of what kind of first lady she might be, if her husband makes it to the White House. She exhibits no Hillary Rodham Clinton-type desire to become a player in policy matters, though she has expressed an interest in health issues. She sees a possible example in Mrs. Obama, whom she praised as "gracious and lovely," and who similarly provides an outgoing counterweight to a more aloof husband. In raising their five boys, Mrs. Romney said, her husband was strict while she was more lenient. She is decisive, while he is deliberative. He is wary of going off script, while she unabashedly mentioned their multiple houses and her expensive dressage horses, hot-button topics for a campaign trying not to highlight the Romneys" wealth. And while he is earnest, she can be irreverent. Michael Barbaro contributed reporting from New York.