Something for which there's about as much GOP grassroots demand as there is for Hillary Clinton to replace Sandra Bullock in any future Miss Congeniality sequels. If you open your window (briefly - we are entering a multi-generational ice age, you know) you can probably hear the communal, howling "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!" from just about anyplace in the country.
Don't believe me? Jennifer Rubin, the WaPo's token conservative blogger and a huge Romney shill in the 2012 cycle, posts ten reasons today why a third Romney campaign is a godawful idea. My favorites?:
Using talking points like “Ronald Reagan ran three times” treats Republicans like dolts. Fellas, Reagan lost in 1976, then won in 1980 and 1984. Romney might, however, move in on Harold Stassen’s legacy. (Stassen tried for the presidency nine times. Never got there.)
The “rivalry” between Romney and Jeb Bush is like that between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The former is so confident of its own stature that it does not know there is a rivalry. Romney is Los Angeles.
The idea of running to Jeb Bush’s right does not work when your gubernatorial record is less conservative than Bush’s on health care, taxes, the Second Amendment, etc.
When you are the butt of GOP jokes (“[W]hat can I tell you? Mitt happens”), it is time to stand down.
When your #1 former fangirl and groupie is begging you not to run again, the bloom really has fallen of the rose. And, of course, it did so years before now.
But Mitt, apparently, isn't listening, as he never really has in a political context, to the voices who actually know what they're talking about:
Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is rapidly moving to reassemble his national political network, indicating that he is serious about running for president in 2016, the Washington Post reported.
Romney, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2008 and 2012 — the latter time as the Republican nominee — contacted former aides, donors and other supporters on Monday and over the weekend in what the Post described as a "concerted push" to "signal his seriousness about possibly launching" a 2016 presidential campaign.
Romney's message, as he told a senior Republican, was that he "almost certainly will" run for the White House a third time.
My biggest chuckle came at the assertion that Romney plans to not just challenge JB, but to actually run to his right. Which isn't exactly a cramped space, but for Mitt would be akin to Thurston Howell III taking up breakdancing. This observation in bolstered by the list of names whose advice he's reportedly solicited so far: Utah-3 Representative Jason Chaffetz; Senators Rob Portman of Ohio and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire; former Senators Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Jim Talent of Missouri; and Hewlett-Packard chief executive Meg Whitman. In order: conservative, RINO, RINO, RINO, conservative, RINO. I'll cut House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan a break because he was Mitt's 2012 running mate.
Hot Air's Allahpundit is hugely skeptical:
It’s not gonna happen. Even if, against all odds, [New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie sobers up from his football-induced euphoria and realizes that he’s going nowhere in the primaries, especially now that Bush is in the race, there’s no way Romney will get in and risk splitting the establishment/centrist vote with Jeb. For him to do it, you’d need first to eliminate that risk by having the entire right side of the field implode — Rubio falters because of amnesty, Rand Paul falters because of foreign policy, Cruz falters because of his role in the shutdown, etc., etc., etc.
And, you know, because all three are freshmen senators, GOP Obama wannabes, and none of them are remotely close to being presidential timbre.
Even then, someone like Jindal....
Constitutionally ineligible. Too bad that no longer seems to matter to either party anymore.
....or Walker....
dingdingdingdingding!
....would probably pick up the disaffected conservative votes, not Jeb. Why would Romney sabotage a fellow establishmentarian like Bush and risk handing the nomination to a more right-wing candidate like Jindal or Walker by jumping in at that point and dividing the center? Even if every candidate on the right faded and Jeb raced out to an enormous, seemingly prohibitive lead, paint me a picture where the donor class would encourage Romney to disrupt Bush’s momentum by joining the race himself. The people who bankrolled Mitt three years ago and who’ll be bankrolling Jeb now may have mild preferences for one or the other of them, but ultimately they don’t much care which gets the nomination so long as a conservative doesn’t. Give me a scenario in which that calculus changes and suddenly there’s support in the monied center of the party for the idea that Jeb Bush himself must be stopped and there’s only one man to do it.
That is a good point about the "establishment," and why they almost always beat the conservative grassroots in the Republican nominating process: They know how to play the game to win, while Tea Partiers not only do not, but take inordinate, overweening pride in refusing to play it, and then bitch and moan when an endless, stale, moldy procession of Bushes and Doles and McCains and Romneys shuffle to our convention every four years, catch some balloons and confetti, and then stumble on to the more-often-than not "thumpin'," "shellacking," and otherwise demoralizing defeat several months later that has typified most presidential elections since the Gipper rode off into the sunset. Yes, they have gobs and gobs of money, but they also know their overriding objective - screw the base - and the way to do it - unite behind a single "establishmentarian" while the TPers scatter themselves to every flake, pretender, pizza magnate, neurosurgeon, and guy or gal whom they heard give a speech once and swooned in ecstasy, instead of following the RINOs' example and closing ranks not just behind a single conservative candidate, but one who can win a mano-a-mano showdown with a Jeb or a Mitt.....
Hmmmm; kinda makes you wish there was a transcript of the Romney-Ryan conversation, doesn't it? Might Governor Romney be intending to run interference for Governor Walker? It would truly be a valuable and appreciated act of patriotic service to his country. Because otherwise Romney III coming on the heels of Bush III would be a nausea-inducing indication of how pathetically bankrupt, at least as the presidential level, that the GOP has truly become.
Exit question: Does that explain Jen Rubin's "I love my Bush!" t-shirt? You know how fickle and flighty groupies are.
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