There had been indications for months that Mitt Romney was thinking about running for president in 2016. Nevertheless, the political world was taken aback when Romney himself finally said it, last Friday at a meeting with donors in New York. He was no longer coy about things, no longer keeping a secret. “Tell your friends,” Romney told the assembled millionaire supporters, according to an account in Politico.
The Wall Street Journal was first to reveal Romney’s message to the donors. After that, political reporters from various outlets jumped in to confirm and add detail. The stories featured lots of Romney loyalists, contributors, and aides from 2012 and 2008, many of whom remain close to the former one-term Massachusetts governor. Television news picked up the story and added a gloss of its own, and in almost no time, Romney 2016 was officially a thing.
It was a thing, except that most of the Republican Party and the conservative world had not weighed in during those first hours. What did, say, state GOP chairmen think about the possibility of Mitt 2016? What did, say, Republican members of Congress, who play roles in their state’s primary and caucuses, think? What about conservative media voices like the Wall Street Journal editorial page?
In the last day or so, they’ve all gotten their boots on and publicly reacted to Romney 2016, and their preliminary verdict is not at all favorable.
“I’m not happy frankly with the way he’s chosen to re-enter presidential politics,” Vin Weber, a former Romney campaign co-chairman, told Bloomberg. “I think his friends need to be honest with him about that.”
In San Diego, where the Republican National Committee is holding its winter meeting, a lot of virtually unknown but very important Republicans — chairmen of state parties —were notably unenthusiastic about Romney 2016. Alex Isenstadt of Politico talked to the chairman of the Louisiana GOP: “[Romney] had a great opportunity last time and I personally want a fresh face”; and the chairman of the Pennsylvania GOP: “I have not detected a groundswell of support for him”; and an RNC member from Tennessee: “He’s got to make the case as to why this time would be better than the last” — and the message was mostly negative.
Then there are the Republican members of the House and Senate meeting in retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania. “I just spent two days at the Republican joint congressional retreat,” the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan reported, “and can tell you there was exactly no Mitt-momentum. The talk, when it turned to 2016, was of others.” Noonan went on to list a bunch of reasons Romney should not run, among them: “He’s good at life and good at business and good at faith. He is politically clunky, always was and always will be.”
Then there were Noonan’s colleagues at the Journal editorial page, who on Wednesday published a scathing editorial, “Romney Recycled,” rejecting in every possible way the very idea of another Romney run. “If Mitt Romney is the answer, what is the question?” the paper asked. “We can think of a few worthy possibilities, though one that doesn’t come immediately to mind is who would be the best Republican presidential nominee in 2016.”
Just for good measure, the Journal’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, separately referred to Romney as a “terrible candidate.”
For months, Romney’s supporters and advisers insisted that since he has wide name recognition and an extensive donor base, Romney would have the luxury of deciding quite late whether he would enter the 2016 race. But it appears the move by Jeb Bush to announce his own (likely) intention to run, plus to start working the Northeast donor base, instantly obliterated that Romneyworld conventional wisdom and pushed Romney into announcing his own plans ahead of schedule. Once underway, Romney’s announcement was of course big news. But now it has moved from headlines to critical appraisal.
Romney is set to address the RNC on Friday in his first public remarks since dropping the news that he might run. Even for those political types sympathetic to him, he’ll have a lot of convincing to do. And then there is the rest of the Republican world. What might seem appealing in prospect can be entirely different in reality. It might be that Romney 2016’s moment will be very short-lived.
