The one silver lining of the 2012 election results seemed to be that I’d never have to write about Mitt Romney as a candidate again.

As regular readers know, between 2006 and 2012, I wrote a lot of critical columns and posts about Romney (I even wrote an ebook laying out how conservatives could cope with a Romney nomination and potential presidency). Like many others, I assumed his career as a candidate was over after 2012 based on the fact that there is absolutely zero good reason for him to run again. But American politics is evidently like Hill Valley in the “Back to the Future” movies, where you can go way back in time or well into the future, and the leading characters are all from the same few families. As my colleague Byron York tried to tell us last fall, Romney 2016 is starting to look like an actual thing.