This Mitt Romney story, from Utah's Deseret News, has been making the right-wing rounds all week. So did you really think Mitt finally got the message that he should stop thinking about running for president after Jeb Bush made his move? Nahhh -- and what's keeping his hopes up is a highly implausible scenario:
Mitt Romney is eyeing a third run for the White House and will get in the race in the coming months if he doesn't like how the GOP field is looking, his longtime friend Kem Gardner said Monday.Um, I don't know if anyone's noticed this, but Ted Cruz is not doing particularly well in the Republican polls -- in the Real Clear Politics polling average, he's eighth, at a mere 5.5%, behind Bush, Christie, Ryan, Paul, Huckabee, Carson, and Walker. I know many people fear Cruz, but he seems to be just too snarly to be a presidential nominee. (We usually want our nominees to convey a simple, sunny optimism -- even Nixon learned to fake that.)
"I know exactly what Mitt's going to do," Gardner, a real estate developer who helped bring Romney to Utah to lead the 2002 Winter Olympics, told the Deseret News....
Gardner ... said Romney is watching to see how the other potential Republican candidates fare, especially Bush and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, before deciding whether to run again after losses in 2008 and 2012....
"If it's Ted Cruz that's the candidate, he's in. If it's Jeb Bush, he's probably not," Gardner said....
We think of Mitt (and most Republicans) as stable, emotionally uncomplicated types, but that's a misleading stereotype in Mitt's case -- he clearly has a desperate craving for this Walter Mitty rescue fantasy. He's clearly telling himself that he'd prefer to be just a retired grandpa, but darn it, his country needs him!
... Spencer Zwick, who raised $1 billion for Romney's 2012 campaign, ... said Romney is getting plenty of encouragement to run, both from the donors who funded his previous campaigns, as well as those who now wished he'd beaten President Barack Obama.And you know what his problem is? He's bored!
"I hope he does. So do many others. That doesn't mean he will. But there are many people who are hopeful," Zwick said. "Mitt Romney is too much of a patriot to just concede the presidency to the Democrats."
Gardner offered a different reason for Romney's interest.Er, Mitt? Here's a suggestion: Get a freakin' job. Go do some actual work like the rest of us.
"Mitt is so restless," he said. "It was fine during the (2014) Senate campaigns because he went to 27 states" to campaign for GOP candidates. "He really felt like he had something to do."
It's different now that the midterm elections that saw Republicans take control of the U.S. Senate are over, and Romney, along with his wife, Ann, author of a family cookbook, are spending more time at their homes in Utah.
"He's here without a rudder and getting restless," Gardner said. "There's only so many cookbooks you can write."
Wait, what? Mitt has a job? With his son's private equity firm? Yeah, but that's a cushy gig -- he works one week a month. During the last presidential campaign, Romney said, "For the next generation of retirees we should slowly raise the retirement age.” Well, he's 67, and wasn't quite 60 the last time he held down a full-time job. Forty hours a week, Mitt! Otherwise, you're a taker!
6 comments:
Given how much of his nongovernmental career he's spent plundering the assets from companies and skipping away from the smoking ruins, do you really want him back at work?
Maybe he could help Jimmy Carter build homes for poor people?
Nah, too nice a thing to do!
Better to wait, and then steal money from their new mortgages.
Yes, let's raise the retirement age.
After all, how hard is it to sit in your high-rise corner office with your assistant bringing you fresh espresso, and reports with the summary so that you don't have to actually, you know, read it yourself?
And then a nice lunch with friends, on an expense account, of course.
And leave when you feel like it if there is something more enjoyable you would like to do. Your salary is the same whether you are in the office or not, right?
Working is just not that demanding, so let's say, age 85? Yes, that would work.
“From 1928 to 1932, the German National Socialist (Nazi) Party’s share of the vote skyrocketed from 2.6 percent to 37.3 percent. While many commentators have attributed the Nazis’ success to its appeal to the lower middle class … the facts unequivocally reveal that it was the upper middle class that most strongly voted for Hitler… The Nazis were seen as patriotic, anti-communist, and religious. The people who voted Nazi were not so much people who had fallen economically, but people who feared falling and wanted to stay on top.” Rollback, by Thomas Bodenheimer, Robert Gould
I am oft reminded of late of Frank Herbert's Dune, and of Beast Rabban, sent to oppress the people so as to later accept his pretty-boy cousin as a messiah. More pronounced by Jeb's entry into the fray, but never-the-less a certain deja-vu.
Of course, there are no messiahs. No one is going to rescue us. Fascism has crept in the back door, wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.
I'm not afraid of revolution. I'm afraid of what's on the other side of revolution.
Poor old Rafael, he lit the sky like the brightest star in the galaxy, but he turned out to be nothing but a cheap firework. I guess dicks are just gonna be dicks.
The Republican nomination process is going to be hugely entertaining. Obama might even be able to get some work done while the other mob is preoccupied with its internal brawling.
Mitt Romney/Walter MITTY.
I see what you did there.
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