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Mitt Again?
On Politico at this hour:
The day after Mitt Romney opened the door to another possible presidential run, a new poll shows he has a huge lead among likely 2016 Iowa Republican caucus voters.
Further:
According to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released Wednesday, 35 percent of likely GOP caucus voters would vote for the 2012 GOP nominee in 2016. When Romney’s name was added to the pool, no other candidate received double-digit votes.
The survey comes as rumors have begun to swirl about a potential Romney bid for president in 2016. After months of insisting that he will not run again, the former Massachusetts governor on Tuesday acknowledged that “circumstances can change.”
Well, good people of Ricochet? In a field including, let us say, Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, and Jeb Bush, where would you rank Mitt Romney?
Published in General
Peter; I’m a long time member with a brand spanking new Thatcher membership.
Don’t tease me.
Romney (if this is the best we can do, we stink)
Cruz (not photogenic)
Perry (not bright enough to win)
Bush (Bush name plus amnesty)
Christie and Paul (too many faults to list)
I saw Romney on Megyn Kelly’s show a week or two ago. He looked like he was in his early 50s. If he was a woman, you’d ask whether he’d had work done…
What is with those Iowans? Why not give Bob Dole another shot, or George H.W. Bush? It sounded like Romney didn’t even want to run very badly in 2012, that he was talked into it. I think Romney’s a heck of a guy. I’d love to have him as a father, boss, or next door neighbor. But he’s just not going to win. Even if he did, could you see him really shrinking the size of government?
Among the names mentioned, here is my ranking:
Rand Paul
Rick Perry
Ted Cruz
Jeb Bush
Mitt Romney
Chris Christie
It’s called watching your weight and staying fit.
If Romney wins the nomination, he must skip Ryan as running mate. Cruz would do.
Three times was not a charm for William Jennings Bryan. Why do we think it would be for Mitt?
No way. Ryan is still the perfect connection between the executive and legislative. Plus, the GOP failed to utilize a very important asset in 2012- Janna Ryan. She’s smart, stylish, beautiful, and extremely well-educated. She is a low-key Ann Coulter and could help enormously with the youth vote. I noticed that the minute I saw her at the convention.
Who do I like? In order:
Rick Perry
Bobby Jindal
Scott Walker
Mitt Romney
Note that Mitt trails the other three by a furlong. I’d vote for any Republican nominated, even first-term senators with no executive experience.
Ted Cruz would be pretty high on if he had time as a governor, but the senators who have moved directly into the Presidency have a pretty poor record in the aggregate. Give me a governor with a good record.
Yeah, I know the knock on Perry is that he is too dumb to be President. I remember another governor, a Democrat-turned Republican, who everyone said was too dumb to be a good President. But Ronald Reagan did a darn fine job, and turned out to be a lot smarter than he had been given credit for being.
Seawriter
I might be interested in that team but you know that the media/social media will try to take over the dialog with Cruz’s birthplace, regardless of the fact that he meets the criteria. It will be enough to create doubt in the low information crowd.
Four years ago I would have predicted that Romney had absolutely zero chance of becoming the nominee in 2012. Yet by the end of the third debate, it was painfully obvious that he was the only one on the dais with the chops and maturity to survive a general election, let alone the presidency.
With that in mind, I would advise withholding any and all judgment about the 2016 field until at least the first few debates.
This is a fit 70-year old.
This is a 67-year old freak of nature with a pinheaded sidekick.
I place Romney just above the middle, at least amongst those listed above. Still, he’s not my front runner. He seems great right now, but that’s because we managed to re-elect Barack Obama and in most fair comparisons, a rotting oak infested with squirrels looks great next to our current president.
My greatest worry is that Romney hasn’t seemed able to finish the job. Either he loses steam on the campaign, or he’s got poor advisors who unwittingly undermine any good point he has.
So no, I hope we get someone else. I’d take Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Rick Perry … maybe Jindal or Brown.
I’m mainly attracted to another Romney run as a fantasy of going back in time and redoing 2012. I doubt he would be the best choice. On the other hand, the more I see him the more I like him.
It’s possible that a rerun of Romney might remind voters in 2016 of what a horrible decision they made in 2012, but I think that’s just wishful thinking. I thought that Sarah Palin was a good choice in 2008 because the only bad thing about her was her lack of experience, when Obama had even less relevant experience. I had been assuming voters would make rational comparisons between the candidates, which was pretty naive on my part.
It all depends on what happens in the next two years. If Putin continues on his current path and the economy tanks, Romney is a shoo-in. He will have been right on both.
Is Kevin McCarthy possible? Don’t know much about him except for interviews posted here and the fact that he is from California!
Hi, from an Australian observer, you seem in a bit of pickle and much as I think Mitt seems a solid lovely guy, he does not have that toughness any conservative is going to need. It is going to be nasty. Best wishes, I think your country is wonderful and your constitution should be the envy of the world.
I think you meant to say crack-addicted, zombie squirrels with Ebola.
Randy Weivoda:
Randy,
Here’s the thing. I doubt “shrinking govt” is going to happen in our lifetime. Read Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book if you don’t believe me.
At this point, I’d settle for the financial whiz necessary to save this country from bankruptcy and a meltdown of prosperity and national security that we have never known.
Ted Cruz
Rick Perry
Rand Paul
Mitt Romney
Chris Christie
Jeb Bush
I like my presidents to have been successful 2 term governors of large states. Large states are complex enough such that said governor has demonstrated ability to balance conflicting regional interests.
Also, one does not allow libertarians to influence either national security policy or foreign policy for the same reasons that one does not permit toddlers to play with loaded handguns: both are likely to kill that which they love solely due to their incompetence at anticipating the foreseeable consequences of their actions.
Also, in my view we cannot get a Jacksonian President quickly enough. The power-vacuum created by Obama’s precipitous abandonment of America stabilizing role in the world has released multiple careening, metastasizing foreign policy crises that–taken together–would overwhelm a Bismark.
My list:
Rand Paul is disqualified on the grounds he’s a libertarian.
In what universe would this make any type of sense? Romney is a failure, a proven failure.
Whatever his personal merits, as a candidate for President he is a known loser. Even with all of Obama’s baggage going into 2012 Romney still was not able to defeat him, indeed Obama won convincingly. Unless the Democrat’s candidate next election is Biden that advantage will be gone, yet somewhere out there are individuals who believe that Romney will perform better this time? That is completely irrational.
#4. You have officially prodded the hornets’ nest! To compare Nixon (who never made an entrepreneurial dime in his “Republican cloth coat” life) to Romney is just factually incompatible.
Romney failed us badly last time around by not recognizing the seriousness of the threat the threat Obama represents to our national wellbeing, by constantly pulling punches, by limiting his rhetoric to economic issues, etc.
He’s not a conservative. He lacks vision.
Give me Scott Walker, Mike Pence, Mike Lee, Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Rand Paul over Romney. I’d take Romney over Jeb Bush or Chris Christie, however.
Romney is the best candidate the GOP has put forth since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Barr none. It was our own stubbornness that lost us the 2012 election.
So yeah, I’d be all in favor of him.
The problem is, the Left has gotten really nasty these past few years. And with someone as experience in nastiness as Hillary Clinton, we don’t need a nice guy.
We need a brawler. We need a current governor who has fought against the best the Left has thrown at them, or someone like Ted Cruz (if not him himself).
I’d love to be a $250 million dollar net worth “loser” with a fabulous family! Where can I sign up for that? Answer: You can’t; you have to earn it.
The true losers are the American electorate who just don’t get it.
I agree with your point. I simply wasn’t considering that factor at all.
All I was trying to say was that I just cannot visualize Mitt rolling back the administrative state: I can visualize him making it more rational and less dysfunctional. Nixon, of course, expanded the administrative state. We’d be luck to get through a Romney Presidency with no further expansion of our administrative state.
PS: Please send the Hornets back. Tell them that it was only a drill or something.
I guess talking about nothing other than the bedroom won Rick Santorum the election then?
Romney lost, but I’m not quite sure about who or what is to blame for that. Perhaps, all those “conservatives” who stayed home on election night. Maybe.
“Is this heaven?” “No … It’s Iowa!”
I’ll take this, but you don’t understand the competitiveness of this man once he’s given a job. He’ll fix it and his track record proves me correct.
Those are wonderful blessings, true achievements, yet neither one will successfully get you into the White House.
I don’t see how Mitt Romney would save us from bankruptcy. Paul Ryan’s budget plan was so gentle it wouldn’t get us to a balanced budget for something like 20+ years. Once he joined the Romney campaign, Ryan’s plan had to be watered down even more because Romney couldn’t defend that level of cutting. If you are correct that we cannot downsize government, then the difference between having Republicans or Democrats in charge is simply a matter of what year it is that it all crashes.