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Romney Calls it Quits
The 2012 Republican presidential nominee has announced he will not seek another term in the Senate in 2024.
Published in General
Did he figure that he wasn’t going to get re-elected anyway?
That’s the best news I have heard all day. RINO’s are bred in Massachusetts, sorry for that.
Enjoy retirement Mitt buhby
They may be bread in Massachusetts, but they’re bred in Michigan.
He wants to start collecting Social Security before it goes bankrupt.
Good.
Point taken. I will edit.
Great news.
An honorable man who deserves a long and peaceful retirement. If only certain craven, spineless Republican senators had done the right thing and voted as he did at either of Trump’s impeachment trials, the GOP wouldn’t be in the mess it is today.
From today’s NYT story:
“[Romney] strongly suggested that Mr. Trump, 77, and President Biden, 80, should follow his lead and bow out to pave the way for younger candidates, arguing that neither was effectively leading his party to confront the “critical challenges” the nation faces.”
Too true. Thank you, Senator.
When’s the last time Romney was actually “effective?” When he was more or less a Democrat governor of Massachusetts?
Sure.
WHAT?
I wish Romney would have went after Biden with the level of ire he did with Trump. All of the things he did not like about Trump were done by Biden. Plus Biden Policies on the economy, the border, Afghanistan, Russia, the CPP and energy are all worse then Trump
Indeed. George Romney was governor of Michigan for a time and was a paternal grandfather to Rona McDaniel per Wikipedia. Maybe Rona could retire too?
Maybe. Or maybe he’s like a normal human being who would like to enjoy several years of retirement rather than dying at his desk in Washington. I wish Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Maxine Waters, and others would realize that the country will still go on without them.
The whole family should take up hiking.
Full-time.
I re-up the story of Mitt’s father running for the GOP nomination: Romney announced in November of 1967 and was gone from the race by February of 1968. Now, running for president back then was a lot different than it is today. Only 13 states held primaries that year. And if you were an announced candidate it was customary that other candidates would not contest you in your home state.
At one point the Gallup poll showed Romney with a considerable lead against LBJ. Then there were the Detroit riots of 1967 and gamesmanship between the Johnson Administration and Romney over the availability of army regulars. To get federal help the law would require Romney to declare a “state of insurrection” in Michigan and he wasn’t going to do that.
Romney was a rambler when it came to interviews. He tended to wander into long moralistic monologues. He said things off-the-cuff and that would get him in trouble, such as the claim that the Army had “brainwashed” him on a trip to Vietnam. Reporters called him “St. George” and Jack Germond said he was going to add a single key on his typewriter that would print, “Romney later explained…”
He would semi-revive his campaign at the 1968 convention after Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller devised a plan to deny Nixon the nomination. It was probably more of an effort to get the VP slot.
A reporter asked Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes about Romney and Rhodes said, “Watching Romney run for president is like watching a duck trying to (make love to) a football.” Only Rhodes did not say “make love to.”
Maybe that’s how he got the top job at AMC.
This is a fascinating look at the evolution of the nomination process. I have never heard that story.
It has mystified me how GW, Trump, and Romney were ever nominated. None of them had the support of the Republican Party. They just announced they were running, essentially, as Republicans.
For example, GW was at odds with the Republican base over immigration from the beginning. I disagree with him on that, although I respect his opinion. He grew up with the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall. His dad was a WWII vet, and the closed borders throughout Europe made it almost impossible for people to escape from the Nazis. See Casablanca. In fact, the desire to form the EU was a direct result of that frustration with closed borders. Europeans admired greatly the ability of Americans to travel so easily. As GW said, a wall keeps people in as much as it keeps people out. I really understand that.
But on our modern-day southern border, the lack of a secure barrier has led to other humanitarian problems. For example, it has created a second class of citizens who do not enjoy the protection of American law (leading to sweat shops and human trafficking).
As a moral issue, GW and I are far apart, even though I respect his reasoning and understand it. Nevertheless, the first thing I ever knew about Governor George Bush was that he would bring water to the desert water stations for the migrants. He was a truly good guy.
He did many things during his two terms that I agreed with, and for me–I know other people have concerns different from mine–he was a great president. During his terms, I followed the criticism of him, and I would be scratching my head when it came to the immigration policy criticisms. He had always held the beliefs he had. I lived far away in New England, and even I knew that about him from when he was a governor. How on earth did he ever get nominated being so different from his own party?
Super Tuesday primaries.
The same scenario happened with Trump and Romney. They never really had the support, the emotional commitment, to their candidacies from their own party.
The networks have been complaining bitterly about covering the conventions. They are boring now. It used to be, they have said, real things happened there. They were like the Super Bowls of politics.
The open primaries changed the dynamics. When you have fought during the conventions to get your candidate to the top, you are invested in his or her winning the race.
We really need to go back to having a closed primary system so that someone emerges the party really wants to support.
Make the parties pay for it. Get it out of the States governments hands
My thoughts exactly.
Open or closed makes no difference. Just the existence of primaries changed the dynamics. It’s the law of unintended consequences writ large.
People used to bemoan the party bosses and the smoke filled rooms and the riots at the ‘68 conventions pushed both parties into devising a primary system. Now we bemoan the money and the length of the campaigns.
As noted above Romney got into the ‘68 race the previous November. The eventual winner, Richard Nixon, didn’t declare until the first week of February.
In 1952, the GOP convention was scheduled for July 7-11 at the International Amphitheater in Chicago. The favorite was “Mr. Republican,” Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio. Taft had been tagged with the label of being an isolationist and was NATO skeptical. He was one of 13 senators who voted against the NATO treaty in 1949. So the internationalists in the party turned to NATO’s first commander and began a “Draft Eisenhower” movement.
Ike resigned from the Army on June 3, 1952 and announced he was seeking the Republican nomination the next day. His pre-convention campaign therefore lasted a grand total of 33 days.
Eisenhower started the GOP down the path of embracing the concept of American Empire and being the world’s policeman. Foreign relations then became the realm of the UniParty until Trump took the party back to its traditional roots of Bob Taft.
Who knows what would have happened had Taft prevailed but the question wouldn’t have an answer even if he had. Taft was diagnosed with terminal cancer in May of 1953 and would be dead by July 31st.
I know not addressed to me but I did comment on this so here we go.
I believe that government should not participate in primaries at all. Taxpayer dollars should not support any party functions. It is a moral issue for me.
I can see a purist argument for that, but taxpayer-funded primaries do provide a valuable service to the citizenry by weeding out multiple no-chance pretenders none of which may get even a plurality, which would then necessitate a repeat election…
Would you like all elections to be like “recalls” in California? I hope not. That would make even today’s version of “X% of the population DIDN’T vote for <whoever>” look good in comparison.
I agree with you. There is no reason for taxpayer money funding an election just to determine who will be the nominees for the Republican and Democratic parties. These contests should be paid for by Democrats and Republicans.
If in some states one or both parties decided to forget about primary elections and go back to state endorsing conventions, that is not necessarily a bad outcome. People imagine smoke-filled rooms where a handful of bigwigs decide who to back. At the state conventions that I have attended there were hundreds of delegates, the vast majority of which were not powerful connected insiders. Most of us were just regular people who had enough interest in the party that we were trusted to be delegates for our respective counties.
Without public primaries, what’s your justification for keeping any number of non-Party candidates off the ballots?
As in my previous example, that’s like the California “recall” system.
Good riddance. His failure to deliver the KO punch to Obama after that debate in Colorado is in no small measure the reason we have that demented and venal creep befouling the Oval Office with the pestilential exhalations of his warped soul today. Thanks for nothing, Mittens.
I think the “smoke-filled rooms” had one advantage: they tended to filter out at least some lunatics and amateurs. They were focused on finding the candidate most likely to win.
Think of how nice it would be not to have a 2-year campaign season.
In fact, Primaries don’t have to be elections at all. The Party can do it any way. How about caucuses?
Keeping any old person off the ballot is easy enough, just do it like you do a primary.
I think the Jungle primary is a great example of the nuts way to go. How insane is that one party keeps the other party off the top two spots by running two of their own?