"Mitt wants to run. He never stopped wanting to run."

"... a senior member of his 2012 team told me. Other Romney-ites, watching this cycle’s candidates falling short, feel a sense of vindication after all the attacks they endured after Romney's failed 2012 bid. 'These guys like Walker and Perry, they were big deals in their states, but you get them onto the national stage and it's a different story,' a former Romney adviser told me. 'It's like they were in middle school, and now they're freshmen in high school and they're getting their faces slammed in the toilets.'"

From "Romney Is Horrified by Trump — and That’s Restarting ‘Mitt 2016’ Talk" in New York Magazine.

"As Jeb Bush struggles to carry the establishment mantle, some wonder whether the time is right for Mitt..."

But: "If Mr. Romney suddenly entered today simply to defend the declining Bush dynasty against the rising New York dynamism of Mr. Trump, it would shatter the creative awakening that is happening to conservatism and paralyze the rise to positive influence of Mr. Carson and Ms. Fiorina."

Mitt, like Biden, is held in reserve. The question is when and if to roll him out. Me, I like Mitt, but he can't just come barging onto the scene. Not at just any time. It's got to be right. But as we say at Meadhouse whenever the topic comes up — which is often — "It's party time, chumps!"

Mitt Romney announces he has "decided it is best to give other leaders in the party the opportunity to become our next nominee."

"Mr. Romney said he believed he could win the nomination, but he expressed concern about harming the party’s chances to retake the White House. "

“I did not want to make it more difficult for someone else to emerge who may have a better chance of becoming the president,” he said. He added that it was “unlikely” that he would change his mind....

In a more than four-hour meeting last week, Mr. Romney’s top staff members and trusted advisers from 2012 relayed a sobering reality — they supported Mr. Romney and thought he would be the best president, but they did not necessarily encourage a third run.

I've been more or less positive about Romney's running again, and I just put up a post earlier this morning looking at the factors he was supposedly weighing, but even though I do like him, I was concerned that he was becoming the front-runner mostly on name recognition, and that was not good for the overall competition within the GOP. I'd like to see the plausible candidates go through a process of presenting themselves to us — especially in debates — and giving us a chance to scrutinize them and maybe warm up to them, and it's appropriate for Romney to stand back and allow that to happen.

If various seemingly plausible candidates fail to get traction or crash for some reason, there's the elder statesman Romney, prepared to serve if needed. I like him there. It fits with the idea that he was going to use as his pitch: That he's a dutiful, modest man, a humble servant, who responds to a calling.

So: Don't call us, we'll call you.

Romney says: "Everybody in here can go tell your friends that I’m considering a run."

Politico reports.

Romney supporters have argued that there’s a clamor for people who would like to see someone emerge as a leader for the Republican Party during a particularly fractious time, and Romney recently began making clear to donors and supporters that such talk was affecting his thinking.

Bush’s decision to move quickly to draw a line in the sand was in part because of Romney’s overtures to donors. Bush allies had privately grown frustrated that Romney was freezing some donors who hoped he would launch a campaign of his own.

If I had to pick one, I'd pick...

Jeb

Mitt

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Who Are The Mysterious Forces Behind The 'Draft Mitt' Movement?"

A Talking Point Memo headline for a piece by Dylan Scott, who doesn't actually call anything "mysterious." We noticed Scott a couple weeks ago, writing under another TPM headline that caught my eye: "George Will's Rape Column Was Edited By A Bunch Of Men."

Scott's new piece fixates on the "Draft Mitt" website, which has only collected 28,000 names of Romney 2016 people, which is close to nothing.

But it's not nothing.

Which begs the question: Who's running this conservative (and low-budget) version of Ready for Hillary? That's the rub: Nobody seems to know.

Not nothing... begs the question (used incorrectly as usual) ... [There's] the rub... The clichés dribble out as Scott endeavors to make something out of virtually nothing.

Contacted by TPM via its Facebook page... an anonymous presence behind the site replied, saying the group "consists largely of former Romney campaign workers and donors."

But the site wouldn't disclose the names of these characters — or "forces" (to use TPM's word) — so I guess that's a bit "mysterious."

Back in April, we talked about rumors that Mitt Romney might run again. I said:

Why couldn't he win if he ran not because he was a sore loser and felt entitled or ambitious, but because he's a modest, dutiful man, called into service in a time of need?

Which is why the draft Romney step is helpful.

And take into account that the opposing candidate is quite likely to be Hillary Clinton, who was so much the front runner in '04 that her failure to get the nomination makes her seem like a previous loser, and that prior loss seems more loser-ish than Romney's 2012 loss, since Hillary was a frontrunner who got blindsided by an upstart, and Romney had an uphill battle against an incumbent. (And wouldn't Romney have won if he'd kept up the first debate aggressiveness in that second debate?)

I took a poll:

"I have a source that told me that if Jeb Bush decides not to run, that Mitt Romney may actually try it again."

Said Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation" yesterday, discussed here, by Wesley Lowery, in The Washington Post. Lowery says:

Romney and Bush are considered similar candidates... Several major Romney donors told The Washington Post earlier this year that Bush would be their preferred Republican candidate in 2016.

After shrinking out of the public light following his crushing loss to President Obama in 2012, Romney has slowly reemerged as a coveted political ally for Republicans seeking office this year.

Romney, 67, has begun to embrace the role of party elder, believing he can shape the national debate and help guide his fractured party to a governing majority.

Can America go for a candidate who has already had the nomination and lost? I remember when Nixon thought he could do it, and I considered it a ridiculous notion — I being a teenager and Nixon being correct. You may say: 1. But Nixon got drummed out of office, or 2. It's a new era and what worked in the 60s hasn't worked since the 60s.