Will Mitt take another run at the White House? According to Byron York’s reporting, the answer is absolutely yes – uh, maybe! “Definitely more than zero.” Larison somehow managed to type while banging his head on his desk:
If it was Romney’s “turn” in 2012, he has had it and squandered it, and there won’t be many interested in giving him another one. Indeed, almost every faction of conservatives would be unhappy with another Romney campaign.
For reformist conservatives, Romney’s last campaign was the embodiment of the party’s complete failure to adapt to the present. Romney’s agenda was the antithesis of almost everything libertarians and small-government conservatives support. Republicans that are concerned primarily with winning elections can’t be pleased by the idea of a Romney return, since he represented everything most non-Republicans loathe about the party between his corporate business background, his condescending attitude towards working-class and poor Americans, and his outdated economic agenda. He topped that off with a foreign policy worldview that was by turns ignorant and frightening. His supporters have desperately been trying to rehabilitate Romney’s foreign policy over the last two years without success, but nothing would be worse for the GOP’s foreign policy than to accept the false notion that “Romney was right” about anything in 2012.
Finally, it doesn’t make any sense for Romney to do this. He is a terrible politician and he isn’t well-suited for what presidential campaigning requires. There must be things that he would rather spend him time and energy on than mounting a third failed bid, and he has no good reason to undergo the scrutiny and mockery that he would inevitably face if he ran again.
Suderman piles on:
[T]he case for Romney in 2016 is rather like the case for Romney in 2012: Romney, who was in the GOP primary fray in 2008 as well, would still like to be president, there are some party bigwigs who see him as their best shot, and some campaign professionals would like to cash in on yet another sure-to-be-pricey run. That’s not an argument for why Romney should run. It’s an argument for why he shouldn’t.
A reluctant Drum takes the bait:
[A]s long as we’re supposedly taking this seriously, let’s put on our analytical hats and ask: could Romney beat Hillary Clinton if they both ran? On the plus side, Hillary’s not as good a campaigner as Barack Obama and 2016 is likely to be a Republican-friendly year after eight years of Democratic rule. On the minus side, Romney has already run twice, and the American public isn’t usually very kind to second chances in political life, let alone third chances. Plus—and this is the real killer—Romney still has all the problems he had in 2012. In the public eye, he remains the 47 percent guy who seems more like the Romneytron 3000 than a real human being.
Still, snark aside, if you put all this together I guess it means Romney really would have a shot at winning if he ran. We still live in a 50-50 nation, after all, and for the foreseeable future I suspect that pretty much every presidential election is going to be fairly close. And Romney certainly has a decent chance of winning the Republican nomination, since he’d be competing against pretty much the same clown show as last time.
Beutler argues that Republicans could do worse than Romney:
Conservatives can be forgiven for being sick of Romney and wanting fresh blood. But they should hope (perhaps quietly hope) that someone like Romney throws his hat in fairly soon. Otherwise they’ll be stuck with a candidate who carries all the baggage of the congressional party, and a down-ballot catastrophe. A Romney-ite would have a hard time beating Hillary Clinton, but a much better chance than any of the conservatives who have all but declared their candidacies already.
Looking to history, Kilgore wishes Mitt luck:
Three losing major-party nominees have managed to win a second nomination the next cycle: William Jennings Bryan (1896-1900), Thomas Dewey (1944-48) and Adlai Stevenson (1952-56). Bryan and Stevenson were beloved figures among their party’s activists. And so we come to the obvious analog to Mitt, Tom Dewey. Like Romney, he ran unsuccessfully for the presidential nomination the first time out (in 1940), and lost to an incumbent president second time out. His 1948 campaign was a struggle, as he lost a couple of primaries to Harold Stassen (don’t laugh—Stassen was a real force that year) and only overcame Stassen and Robert Taft on the third ballot at the convention. Dewey did, however, have something going for him in 1948 that Mitt could not match: he won landslide re-election as governor of New York in 1946.
The rest, of course, is well-known history, as Dewey managed to lose what was considered a huge lead over Harry Truman, whose Democratic Party had fractured to the right (via Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat campaign) and the left (with Henry Wallace running on the Progressive ticket).
The Dish 