There has been a debate as to whether Mitt Romney really wanted to win the Presidency. In an interview for an upcoming book, Romney admitted that he almost dropped out of the race. His reasoning was that he could not win the election. This explains his lackadaisical attitude towards the race and why he did not fight back until October 3rd.
Mitt Romney officially announced his candidacy for president in June 2011. But during the spring of that year, Romney considered scrapping his campaign altogether, as detailed in a soon-to-be-released book about the 2012 presidential campaign by The Washington Post’s Dan Balz.
Then in the exploratory committee phase of his campaign, Romney was preparing on a May morning to deliver a speech in Michigan to defend the health care plan he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts and attack President Obama’s federal health care measure. The Wall Street Journal released a scathing op-ed that same day slamming the Republican over his Massachusetts plan.
Romney’s eldest son Tagg got a message from his father early that morning, he told Balz. “I’m going to tell them I’m out,” Tagg Romney recalled his father telling him. “He said there’s no path to win the nomination.”
Romney confirmed after the election that he called his son one morning to tell him he thought he wasn’t going to run. “I recognized that by virtue of the realities of my circumstances, there were some drawbacks to my candidacy for a lot of Republican voters,” he told Balz in January. “One, because I had a health care plan in Massachusetts that had been copied in some respects by the president, that I would be tainted by that feature. I also realized that being a person of wealth, I would be pilloried by the president as someone who, if you use the term of the day, was in the 1 percent.”
I was not a fan of Romney until he picked Paul Ryan and revealed his true Eisenhower Republican ideology until the first debate October 3rd. During that Spring and Summer, Romney was just a punching bag and did not respond to any of Obama’s attacks. This interview and seeing the way he ran his campaign, convinced me his heart was really not in it. Mitt’s attitude was that if he won, great, but if he lost no big deal. He wasted Millions of voters times and hopes.
Could anyone have beaten Obama in 2012, probably not. But the GOP should have at least ran a candidate committed to winning and one that at least put up a fight. I lost any respect for Mitt Romney reading this. If he knew he could not win, he should not have run for President.
Tags: Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America, Dan Balz
