I missed this report from before Christmas in the Boston Globe and I wish I missed it altogether. Romney’s son Tagg, one of Romney’s closest campaign advisers, says his father did not really want to become president.
“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to . . . run,” said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.”
My wife rose early on several cold mornings and stood along Georgetown Pike in Great Falls, Virginia, waving a “Women for Romney” sign. We took weekend days and went door to door for him. After the election our four-year-old daughter Gigi kept her mother from taking off her “Romney for President” bumper sticker “so people will know we still love Womney (sic).”
Romney had all of us work so hard, spending billions of hours and billions of dollars and he didn’t really want it?
If this is true, do we still love Womney? Did we ever?
January 4th, 2013 | 10:18 am
Not sure I believe this round of dubious humility. He ran aggressivly in 2008 and spent the next 4 years making it clear he was laying the groundwork for another run. If he really didn’t want the job, if he really wanted some other Republican to do it why didn’t he spend that time trying to help some other Republican he felt was worthy of the position? What does it say about the GOP that he is claiming not only was he lukewarm about the run but that he also felt there were NO other Republicans worthy of Presidential consideration even though it felt like at ten dozen Republicans had 15 minutes as ‘front runner’ over the last 4 year?
January 4th, 2013 | 10:28 am
It’s said those who are best for powerful positions are those who don’t want them. Many of the saints have been like this. It makes me think Romney was even better suited to the presidency.
January 4th, 2013 | 11:55 am
It is just nonsense to believe that Romney didn’t want to be president. As a very “private person” (as we say), he may have been ambivalent about taking on such a public role, but clearly no matter how ambivalent he was, he wanted to be president. In one of the accounts, I read someone saying something like, “I understand what he (Romney’s son) is saying, but Romney did want to be president.”
January 4th, 2013 | 12:19 pm
Assuming Tagg is right, I agree with Ed. I want a president who doesn’t really want to be president. Probably we should all remain agnostic about whether Romney really wanted it or not.
January 4th, 2013 | 12:58 pm
Failing to close out various off shore accounts between 2008 and 12 is one indication that the Presidency wasn’t exactly Number One for him. Would you seriously hire a person for any job he didn’t really want? Not wanting it enough gave us the alternative, are we all down with that?
January 4th, 2013 | 1:04 pm
OK let’s say we should want a President who doesn’t want to be President. What then shall we make of a man who doesn’t want to be President but spends nearly a decade acting just like a man who really wants to be President? Compared to someone who is willing to say they want to be President I’m not sure that’s 2nd best by a long shot.
BTW, can anyone name a President who ever said he actually wanted to be President? I suspect many if not all of them claimed it was a job they didn’t want. If that’s the mark of a saint then the US has been quite blessed with so many saintly Presidents and candidates for President!
January 4th, 2013 | 1:47 pm
Question: “Can anyone name a President who ever said he actually wanted to be President?”
Answer: Bill Clinton.
January 4th, 2013 | 3:56 pm
How do you run for president and not want to be president?
January 4th, 2013 | 5:36 pm
Jim, I think Ted Kennedy did that in 1980. He seemed to be running on family inertia or something. He sure didn’t seem to know why he was in the race.
January 4th, 2013 | 5:59 pm
Having read this and other similar reports, my take on Romney has evolved.
Ask oneself, what was Romney’s main area of experience? Leveraged buyouts. Taking over a failing entity in an attempt to turn it around.
In 2007, 2008 he may have seen the USA as a “target”, an entity in need of help. As 2009, 2010, even 2011 passed by, he may have still thought so.
But come 2012, maybe Romney began to wonder what many of us think: The USA is GONE.
He hedged by keeping those off shore bank accounts.
I wonder now how many passports he has in his pocket?
January 4th, 2013 | 6:31 pm
Some time ago I came to the conclusion that considerations of whether or not one loves or even likes a a person in pubic life really has no proper place in deciding whether or not to vote for or against that person. For one thing we must realize that we can only have the most superficial knoweldge of people in public life, especially in view of the fact that much of their discourse has been crafted by others. What is more both more important and harder to face is that while a person for whose external presentations repulse us might have all of the character traits necessary to to do the right thing we might easily warm up to a handsome and charming sociopath. Even if Ol’ Mitt’s son’s claim were true and I’d known it ahead of time, I would still have had to vote for him on multiple grounds. When you do not invest emotion in people you do not know they cannot disappoint you too greatly. In such cases we learn from our misjudgements. In God we trust; all others pay cash.
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