Plan B Forum

No one wanted to be president less than Mitt Romney, his son says in an interview that raises new questions about the candidacy of the losing Republican nominee.

In an interview with the Boston Globe examining what went wrong with the Romney campaign, his eldest son Tagg explains his father had been a reluctant candidate from the start.

He wanted to be president less than anyone I've met in my life. He had no desire ... to run.
After failing to win the 2008 Republican nomination, Romney told his family he would not run again and had to be persuaded to enter the 2012 White House race by his wife Ann and son Tagg.

"He wanted to be president less than anyone I've met in my life. He had no desire ... to run," Tagg Romney said. "If he could have found someone else to take his place ... he would have been ecstatic to step aside."

Mitt Romney "is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them. He loves his country, but he doesn't love the attention," his son said.

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and multi-billionaire businessman, has been widely criticised for blaming his loss in the November 6 election on President Barack Obama's "gifts" to Latinos, women and the poor.

"What the president's campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote," Romney said during a call with campaign donors in mid-November that represented his first public reaction to his election loss.

The Globe story sought to look beyond that narrative and examine what really went wrong.

It focused on the fact that Romney was unhappy that one of his most trusted advisers, Mike Murphy - the architect of his successful 2002 run for governor of Massachusetts - did not join the campaign.

Instead, the campaign settled on Stuart Stevens, who had worked on Romney's 2008 presidential bid.

The Globe story also highlights the decision to downplay Romney's biography in favour of going after Obama and the flagging US economy.

Campaign strategists feared that highlighting Romney's biography would open the Mormon candidate up more to personal attacks that he was wealthy, out-of-touch and belonged to a minority faith.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/romney-didn ... z2FvFGowci

Obama, July 13: There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.