Free Republic

Mitt Romney said Friday he will not make an 11th-hour presidential run to try to stop Donald Trump from winning the Republican nomination, the day after sharply attacking the real estate mogul's candidacy. "I won't run for president," Romney told host Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today" show. Lauer asked the 2012 GOP presidential nominee three times about his 2016 ambitions, pressing for an "unambiguous" response after Romney appeared to leave the door to a bid slightly open.

Mitt Romney is back, offering to share the sage political wisdom that won him the White House in 2012. Oh, wait. President Obama beat him — despite a sagging economy and terrible approval ratings. Indeed, Obama became the first guy ever to win a second term in the White House despite drawing fewer votes than the first time round. More than 3 million fewer — while Mitt added only 1 million to John McCain’s disastrous 2008 total.

A MSNBC correspondent on Tuesday decided to do a live report from a gun range. As one could guess, it didn’t go well. Reporter Kerry Sanders pointed at the gun-rights fans and began, "There are lots of folks here who believe that Second Amendment in this country is under attack.” Seconds later, the shooting started. The Second Amendment afficionados drowned Sanders out. He sounded like this: “A short distance away later today [BLAM] Donald Trump [BLAM] — protect the Second Amendment.” He soldiered on, shifting to other topics. But it came across as this: “Talking about [BLAM] Ted Cruz has...

Karl Rove believes there is still time for Republicans who don't want Donald Trump to be the 2016 GOP nominee to get behind a candidate - but it's running out. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal out Wednesday night, the former senior adviser to President George W. Bush took stock of Trump's recent string of victories. -snip- Before the op-ed was published on Wednesday, Trump was already going after Rove on his favorite medium of attack. "Big defeat last night in Nevada for Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. @KarlRove on @FoxNews is working hard to belittle my victory....

Jeb Bush and key members of his national finance team addressed top donors on Wednesday in a conciliatory conference call in which he expressed dismay over the outcome of the race. "I'm sorry that it didn't turn out the way that I intended when I launched the campaign," Bush said. The former Florida governor said he saw a path to win the nomination running as a "reform-minded conservative," but acknowledged that wasn't what the electorate was looking for in 2016. -snip- Also addressing donors on Wednesday's conference call were Bush national finance chairman Woody Johnson, who owns the New York...

A tired-sounding Jeb Bush apologized to his major financial backers in a brief conference call on Wednesday afternoon, saying he never expected his presidential campaign to end so early, and in such disappointment. "I'm sorry that it didn't turn out the way that I intended," Mr. Bush said, according to an audio recording of the call. "When I launched the campaign in front of three or four thousand people in Miami, I anticipated a different result."

On what turned out to be the last full day of Jeb Bush's presidential campaign, a man with a distinctively English accent stood to ask him a question. "Can you vote?" Bush interrupted with amusement. "I don't think so," the man responded. "I've had the privilege of reporting for the Times of London - " "Oh, you're a reporter, too!" Bush cut in again. (The man was a columnist.) And then, there in Greenville, South Carolina, Bush said something that left no doubt he was still Miami Jeb: "This is going from Guatemala to Guate-peor!" I laughed, but few others...

The Last Days with Jeb Bush: "Like a Funeral" (Video) NBC News Campaign Embed Jordan Frasier has been following the Bush campaign for seven months.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush dropped out of the Republican presidential primary two days ago, prompting campaign officials and supporters to look for a scapegoat for the debacle. They may have settled on a pricey one, indeed. Political strategist Mike Murphy, head of the pro-Bush super PAC Right to Rise USA, is under fire for allegedly giving himself a salary and compensation package that totals $14 million. "He made minimum of $14 million," a Bush campaign bundler told CNN.

When Donald Trump pointed the finger at Jeb Bush at the last debate and claimed he's got nothing to show for the millions his campaign has spent, he wasn't kidding. A review of how Bush and his allies spent over $125 million in his failed campaign shows the main thing to come out of it was a lot of consultants and local TV stations made a lot of money. A Washington Post review of Bush spending shows more than 95 percent of the advertising budget - from his campaign and the separate super PAC, Right to Rise - went to...

Mirroring the donor-backlash against Karl Rove after his American Crossroad/Crossroads GPS super PACs raised upwards of $300 million and produced a dismal 2012 success rate, Mike Murphy, the man in charge of the Jeb Bush Right to Rise USA super PAC is now in the crosshairs. Right to Rise's dismal results became painfully obvious when Bush dropped out of the race Saturday night after only three primary contests. CNN reports that donors are not happy: In the armchair quarterbacking following Bush's departure from the race Saturday night, Murphy is facing countless questions about the efficacy of the PAC spending tens...

One byproduct of Jeb Bush's long, agonizing slide out of the 2016 presidential race is that, by the time he finally packed it in this weekend, plenty of postmortems had almost certainly been prewritten. -snip- as donor grumbling became loud enough to penetrate even the most insular campaign, the guy handling all of Jeb's money, Right to Rise super-pac director and alleged strategic genius Mike Murphy, granted an unusual two-part interview to Bloomberg's Sasha Issenberg. It was designed to shame into silence anyone who'd been stupid enough to pay attention to anything that had happened thus far. Murphy described Donald...

After disappointing finishes in presidential nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Jeb Bush suspended his campaign for president Saturday night. It was the end of a run that had seemed doomed for months: countless gaffes, merciless attacks from the likes of Donald Trump, seemingly limitless spending from a superPAC he couldn't control with horrible returns from those investments and perhaps above all, a candidate who seemed uncomfortable on the trail at best, and at worst, frustrated and unhappy. Already, the post-mortems are almost writing themselves.

With apologies to Winston Churchill, the tale of the Jeb Bush campaign might be summarized as "Never before have so few spent so much to achieve so little." -snip- Although the vast majority of this money - more than $100 million - went to purchase air time on local television stations, the advertising barrage probably generated several million dollars in consulting fees and commissions Why did Bush spend so much on ads, especially given how little it seemed to help his ill-fated campaign? One reason may be because the super PAC Right to Rise was run by Mike Murphy, a...

One Bush bundler told CNN's Dana Bash that when it came to Murphy, "strong knives are out." "He made minimum of $14 million," the bundler said, requesting anonymity to speak freely about campaign strategy. The details of Murphy's compensation package at Right to Rise are not publicly known.

Jeb Bush launched his presidential campaign's exploratory committee on December 16, 2014, the presumptive Republican nominee. He ended his campaign on February 20, 2016, a broken man. Bush's campaign (and the pro-Jeb super PAC Right to Rise) spent over $100 million on his campaign. He won no states. And for the last several months, he's been in the news mostly for all the wrong reasons: desperate donors, misspent money, jokes-that-aren't-really jokes. He's been a loser for almost as long as he was a presumptive winner. The slow, torturous twilight of Jeb's campaign offers a couple of lessons. For one thing,...

I'm feeling bad for Jeb Bush. I've never been a supporter of a third Bush presidency-having endured the highs and lows of the second up close-but I can't help but think about this coming Easter or Thanksgiving, or the next event when the whole Bush family is gathered around in one place. The Bushes may come across as kindly, low-key aristocrats. But have no doubt: They are ruthless competitors. When I worked for President George W. Bush, he was racing Karl Rove to see who could read the most books in a calendar year. His father used to challenge people...

Jeb Bush always remained optimistic. From the beginning of his candidacy last June, he pledged to run with "joy" and adopted a tortoise-and-the-hare strategy, earnestly believing that he would prevail in the end despite a crowded field of candidates. Even as his chances became grim over the past eight months, he started handing out tiny toy turtles from his pockets to children, telling them that "slow and steady wins the race." But in 2016, "slow and steady" was the opposite of what the country wanted. There's plenty of blame to go around for Bush's fall, but the central theme is...

For Jeb Bush's loyalists, the first moment of palpable panic - and there would be more than they ever expected in the months to come - built over four days last May when their not-yet-presidential candidate struggled repeatedly to utter a one-word answer - No - to an utterly predictable question: Should the U.S. have invaded Iraq? -snip- From the start, the campaign hired extensively and paid handsomely. That money, though, couldn't come from Right to Rise, which had pulled off a record $103 million haul in six months. The campaign needed to raise the cash itself. It couldn't keep...

For Jeb Bush's campaign, August was a cruel month. Donald Trump's attacks on the former Florida governor as a "low-energy" politician were beginning to stick, and the two were bickering over immigration. The issue before the Bush team was what to do about it. -snip- Mike Murphy, the chief strategist for Bush's super PAC, Right to Rise, explained what had happened this way on Sunday. "Our theory was to dominate the establishment lane into the actual voting primaries," he said. "That was the strategy, and it did not work. I think it was the right strategy for Jeb. The problem...