First, I don't believe that. There certainly is no other candidate, or potential candidate that comes close to his cognitive ability.
Second, those that didn't run probably didn't because of the skeletons in their closets (and this was likely Thompson's problem too)
Romney would have gone NOWHERE without his money. Absolutely nowhere. He outspent everybody combined on the GOP side and still couldn’t win. He was not a heavyweight candidate. He benefited from the weak GOP field as much as McCain or Huckabee. None of them are top-tier candidates, in my opinion.
I thought Jeb Bush should have run in 2008. Too bad his brother messed things up so badly as to make it almost impossible for that to happen. The idea of Fred Thompson sounded better than the actual thing. I still respect the record that Fred put together in the Senate, though. He just didn’t catch fire at all. Frist was taken out long ago. There really aren’t any other heavyweights that I could think of as possibilities.
“Second, those that didn’t run probably didn’t because of the skeletons in their closets (and this was likely Thompson’s problem too)”
I think that a lot of people looked at Romney’s treasure chest and didn’t see a way to challenge it, as it was, his spending 40 to 50 million dollars of his own money did buy up a lot of real estate, it couldn’t purchase him the gold medal but it did buy him the bronze.
Try to imagine how his campaign would have looked without his ability to pay his way out of the dead spots during the campaign.