Free Republic

Mitt Romney didn't want to be president, anyway. That's what Tagg Romney, Mitt's oldest son, told the Boston Globe for its big post-mortem on his father's failed presidential bid published on Sunday. “He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life," Tagg Romney told the paper. "He had no desire to ... run. If he could have found someone else to take his place ... he would have been ecstatic to step aside.

Mitt Romney’s son says that his defeated dad never actually wanted the top job and he was reluctantly convinced to run for president. “He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to… run,” the eldest Romney son Tagg said in an interview with the Boston Globe. “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...

SAN DIEGO — The man who planned to be president wakes up each morning now without a plan. Mitt Romney looks out the windows of his beach house here in La Jolla...He devours news from 2,600 miles away in Washington about the "fiscal cliff" negotiations, shaking his head and wondering what if. Gone are the minute-by-minute schedules and the swarm of Secret Service agents. There's no aide to make his peanut butter and honey sandwiches. Romney hangs around the house, sometimes alone, pecking away at his iPad and emailing his CEO buddies, who've been swooping in and out of La...

GOP ready to forget Romney and embrace Rep. Ryan on MedicareBy Sam Baker and Elise Viebeck - 12/02/12 02:45 PM ET Mitt Romney’s Medicare budget might be fading away just as quickly as Romney himself. During the campaign, candidate Romney repeatedly hammered President Obama for cutting $716 billion from Medicare as part of his signature healthcare law. Romney pledged to repeal those cuts in a break from his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Ryan, the House Budget Committee Chairman, had preserved Obama’s Medicare cuts in two consecutive budget proposals that repealed the rest of the Affordable Care Act. Ryan...

President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney talks in the Oval Office following their lunch. Bitter campaign foes just weeks ago, President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney met for lunch at the White House on Thursday, sitting down with an eye on overlapping interests rather than the sharp differences that defined their presidential contest. In their first meeting since the election, Obama and the Republican nominee met in the White House's private dining room, fulfilling a promise Obama made in his victory speech the night of Nov. 6. Romney arrived at the White House early Thursday afternoon in...

Stuart Stevens was the chief strategist for the Romney presidential campaign. Over the years, one of the more troubling characteristics of the Democratic Party and the left in general has been a shortage of loyalty and an abundance of self-loathing. It would be a shame if we Republicans took a narrow presidential loss as a signal that those are traits we should emulate. I appreciate that Mitt Romney was never a favorite of D.C.’s green-room crowd or, frankly, of many politicians. That’s why, a year ago, so few of those people thought that he would win the Republican nomination. But...

Barack Obama did not win the election. Mitt Romney and the Republicans lost it. Obama has no mandate. None whatsoever. Here's why: Obama received roughly 7 million fewer votes in 2012 than in 2008. He was perceived to be something much less than he had portrayed himself. No matter what the Democrats did, they could not turn out anything like the 69.5 million votes they got in 2008. The election was handed to Romney on a silver platter, but his campaign advisers — and a couple of Republican Senate candidates — wrecked his chances. Let's give the Republicans some credit....