Free Republic

Mitt Romney can still draw a crowd. Some top supporters and donors from the former Massachusetts governor's two presidential campaigns are gathering starting Thursday for Romney's retreat in Park City, Utah. They'll be joined by a bunch of political leaders who may hope to follow in Romney's footsteps by winning the Republican presidential nomination. This is the third year in a row that Romney has hosted the event, which is being held at the upscale Stein Ericksen Lodge at the Deer Valley Resort. The first came came during the 2012 presidential campaign as the then-GOP nominee was facing off against...

Mitt Romney is on the hunt for a vice presidential candidate, and if his years running Bain Capital are any indication, he might be looking for a version of himself. In his roughly 25 years at Bain, Romney tended to hire mini-Mitts — smart, ambitious, clean-cut and a little awkward, according to those who dealt closely with the men. Romney built the private equity firm, a spinoff of the consulting firm Bain & Co., from the ground up in the mid-1980s, bringing on several people who would help him turn it into an investment giant. “First-rate brain power, first-rate analytical...

Mitt Romney to roll up delegates in 5 GOP primaries [Milt predicts total win] David Lightman and Erika Bolstad ASTON, Pa. — "Mitt Romney is expected to win all five Republican presidential primaries Tuesday, but Pennsylvania and Connecticut will be watched closely for signs that he could headed for trouble in those states in November. A weaker-than-expected showing in Pennsylvania against Rick Santorum, who represented the state in the U.S. Senate from 1995 to 2007, would raise fresh questions about Romney’s appeal in a general-election swing state. ... Connecticut also will offer some clues about Romney’s November prospects there. The...

Unto the manor born, as they say: Romney’s speech was billed by his advisers as his closing argument before the GOP nomination fight kicks off in earnest with the Iowa caucuses on January 3. But you would be forgiven for thinking it sounded more like the opening salvo in a general election. Romney drew no explicit or, really, implicit contrasts with any of his Republican rivals, training his fire exclusively on the Democrat in the Oval Office. His focus reflected a strategy from which his campaign has rarely deviated all year long. But it was also born of a confidence...

Mitt Romney, making a direct appeal to middle class voters, said this morning that he would be a president who would protect average Americans – a statement that is sure to be challenged by Democrats and will become a major theme in the general election if Romney wins the nomination. “The people who have been hurt in the Obama economy are not the wealthy, the wealthy are doing just fine,” Romney said this morning on Fox News Sunday. “The people that have been hurt are people in the middle class.” In a wide-ranging interview with Chris Wallace – his first...

An Ohio Republican Party official sent over results from the party's presidential straw poll in a proving-ground swing state, which showed Mitt Romney the clear winner. Romney, who made the Ames Straw Poll his Holy Grail in 2007 but is bypassing Ames, Florida's Presidency V and all other such contests this cycle, won handily with 25 percent. Tim Pawlenty, who is fighting his own war for Ames, scored second place, with 16 percent. But Pawlenty was bunched with the third- and fourth-place finishers, Michele Bachmann (15 percent) candidate Rick Perry (14 percent). Perry is especially noteworthy, since he has yet...

Potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, looking to bolster his foreign policy credentials, is on a Mideast swing that included a visit to Afghanistan on Sunday. Romney senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said Romney met the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus. Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 only to lose to John McCain. He has shown multiple signs of planning to seek his party's nomination again for the right to oppose Democratic President Barack Obama in 2012. Romney could be among as many as a dozen Republicans seeking the...

Today I endorsed Susana Martinez for governor of New Mexico - Mitt Romney Better late than never I guess...Welcome Mitt http://www.freestrongamerica.com/press/item/release_mitt_romney_announces_new_mexico_endorsements

"As a band of noisy nurses derided her as "Queen Meg," Republican gubernatorial front-runner Meg Whitman brought a quartet of GOP heavy-hitters to the Peninsula on Friday night to raise a half-million dollars for her candidacy. U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Secretary of State George Shultz praised the former eBay CEO as a smart and pragmatic woman who would keep California from plunging over a cliff. "She can get the job done," said Shultz, now a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution."

t’s page 258 – and suddenly we are back in Campaign Mode. The transition is very abrupt. On pages 256, Romney is describing an interesting program he advocated in Massachusetts: “a Parental Preparation Program for every underperforming school district. In order for parents in these districts to enroll their children in public school, the parents would have been required to attend classes themselves, where they would learn about the value of education as well as ways in which they could support their children’s educational experience.” On p. 257, a funny story about Romney’s business career, about his unsuccessful attempt to...

SALT LAKE CITY — Mitt Romney brought his book tour Saturday back to the city where he led the 2002 Winter Olympics, telling an enthusiastic audience he could decide by Christmas whether to run again for president. "That's not a decision we've made at this point," Romney told a 12-year-old boy from Bluffdale who said he was "asking a question that a lot of people are wondering and that's, 'Are you going to run for president?' " The cheers the question received were among the loudest during Romney's hour-long appearance at the Salt Palace as part of his national tour for...