 |  | | Jan. 21, 2015 |  | No. 155 | | By Jonathan V. Last | |  |  |  | | | | COLD OPEN |  | | | Can we all agree to ignore last night's State of the Union address? Surely you were fed up with SOTU talk before the president even arrived at the Capitol. Good. Me too.
So let's get to the topic that's been like a splinter in my brain for the last 25 months: Romney 2016!
Having followed Romney around in both 2008 and 2012, I was always convinced that the odds of him running in 2016 were high. For one thing, the man has a decades-long history of running for office, over and over, even after voters reject him. He's a career politician without a "career" in politics. (He was an active governor of Massachusetts just long enough to build Romneycare, and after that he spent the rest of his term preparing for his first presidential bid.) He has never in life-not once-shown a willingness to take "no" for an answer from the electorate. Running for office is what he does.
The other thing that struck me was that Romney really wanted to be president. A lot. The reasons for this desire weren't immediately obvious. He has-clearly-very few deeply-held political convictions. He has-again, clearly-no Big Ideas about ways in which he wants to lead the country. The sense I always got (and this might be incorrect-I'm not his rabbi) was that Mitt Romney wanted to be president because he wanted to be president. And when the impulse to run is yoked to personal ambition and removed from politics, philosophy, or the world ideas-well, that sort of yearning dies hard. Which is why, in January of 2012, I started saying that if Romney wasn't elected president in that cycle, I expected he would try again in 2016.
Another reason I'd become more, rather than less, convinced that Romney 2016 would happen is that the topography of next year's race has become encouraging for him. He does very well on all of the buyer's remorse polls showing that people wish he'd been elected president. He's been proved substantively-and decisively-correct on the foreign policy portion of that campaign-Russia, Libya, Syria, and all the rest. And if Hillary Clinton winds up as the Democratic nominee, then the most obvious criticism of a Romney 2016 campaign-that it's time to look forward, not backward-becomes harder for Democrats to make.
If you're Mitt Romney and you're studying the 2016 cycle with an eye to possibly running, then you might think that the stars are aligning just for you.
In a way, even Jeb Bush's early declaration probably acted to nudge Romney closer to running. If the Republican field had remained amorphous, Romney might have moved more slowly in making a decision-and with all decision points, the longer you wait, the more you inherently favor the status quo. But Bush jumped, the field suddenly began to gel, and that provided an impetus for Romney to make a decision sooner, rather than later.
And on top of all that, as a political commodity Bush was genetically engineered to entice Romney to enter. Like Romney, Bush has no obvious political or philosophical raison d'être for running-he's an answer to a question no one is asking. Like Romney, he's a creature of the establishment. And unlike any other possible candidate for the Republican nomination, Bush is the one guy who can't argue that Romney is "the past." Because Bush is from a political vintage even older than Romney's.
Again, if you're Mitt Romney looking at the race, Jeb Bush charts as a more ideologically exposed, less relevant version of yourself. Why wouldn't you challenge him?
As always, nothing is for sure until it happens. Romney could still back away from the race. But at this point, I'd put the odds at better-than-even that he runs.
And I'll tell you why I'm excited about the prospect down below. | | | | LOOKING BACK | | | | | "We were sitting in a clearing in the brush that was one of the converts' meeting places. I imagined that Jesus and his disciples must have prayed in places like this, maybe even here. An Israeli Defense Forces patrol passing on the nearby road stopped to see what was going on. The missionary explained to the officer in charge, who nodded and went on his way.
"'My brother and I converted because we knew we needed love in our lives,' the Palestinian continued. 'I think that Jesus is going to bless the Palestinian people by spreading his gospel of love here.'
"Perhaps someday, but for now the Christians of the Middle East are facing danger. Both recent converts and ancient congregations-the Assyrians in Iraq, the Copts in Egypt, Lebanon's Maronite Catholics, and more, long antedating Islam-are under fire. The land where Christianity began is being cleansed of Jesus' followers. It is possible that we will soon see an event without precedent: the end of a living Christian witness in this region after more than 2,000 years."
-Lee Smith, "The Long, Withdrawing Roar" from our January 24, 2011, issue.
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Marc Andreessen vs. Larry Summers on the economics of the future.
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Meet Ben Sherwood, the man who runs ABC. | | | | INSTANT CLASSIC | | | | | "The Muslim community is not to be confused with the terrorists it produces. But left to its own, it probably lacks the means, the inclination and the courage to stand up to the faction, however small, that supports terrorism. In 1995, there were riots among French Muslims after the arrest of Khalid Kelkal of Lyon, who had planted several bombs-in a train station, near a Jewish school, on a high-speed rail track. In 2012, when Mohamed Merah of Toulouse was killed by police after having gunned down soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish elementary-school children, his brother professed himself 'proud,' and his father threatened to file a wrongful-death suit against the government. . . .
"Acts of terrorism can occur without shaking a country to its core. These latest attacks, awful as they were, could be taken in stride if the majority in France felt itself secure. But it does not. Thanks to wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, thousands of young people who share the indignation of the Kouachis and Coulibaly are now battle-hardened and heavily armed.
"France, like Europe more broadly, has been careless for decades. It has not recognized that free countries are for peoples strong enough to defend them. A willingness to join hands and to march in solidarity is a good first response to the awful events of early January. It will not be enough"
-Christopher Caldwell on Europe, immigration, and Islam, January 17, 2015. | | | | THE LAST WORD | | | | | Lots of conservatives seem dismayed by the idea of Romney 2016. (In the media, at least, the most negative reactions seem to have come from people who were firmly in the tank for him the last time around. Weird, right?) But I'm kind of excited by it. As my friend Ben Domenech chortled last September, "Romney 2016 is real and it's spectacular." (A reference to what might be the greatest Seinfeld scene ever.)
Last week a friend emailed me to point out this paragraph, buried in a Boston Globe story, about Romney's embryonic campaign:
Underlying it all is the notion that, in the mind of Romney and his top advisers, the country made a mistake in not electing Romney in 2012. They want to give the country another shot at sending him to the White House.
As my buddy quipped, "I guess the advertisements write themselves: Dear America: You don't need to apologize to Mitt. He already knows you're sorry, and he forgives you. This one time."
Another Romney campaign will produce all sorts of awesomeness. Here, for instance, is a tidbit from a John Dickerson piece last week: "His argument to his former supporters, says one who spoke with him, is that he came very close in the last election against an incumbent president with a good economy."
Which is strange, since you will recall that he based his entire 2012 campaign around the idea of making the election a referendum on Obama's economy. Remember this?
Romney argued that another four years under Obama would mean "$20 trillion in debt, crippling unemployment, stagnant take-home pay, depressed home values and a devastated military." Romney, who donned a suit and used teleprompters, told the crowd that unless the nation changes course on Tuesday "we may be looking at another recession."
If Romney believed that the economy was "good" in 2012, then you have to wonder why he spent a full year trying to convince the country that it wasn't. But like I said, I'm not as wrapped around the axle by Romney this time around. In 2012 he was the establishment heavyweight, and he used his muscle to keep other, better candidates out of the race. If he runs again, he'll be just one entrant in a crowded establishment field that already has Jeb Bush and looks soon to have Chris Christie, too.
In a strange way, a Romney 2016 candidacy might even make it more likely that quality candidates who are currently undecided will get in. His presence dilutes the monetary advantage the establishment candidate(s) will have and helps heighten the contrast between people running with, and without, clear visions for the country. And it really, really helps define which candidates are running for the future, and which are coming from the past.
All of which is why I'm excited for Romney 2016. There's a first time for everything.
I'll see you next week. As always, keep calm and carry on. And remember, you can always email me with tips, thoughts, etc., at editor@weeklystandard.com.
Best,
Jonathan V. Last
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