I’m with Charles Pierce on this. It’s not about want, contrary to what Tagg Romney said about his father in an interview with the Boston Globe.
… “He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. 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…(Willard) is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them. He loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.”
Now, ever since this quote hit the papers, young Tagg has been the subject of much mockery and ridicule, and suggestions that he join that nice Mr. Aesop in the Produce section, over by the grapes. It has been hinted that Tagg has the same largely accidental relationship with the truth that his father so vividly demonstrated over the five years in which he pursued the job he really didn’t want anyway. I choose to believe Tagg Romney entirely. Willard Romney didn’t want to be president. Willard Romney expected to be president, and that was his real undoing. …Charles Pierce, Daily Politics
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Romney, of course, figured that the damn Democrats had done something to win that Republicans would never stoop to: the Dems bribed people to vote for them: “What the president, president’s campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote…”, according to Romney.
As you and I know, Republicans never use money or the promise of money to get power. Just too much integrity or something, right?
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But there are those who noticed the great “ground game” the Obama campaign put together, just as the campaign had done for the 2008 election.
In the coming months, Romney, ever the data-driven analyst, plans to contemplate how his political life came to an end, and what the party should do next, according to his son Tagg. The fight for the ideological soul of the party will play out for months. But recommendations are already pouring in for the party to create a ground-game infrastructure long before a nominee is selected, to catch up to the Democratic advantage in high-tech turnout operations, and to find ways to make the party more inclusive for minorities and women.
Romney himself will make the case to the party for many such changes, according to Tagg.
“Having been through it, you know so much more than when you haven’t,” Tagg said. ...Boston Globe
Maybe, maybe not, Tagg. Your father didn’t show a whole lot of “knowing” during the long stretch of campaigning. Actually he came across as something of a numbnuts, spaced out. Maybe that’s because he had to spend so much time and effort hiding stuff…