Mitt Romney Tells Donors He’s Actively Considering Running Again

HotAir.com:

Some children want to be cowboys, astronauts, or pro athletes. I wanted to be conservative America’s premiere “Romney 2016?” trollblogger.

Live your dreams, my friends.

It may not be only the right flank of the Republican party that’s crowded in 2016. Mitt Romney is more open to a third presidential bid than ever before, according to friends and top donors of the former Massachusetts governor, which means there might be a bloody battle on the establishment side of the field as well.

“The governor is preserving his options — that’s the message I’ve gotten from Boston,” says Robert O’Brien, a Los Angeles lawyer who served as a foreign-policy adviser on Romney’s 2012 campaign. When I spoke with O’Brien in December, he told me that Romney was not considering a 2016 run but that “circumstances could change.”

In Romney world, the thinking about a 2016 bid has ratcheted up, and his top donors, most of whom remain quite loyal, have gotten the signal. O’Brien tells me that the shift in his own language reflects what he’s hearing from Romney and his team in Boston, which right now consists only of Spencer Zwick, who served as finance director on both of Romney’s presidential campaigns, and Zwick’s deputy, Matt Waldrip. Both Zwick and Waldrip work with Romney’s eldest son, Tagg, at the Boston-based private-equity firm Solamere Capital. O’Brien has spoken with a number of key donors who have relayed their hope the governor will run; they are sending him the message, either directly or through former staffers, that they want him in the race.

It’s not gonna happen. Even if, against all odds, Christie sobers up from his football-induced euphoria and realizes that he’s going nowhere in the primaries, especially now that Bush is in the race, there’s no way Romney will get in and risk splitting the establishment/centrist vote with Jeb. For him to do it, you’d need first to eliminate that risk by having the entire right side of the field implode — Rubio falters because of amnesty, Rand Paul falters because of foreign policy, Cruz falters because of his role in the shutdown, etc etc etc. Even then, someone like Jindal or Walker would probably pick up the disaffected conservative votes, not Jeb. Why would Romney sabotage a fellow establishmentarian like Bush and risk handing the nomination to a more right-wing candidate like Jindal or Walker by jumping in at that point and dividing the center? Even if every candidate on the right faded and Jeb raced out to an enormous, seemingly prohibitive lead, paint me a picture where the donor class would encourage Romney to disrupt Bush’s momentum by joining the race himself. The people who bankrolled Mitt three years ago and who’ll be bankrolling Jeb now may have mild preferences for one or the other of them, but ultimately they don’t much care which gets the nomination so long as a conservative doesn’t. Give me a scenario in which that calculus changes and suddenly there’s support in the monied center of the party for the idea that Jeb Bush himself must be stopped and there’s only one man to do it.

It’s not happening. But Bush, prudently, is taking no chances. Even before I encountered the phrase in the excerpt below, my thought upon reading the opening was “shock and awe.”

Jeb Bush’s allies are setting a fundraising goal of $100 million in the first three months of this year—including a whopping $25 million haul in Florida—in an effort to winnow the potential Republican presidential primary field with an audacious display of financial strength.

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