No! Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I demand a recount.

My favorite part of this Romney 2016 walk-through isn’t that Romney has come to the conclusion–for the second straight cycle–that there’s no one running who could possibly be a better candidate (or president!) than himself. And it isn’t that he considers Jeb Bush a “small time” businessman.

No. It’s that when Romney looks at the 2016 field, the only two people who stand out as “strong presidential material” are . . .

Bob Portman and John Kasich.

Once again, Mitt Romney displays the laser-like intelligence and keen acumen which earned him hundreds of millions of dollars in the private sector.

In which I jump totally in the tank for Mitt.

Galley Friend X sends in the following note:

This paragraph, buried in the middle of a Boston Globe story, captures everything so perfectly:

“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.”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.

I don’t like to pull the “I-followed-these-guys-around-the-primaries-and-I-have-a-good-bead-on-thm” card, but I did spend a lot of time following Mitt Romney around in both 2008 and 2012 and I came away pretty convinced that he was going to run again in 2016.

And it looks like we’re getting closer to this dream becoming a reality. How close? You can tell by Jen Rubin’s Benedict-Arnold freakout from yesterday in which Romney’s most reliable scribe is suddenly all Hey, there–don’t do this! Mitt Romney is a terrible candidate!

As the Comic Book Guy once said, “Oh, that is rich.”

(And by-the-by, what is this “rivalry” between Los Angeles and San Francisco that Rubin talks about? Is that a thing? If so, I’ve never heard of it. A rivalry between L.A. and New York? Sure. But Los Angeles and San Francisco? Two totally different cities with different geographies, different economies, and different identities. Maybe I’m missing something. I suspect that Rubin was just reaching for a way to signal, as inoffensively as possible, that she’s switched tanks. Jeb The Tank! Jeb The Tank!)

A word of caution: Let’s not get too excited here until Romney officially announces. Visions that feel too good to be true usually are.

Exit Question: If you’re Scott Walker or Marco Rubio, would it be smarter to announce ASAP–like, maybe even tomorrow–or to wait until just before Romney makes it official? Obviously, Walker is in a better position to spin up a campaign quickly. And there are definite advantages to waiting. It still is really early. But if you’re going to make a real play to win the nomination as a conservative-fusion candidate, which is the lane Walker and Rubio would be likely to run in, then you may need to start getting to work on the invisible primary stuff right now. That is, if you’ve already made up your mind to run.

Update: I didn’t want to look like I was piling on, but enough people have emailed me about it that I might as well put it down: Rubin’s #1 warning for Mitt 2016 boosters is the following:

Using talking points like “Ronald Reagan ran three times” treats Republicans like dolts. Fellas, Reagan lost in 1976, then won in 1980 and 1984.

Except, of course, that when people talk about Reagan running three times, they mean 1968, 1976, and 1980. Not 1976, 1980, and 1984. Jeb The Tank!

Ben Domenech had a great headline in this morning’s Transom: “Romney 2016 is real and it is spectacular.” That’s based off the steady drip-drip-drip of pieces over the last eight weeks or so plus Byron York’s piece today. A few thoughts:

* I don’t know whether or not I ever blogged about this (turns out I did, obliquely), but throughout the 2012 cycle my working assumption was that Romney was likely to try again in 2016. When I would tell this to various Galley Friends, they dismissed it as more JVL crazy talk. Hey Kobe . . .

* Do I really for real think this is real? Oh yes. I believe that it will be a very short hop for the Romneys to talk themselves into “America needs me/him now.” And the early 2015 polling will show (a) that he does very well retrospectively against Obama and (b) exceptionally well in the GOP primary field, because of his enormous name ID. That could well be enough to nudge him in.

And if Hillary runs, then one of the big problems he faces–he even flip-flopped on not running for president again!–disappears, too, because she has the exact same problem and the media won’t be able to take after him without making her collateral damage. The Precious must be protected at all times.

Plus, he’ll have the money. I suspect that for the GOP donor class Romney remains the dream candidate. If he gets in, he’ll suck up all of the greenback-oxygen very quickly and will make it hard for other candidates to raise a critical mass of dollars.

Plus-plus: What else is he going to do with himself? For a guy who’s “not a career politician” he spends an awful lot of time running around chasing elected office and aping the sort of thing that career politicians do.

* Here’s the swerve: I don’t know that he’d be the worst candidate in the world this time around. He’s so thoroughly vetted that there is nothing voters could possibly learn about him. At this point he might be the platonic ideal of the generic Republican candidate, with very little energizing upside, but zero hidden downside. Every conceivable angle–pro and con–is baked into his cake. If you believe that’s enough to win in 2016, then maybe he’s okay. At the very least, running him as the nominee in 2016 would be, in it’s own weird way, a radical new electoral proposition coming from Republicans. No one has tried it in the modern era and it becomes difficult to predict how it would work.

* Then there’s the question of the field. People have assumed for two years now that the 2016 GOP field won’t be the 2012 clown show, but rather an all-star line-up of awesome. Christie. Walker. Jindal. Rubio. Ryan. Huckabee, maybe. That’s what it looked like 20 months ago.

Then Rubio pushed all-in with a bad immigration bill. The Bridgegate thing hit Christie. Jindal’s in-state approval rating tanked. Ryan looks to prefer the House. Walker is in the fight of his life for reelection. Jeb Bush inserted himself into the conversation. And Rick Perry began rehabilitating himself.

Now the field looks much more like Perry, Cruz, Rand Paul, and, possibly, Jeb. With Ben Carson making noises about getting in. And suddenly the clown show looks like it might be coming back to town.

I posit that it’s possible the Republican field in 2016 could be much weaker than people anticipate.

If that happens–if Walker loses and Christie can’t recover his mojo and Jindal never takes off and Rubio either decides not to go, or can’t escape his immigration problems and Ryan stands pat and Huckabee chooses to keep making money–then there will be a moment of chaos and panic in Republican circles as the party realizes that the line-up they were expecting isn’t going to appear. And in that moment, there will be the opportunity for both a fresh face we haven’t looked at before, and for Romney 5.0.

Exit question: This is a serious question–not me being snarky. If I told you that you had to have either Jeb or Romney 5.0 as the nominee, who would you pick? And I’ll ask the question two ways: (1) For governing ability and (2) For electability purposes.

I’ll hang up and listen to you off the air.

Every once in a while I feel like a piece was written just for me.

Nope. I still can’t figure out why voters have never warmed to Mitt Romney. It’s a mystery!

By all accounts, the past month has been most difficult on Romney’s wife, Ann, who friends said believed up until the end that ascending to the White House was their destiny. They said she has been crying in private and trying to get back to riding her horses.

(1) “Romney says abortion legislation isn’t part of his agenda.”

 “There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” the GOP presidential candidate told The Des Moines Register’s editorial board during a meeting today before his campaign rally at a Van Meter farm.

(2) “Romney’s overly optimistic tax plan.”

I asked a tax policy expert to crunch the numbers on a typical household with an individual filer and deduction amounts. Consider them an evangelical suburbanite at the $100,000 level who has a mortgage, tithes, and has some annual medical expenses. Here’s what comes back:

“If you make $100,000, have a new $300,000 mortgage @ 4 percent, tithe 15 percent, pay $5,000 in state/local taxes, and have $7,500 in qualified medical expenses, you would pay $12,100 in federal income taxes on AGI of $60,500 w/ deductions of $39,500 (assume 20 percent effective rate). Under the Romney plan, you’d pay $13,280 (new effective rate would be 16 percent on AGI of $83,000), an increase of nearly 10 percent.”

Click your heels together three times and say, “There’s always the SCOTUS.”

People are pretty worked up over the moment yesterday when Andrea Saul responded to the latest Obama ad charging that Bain Capital killed a worker’s wife by saying that Romneycare would have saved the unfortunate woman. I understand why conservatives would be upset about this response, I suppose. But I have two genuine, not smart-alecky, questions:

(1) When is the last time you heard what someone on the Romney campaign was saying and thought, “Geez, that’s pretty sharp. Smart insight. He/She is a pro.”

I’ve followed the Romney operation pretty closely and only two people I’ve come across inside the campaign really impressed me. One of them was shunted out the door in reasonably short order. The other one wasn’t brought on until fairly recently.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t smart, impressive people toiling away for Romney. And it’s not to say that staffwork will win or lose the campaign. (My own belief is that once you cross a certain very low threshold for money and organization, the onus for winning a presidential campaign is really on the candidate. Either they have the vision, the magic, and the environment, or they don’t.)

All that said, it is pretty striking how a guy whose primary credential is his businessman’s ability to master an organization has surrounded himself with so many folks who seem to be more valued for something other than ability.

(2) If Romney wins, what do you think the odds really are that he’ll repeal Obamacare? Not waiver it, or starve it, or alter it–but actually go through the bloody fight of full and final repeal?

I don’t know the answer and I’m open to all sorts of arguments on this. But it strikes me that repealing Obamacare will take, under the best of circumstances, a singular focus and drive on the part of the executive. It will require both enormous rhetorical skill to build public support and political skill to cajole Congress. And, more than anything, the administration will have to be willing to endure a blood-letting from Democrats and the media.

Given all of that, and what we’ve seen from Romney and his campaign, do we really believe that, if elected, he’ll repeal Obamacare? Like I said, I don’t know. I’d like to believe it, as, I’m sure, most conservatives would. Because repealing that law is the single most important task for the next president. If he repeals it, he is a success, whatever else follows.

But if not? The great unmentionable in conservative circles right now is this simple question: Would it be better to have another term of Obama and a last-gasp, hail Mary shot at repeal in 2016 than to win the White House in 2012 only to have a Republican president who doesn’t repeal it?

Like I said, I’m not sure. Probably not, is my guess.

As always, it’s hard to defend Romney. Here’s his response to the stupid Newsweek cover:

“They tried that in George Herbert Walker Bush. He was a pretty great President and anything but,” said Romney in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation.

George H.W. Bush was “a pretty great president”? Really? I’d like to see Romney’s personal ranking of U.S. presidents because I can’t imagine any reading of U.S. history in which H.W. Bush clocks in as “pretty great.”

Of course, Romney might just be bar-setting for himself down the road I guess.

I’ve made a habit of arguing that Mitt Romney has plenty of problems as a political commodity, but the notion that he has a “wimp” problem is just ludicrous.

Leave aside the empirical matter of whether or not Romney is a wimp. None of his political liabilities have to do with perceptions of wimpiness. If you wanted to take the worst, darkest view of his record and his persona you might argue that he’s craven, ambitious, mercenary, and grasping. If you took the most sunny view of those same characteristics you could just as easily argue that he’s intelligent, measured, flexible, and focused.

But there is no conceivable reading of Romney where his problem is that he’s a “wimp.”

The only explanation I can think of for this story is that Tina Brown has been stewing over Time’s breastfeeding milf cover for months and was determined to one-up them on the traffic-bait scale.