Like any spurned lover who wants to give it another go, Mitt Romney promises that he's a changed man.
All that business about not being concerned for the "very poor"? That bit about 47 percent of Americans who are shiftless moochers and lost to the Republican Party? Or that jibe at Obama-supporting minorities and young voters who re-elected the president because he gave them "gifts"? Given the chance to take up the GOP's mantle again, the reformed 2012 nominee says that come 2016, he'll be an anti-poverty warrior and will court minority and young voters. No longer will he write off segments of the electorate historically skeptical of the GOP.
America, Mitt wants you back. Badly.
The latest attempt to ingratiate himself to the voters who jilted him two years ago came Monday, during a speech in Indian Wells, California. Offering clues as to how a 2016 bid would differ from his unsuccessful campaigns in 2008 and 2012, Romney all but disavowed the central selling point of his last White House attempt.
That selling point, of course, was the former Bain Capital CEO's business acumen, which he touted as just what the country needed to accelerate its recovery from the Great Recession."I spent my career in the private sector. I think that’s what the country needs right now,” as Romney put it at the time.
Now, as the man who once declared that corporations are people gears up for yet another campaign, Romney has decided that he doesn't want voters to get the impression he's a "business person."
“If you show up at businesses it looks like you’re a business person," the businessman who literally wrote a business book told his California audience last night, per Fox News. "If you show up at churches and at minority communities it shows you care much more broadly. And that’s something that I want to do.”
Of course, it's a bit rich for a guy who joined a private equity fund after losing in 2012 and first announced his interest in 2016 to a room full of wealthy Republican donors to then turn around and promise not to run as the candidate of business. But not to quibble! Romney has seen the polling, and he recognizes that voters aren't exactly enamored of big business and see inequality as a huge problem. Mitt's all about that too, if that's what you're into.
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