Romney in the Wilderness, Waiting

By:  Robert Costa

New York — Mitt Romney, sitting ramrod straight, is gazing up at the gleaming glass boxes on Park Avenue as we zoom through midtown Manhattan. It is lunchtime, and the streets are swarming with business folk — attorneys with lattes, analysts with take-out sushi. For Romney, this is a glimpse of his old world, a world of mergers, acquisitions, and Harvard Business School lingo.

His new world, one of big ideas and presidential aspirations, sits on his lap, in the form of his latest book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.

Romney knows how to use his time in the wilderness. Unlike many of his potential Republican foes for the 2012 presidential nomination, Romney has kept a relatively low profile since ending his 2008 primary campaign.

No television show, no drama for the former Massachusetts governor.

Instead, Romney is laser-focused on electing state and federal Republican candidates in the midterm elections.

That strategy is paying off. In January, Scott Brown, the Bay State’s new GOP senator, credited Romney as being instrumental to his come-from-behind win. Elsewhere, Romney’s political-action committee, Free and Strong America, has donated over $120,000 to Republican candidates over the past year. Last month, he went so far as to defend former president George W. Bush, his party’s battered hero, in a speech at a conservative conference. All of these efforts, and his book, are signals to the GOP faithful that a certain former governor is tanned, rested, and ready.

GETTING TO THE POINT

The release of No Apology has garnered Romney numerous lighthearted television appearances, from The View to The Late Show with David Letterman. The buzz is nice, he says, “and a lot of fun,” but not his purpose. The will-he, won’t-he presidential chatter misses the point as well.

Americans, he explains, do not want to hear horse-race chatter, but desire, strongly, a real and substantive policy debate, be it about geopolitics or domestic policy. No Apology — a 324-page Romney vade mecum chock-full of policy talk, data, charts, anecdotes, quotes, and arguments — is, in his eyes, a step in that direction. It covers a few key policy areas: 100 pages on America’s role in the world, plus chapters on health care, fiscal policy, education, and “the culture of citizenship.”

“I have wanted to write something like this for about 20 years,” Romney says.” He jokes that he “became unemployed unexpectedly” and, “with a little time on my hands,” told himself that “this is the time to do it.”

Developing his book’s theme was easy. “When I was in the private sector, doing business around the world, I became concerned that Americans were not seeing what was happening around the world,” Romney says. “We think of ourselves as being light years ahead of other nations, and that was the case when I was going around the world in the 1960s. But today that is no longer the case. There are other parts of the world that are eclipsing us in terms of productivity, infrastructure, investment in higher education, and technology. Unless we change course, I’m very concerned that America is going to be eclipsed by some of those other nations. So I wanted to tell this story.”Read more at NRO