Some are openly negative about the possibility. “I am willing myself not to believe Romney is running again. That’s too stupid even for his set of advisers,” tweeted Erick Erickson, the proprietor of the influential conservative blog RedState.com.
Romney will take his first public shot at convincing the right that he deserves another chance on Friday night, when he speaks at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting near San Diego — just a few miles away from the site of the “car elevator” incident of 2012.
Here are five of the top arguments that conservatives have made in recent days against Romney in 2016:
1. There are a lot of good candidates — we don’t need a retread.
–
Romney blasted Obama in the wake of the 2012 election for handing “gifts” to important chunks of the electorate that accounted for his victory — women, Latinos, African-Americans and more. But that Democratic constituency isn’t going away. And in some ways it could be more potent if Clinton remains popular.
Sure, Romney can make the argument that he was right and Obama was wrong about a number of foreign policy topics, like Russia. But Clinton hasn’t been a member of Obama’s second-term administration.
Romney has in recent days been in contact with many of his former staffers as news reports suggest he’d get much of the old team back together for 2016. But that’s a team that has also been embarrassed since the election by revelations such as, it took 22 staffers to sign off on a single Romney tweet.
“If he cannot be decisive and quick about getting into the race, how is he going to be decisive and fleet-footed enough to run a successful race this time around?” blogger Jennifer Rubin wrote in The Washington Post. “… In 2012, he not only put together an unwieldy and incompetent campaign, but he also dug his own grave again and again with comments that allowed the Democrats to portray him as out of touch and unfeeling.”
