Don't Do It, Mittens!

In a post titled "Why Losing Nominees Should Just Go Away," Daniel Larison at The American Conservative explains why Mitt 2016 is a really bad idea. You can read the entire article here; money quotes here:

Politico recently reported on the thinking behind the ill-fated push for a third Romney campaign. Reading the report, I was struck by how clueless many people in the Romney camp still are about what went wrong with the campaign last time. For instance, one “senior adviser” maintained that foreign policy was one of Romney’s strengths in 2012, and said that there would be an even greater emphasis on it in a future campaign. I suppose one would expect a Romney adviser to think that his boss’ ideas were right, but the delusion that one of Romney’s most glaring weaknesses was a strength is harder to explain. 

[R]etread candidates are tiresome and start to appear desperate, especially by the third time around. By the time the first votes are cast in 2016, Romney will have been running for president almost without interruption for more than ten years, and he has done so without success. I suppose one could credit him with a strange sort of perseverance, but for most people that’s just evidence of an increasingly bizarre obsession. Like most other former nominees, Romney has nothing to offer his party, and his party can’t be so self-destructive and unimaginative as to want him back.