Two-time presidential hopeful outlines more inclusive agenda in post-Obama era during speech, but fellow Republicans remain skeptical

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Mitt Romney has cast himself as a champion of the poor and the underdog in his first public comments since revealing another potential presidential run.



The 2012 Republican presidential nominee signalled to a group of Republicans on Friday night he would run a markedly different campaign should he run for a third time in 2016.

“I believe in the post-Obama era we need to stand for safety and for opportunity for all people, and we have to stand for helping lift people out of poverty,” he said.

The address to hundreds of Republican National Committee members aboard the aircraft carrier Midway, moored in San Diego harbor, was the first since Romney told GOP donors last week that he was mulling another White House bid.

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“I’m giving some serious consideration to the future,” he said. “But this I know - we can win in 2016... if we communicate a clear vision of where we’re taking this country.”

The address sketched out a softer, more inclusive persona than the polarising, corporate hatchetman depicted by Barack Obama’s victorious campaign.

Romney lamented income inequality and the “scourge of poverty” - a marked shift in emphasis for a tycoon who was secretly recorded in 2012 dismissing 47% of voters as feckless welfare-seekers.

“Under President Obama the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty in American than ever before,” Romney said.

He mentioned his decade as a Mormon bishop, a departure from a previous strategy of playing down his religious background in favour of his corporate track record.



The former Massachusetts governor said his wife. Ann, understood his heart, and suggested she supported another campaign, despite previous statements from the couple that his White House dreams were over. “She believes that people get better with experience,” he joked, prompting applause. “And heaven knows that I have experience running for president.”

The former governor linked Hillary Clinton, the Democratic party’s undeclared frontrunner for 2016, to what he described as a feeble, misguided foreign policy. “The results of the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton foreign policy have been devastating.”

Romney bid unsuccessfully for the party’s nomination in 2008, losing to John McCain. He won the nomination four years later but lost key states after Obama painted him as a heartless, out-of-touch tycoon.

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Some Republicans gathered in San Diego expressed skepticism about another run. “He’s had two chances,” Rob Gleason, the Pennsylvania Republican chairman, told the New York Times. “Nice guy, great guy. But let’s be honest about it: He ran a terrible campaign.”

Romney could face stiff competition for another nomination from the likes of Scott Walker, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush.

Earlier this week Rupert Murdoch echoed criticism in the Wall Street Journal, which he owns, about a putative Romney run. “He had his chance. He mishandled it, you know? I thought Romney was a terrible candidate.”