Most Republicans would prefer Romney to just ride off into the twilight. Republicans run from Romney

Mitt Romney is rapidly becoming the candidate that Republicans would like to forget.

Less than two weeks after his narrow popular vote defeat to President Barack Obama, members of his own party are fleeing from him with surprising speed — especially in the wake of the GOP nominee’s explanation for Obama’s win: “gifts” to Democratic constituencies.


( Also on POLITICO: Republicans at a crossroads)

Unlike Romney, previous losing GOP candidates like current and former senator John McCain and Bob Dole built up decades of goodwill that ensured a degree of respect and loyalty after their presidential defeats. But there’s little of that for this year’s failed candidate, who was never part of the Washington establishment.

“Post Romney, post haste. That’s I think where we are,” said Rick Tyler, the GOP strategist who attacked Romney as head of the pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC. “I don’t get the sense that anybody really wants him to stay around, and I don’t get the sense he wants to say around either.”

The GOP inevitably would have moved on from 2012, driven by a lack of authentic admiration for the former Massachusetts governor and a desire to win in 2016. But Romney’s comment on a conference call last week that Obama won because he gave “gifts” to African-Americans, Latinos and young people hastened a process of coming-to-terms that took much longer after 1996 and 2008.

The criticism of the “gifts” gaffe is emblematic of the broader desire to “turn the page,” as Iowa GOP Gov. Terry Branstad puts it.

For his part, Romney has not spoken publicly since the loss on Nov. 6. The “gifts” comment came on a conference call for top donors. He was last spotted Saturday night at a movie theater near his La Jolla, Calif., home. He went to see the fifth and final installment in the “Twilight” franchise — an apt metaphor, when most Republicans would prefer he just ride off into the twilight.

University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said McCain and Dole were well liked by at least some parts of the Republican Party structure.

“I just don’t think Romney ever established an emotional connection with much of anybody in the party,” said Sabato. “He was essentially a cyborg designed to win the presidency, and when he failed he was placed in the disposal bin.”

Following their losses, former nominees like McCain and John Kerry returned to Congress and played substantial roles in policy and politics. Both McCain and Kerry campaigned for their party’s nominees this year. Kerry played an even larger role in prepping Obama for the debates as the stand-in for Romney and is now being considered for a Cabinet job in a second Obama term.

But Romney has no political job to retreat to, and is likely to take refuge in his family or the business world, where he spent the bulk of his professional life. It’s hard to imagine the former Bain Capital CEO playing king-maker in 2016 or stumping for congressional candidates in 2014 — or even that they would want him to.

“Both Bill Clinton in 1996 and Barack Obama in 2008 were larger than life forces,” said Dan Schnur, the director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. “It was easy for Republicans to attribute the loss to the unusual strength of a candidate on the other side. This defeat isn’t all about demographics, but it’s a fairly large contributing factor.”

Schnur — who was McCain’s communications director in 2000 — pointed to the fact that Romney represented the demographic problems facing the Republican Party, whose base is increasingly older, white men in a country that is becoming more diverse.

In the days immediately following the election, Republicans denounced Romney for his harsh rhetoric on immigration in the GOP primaries and for not reaching out more aggressively to Latinos.

“Fairly or not, Romney represents all of the demographic trends that are working against Republicans,” Schnur said. “Distancing themselves from him is an easy way of recognizing those broader societal shifts. It’s relatively difficult to come up with a new policy on immigration or on contraception. It’s a lot easier to symbolically push the old white guy off the cliff, especially when he says things that perpetuate the party’s perception problems.”

Weekly Standard editor William Kristol said Romney is probably the first Republican presidential candidate in his adult lifetime to lose after most Republicans expected him to win. Kristol said that everyone sort of presumed that McCain would lose in 2008 and that Dole would be defeated in 1996. Ditto for George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Gerald Ford in 1976.

“So there’s perhaps a particularly strong desire among Republicans to let his campaign disappear down the memory hole,” Kristol emailed.

It’s not only independent Republicans who are making a clean break from their nominee now that the election is over.

Romney’s top economic adviser, Glenn Hubbard, said Monday that raising more tax revenue from the rich likely needs to be one part of the solution to get the deficit under control — a marked reversal from the campaign’s no-way, no-how message just two weeks ago.

“We just had an election,” Hubbard, the dean of Columbia’s business school said on MSNBC’s “ Morning Joe. “We’re going to have to have some compromise. And I think step one is figure out how to raise some revenue without killing the economy.”

Even Romney’s adviser on Latino outreach, former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, felt no compunction trashing the “gifts” comment and connecting it to a larger critique.

“I was shocked and frankly I don’t think that’s why the Republicans lost the election,” he said on CNN. “We lost the election because the far right of this party has taken the party to a place that it doesn’t belong.”

The former political director of the Iowa Republican Party, Craig Robinson, explained that Romney didn’t build many personal bridges, only temporary political alliances. Mike Huckabee, Robinson said, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, could to this day still call up thousands of people in the state, tell them he was coming to Decorah and oodles of people would carpool to see him.

“With Romney, that just never existed,” he said. “There’s no fondness built up.”

Robinson, who runs TheIowaRepublican.com, said the huge turnout for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s appearance in Iowa on Saturday night was more about getting over Romney than getting behind Rubio.

“From an Iowan’s perspective, it was kind of like a rebound date,” he said. “Okay, shrug it off. Get back up on the horse and start looking around and start looking to the future for something better. I talked to a lot of people who kind of felt that way…There’s no one that feels bad for Mitt Romney.”

“Everything associated with the Romney campaign is tarnished,” he added. “There’s a little rehabilitation that has to go on with every person and consultant who was involved in that campaign. Most activists would rather move on than look bad and salvage something from that campaign.”

Conservative Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley framed Romney’s selection as a cautionary tale for what happens when the party embraces the “electable” candidate. He said Reagan would never have made a comment like the one caught on tape that “47 percent” of Americans wouldn‘t vote for him because they are dependent on government.

“There were elements of the political classes who thought he would be the best nominee, but there were others who had their doubts as to whether he understood conservatism or the American people,” Shirley said. “The fundamental difference is political operatives and commentators can talk that way, but people who aspire to the presidency cannot and moreover should not talk that way.”

Burnishing that point, the chorus of Republican criticism intensified over the last week from all the wings of the party. It was hard to find defenders of Romney at the Republican Governors Association meeting in Las Vegas last week, for example.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a likely 2016 presidential candidate, has repeatedly criticized Romney since last week, with interviews, a press conference and on the Sunday show circuit.

“We as a Republican Party have to campaign for every single vote,” Jindal said on “Fox News Sunday.” “If we want people to like us, we have to like them first. And you don’t start to like people by insulting them and saying their votes were bought.”

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker made less harsh comments on the program but nonetheless implicitly rebuked Romney. “We have to show that we are serious about reaching out and helping everyone, not just a group here, not just a group there, but everyone in the country,” he said.

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez chastised Romney’s 47 percent and gifts comments while criticizing him for not doing a better job of reaching out to Latinos.

“That unfortunately is what sets us back as a party — our comments that are not thought through carefully,” she said.

Even those on Romney’s short-list for vice president have criticized the “gifts” comment.

“President Obama, first of all, just tactically did a better job getting out the vote in his campaign,” said Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor, in an interview that aired Sunday on C-SPAN. “But No. 2, he, at least at the margins, was better able to connect with people in this campaign.”

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham criticized Romney for saying Obama won because of “gifts.”

“When you’re in a hole, stop digging. He keeps digging,” Graham said on NBC’s “ Meet the Press.” “We’re in a death spiral with Hispanic voters because of rhetoric around immigration.”

Ted Cruz, the Republican senator-elect from Texas, rebuked Romney for blurring his differences between Obama on foreign policy in the third debate.

“I’m pretty certain Mitt Romney actually French-kissed Barack Obama,” he said in a speech to the Federalist Society on Friday.

But with Romney’s political corpse barely cold, some have tiptoed more carefully.

“Governor Romney ran an honorable and hard-fought campaign and nearly became our next president,” Rick Santorum, the runner-up for the GOP nomination, opined in Monday’s USA Today. “But we as a party, the party of Ronald Reagan and ‘Morning in America,’ failed to provide an agenda that shows we care.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said it is up to Romney whether he wants to move on, even as he criticized his “gifts” gaffe.

“Do I wish he hadn’t said those things? Of course,” Christie said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Friday. “But on the other hand, I’m not going to bury the guy for it…When you lose, you lost.”