Romney dopped out saying he hated to lose, and that he loves America. | John Shinkle/POLITICO Romney ends bid, eyeing 2012

The presidential race Mitt Romney planned for years crashed to a halt Thursday, stopped in its tracks by the surprisingly durable John McCain campaign and by Romney's failure to quell concerns about his shifts on key issues, his political persona and his Mormon religion.

Making the dramatic announcement at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference at a Washington hotel, Romney clearly hoped to preserve the goodwill of his party for another possible bid in 2012. He intends to run again in four years, according to a senior member of his inner circle.


"He should be president. 2012," the confidant e-mailed after talking to Romney.

Asked if Romney will run again, another close adviser said, "He’ll consider it. He's keeping his options open."

Romney framed his departure as one of duty to party and country. “If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Sen. Clinton or Obama would win,” he said. "And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”

Disbelieving young supporters yelled "No!" and "Fight on!" and booed when Romney got to the end of his speech and explained his decision.

Romney suspended his campaign rather than officially end it in order to continue to represent the interests of his delegates, said spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom. "We want to make sure that the governor's principles are reflected in the platform and at the convention. We have a number of pledged delegates and we don't want to completely abandon them. But we're not laboring under unrealistic expectations that governor Romney might magically become the Republican nominee."

McCain would respond to Romney's decision with a "gracious recognition" in his own CPAC speech later in the day, an aide said.

Fehrnstrom said the surprise announcement began to take shape at a senior staff meeting Wednesday morning, when Romney had made no final decision but said he wanted to "do what was best for the party."

Romney then went home to write his CPAC speech, talked to his family and the CPAC address "became a farewell speech," Fehrnstrom said. Top staff found out when drafts of the speech were circulated Wednesday night. The entire staff was informed by campaign manager Beth Myers just before Romney took the stage.

A close Romney adviser said family and longtime aides and advisers wanted him to fight on. They all pressed the 1976 scenario where Ronald Reagan dogged President Gerald Ford to the GOP convention. But Romney himself brought up the issue that was central to his Thursday speech: The nation is at war.

Josh Romney, one of the former governor’s five sons, said his dad sounded upbeat and strong when he called family members Wednesday night to tell them of the decision.

“He felt that he still had a shot at winning the nomination,” Josh Romney said. “But for the good of the party and the nation, he didn’t want to have a long, drawn-out battle.”

In taking the action, Romney was essentially conceding to McCain, a nemesis who clashed bitterly with him repeatedly at debates and had looked for much of last year like an also-ran who would not be much of an obstacle.

Instead, McCain’s rag-tag campaign caught fire in New Hampshire — literally Romney’s backyard, since he owns a summer place there — and quickly built momentum despite longtime hostility from the conservative establishment.

“This is not an easy decision for me. I hate to lose,” Romney said. “My family, my friends and our supporters — many of you right here in this room — have given a great deal to get me where I have a shot at becoming president. If this were only about me, I would go on. But I entered this race because I love America, and because I love America, I feel I must now stand aside, for our party and for our country.”

GOP operatives said Romney was acknowledging a bitter reality. "Numerically it wasn’t there," said Jason Roe, a former Romney aide and veteran Republican strategist. "We’re are a point now where the Democrats are going to be tearing each other apart for seven weeks, so Republicans actually have an opportunity to unite behind one candidate."

Romney's announcement followed his disappointing showing in the Super Tuesday contests, where he had tried to convince voters that he was the true conservative in the race and that McCain did not share their values.

The son of a Michigan governor, Romney had developed his own public profile as head of the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, which he helped rescue after they got off to a scandal-marred start.

In the CPAC remarks, he vowed to continue his public profile, saying: “Look forward to joining with you many more times in the future."

“I will continue to stand for conservative principles; I will fight alongside you for all the things we believe in,” he said. “And one of those things is that we cannot allow the next president of the United States to retreat in the face of evil extremism.”

The most buttoned-down of this year’s candidates succumbed to the chaos of one of the nation’s least predictable presidential elections as well as to an enduring perception in GOP circles that he had undergone a convenient conservative conversion after governing in Massachusetts as a moderate.

Romney methodically raised more than $53 million and put in $36 million more of his own as he attempted to build a state-of-the-art operation that would put himself in a position to succeed President Bush at a time when the party had no heir apparent.

But Romney quickly learned that politics is not as rational as the financial deals that made him wealthy as founder of Bain Capital. Romney had three chief challenges: his Mormon faith, what critics saw as flip-flops on key issues and his failure to connect.

All crystallized in a bad Iowa loss that presaged his ultimate failure.

Romney's campaign never got a lift in national polls and struggled consistently in the early-voting states where he was banking on gaining momentum.

His leadership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a constant distraction and somewhat of a hindrance in the South, where many evangelicals regard members of his church with suspicion and even hostility.

But “the Mormon thing,” as Romney aides called it, was just one factor among a host of reasons that Romney never caught fire.

He came off as robotic, brushing off advice from aides to show more of his emotion in speeches. Ironically, his presidential looks and bearing turned into a drawback because he looked so perfect that the touchy voters of Iowa and New Hampshire never warmed up to him.

Instead, the more casual, human styles of McCain and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee electrified voters in New Hampshire and Iowa, respectively, leaving Romney literally out in the cold as he campaigned doggedly but to limited effect.

Christian conservative activists in Iowa rejected Romney and chose one of their own because Huckabee had everything Romney did not: a shared faith, a consistent record on social issues and personality and background his audience could relate to.

In New Hampshire, Romney tried to pivot back to a "change" and Washington outsider message that he had begun in the fall. But he had only an extended weekend after Iowa to make the transition and McCain had been waiting in New Hampshire for months, building support.

Romney found his voice in Michigan, where he scored a decisive win, but it still was not enough. Florida became the showdown, the first closed primary where all the top combatants would clash. And Romney lost decisively, by nearly 100,000 votes.

From day one, his advisers knew his biggest vulnerability would be the charge that he was a flip-flopper — that he was at heart a moderate Republican, as he had run in Massachusetts and had shifted to hard-right stances in recent years out of political expediency.

As Romney geared up to court the conservative electorate that determines Republican presidential nominations, he took a more restrictive position on abortion, and changed his mind about the use of stem cells in research, conforming his views to those of the party’s more conservative elements.

On the stump, he became strident in his opposition to illegal immigration and said he would “double” the detention facility for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The changes in position haunted Romney and gave McCain, in particular, a stick with which to club him. For the entire first half of last year, McCain aides doggedly and successfuly drove a message, with the help of YouTube and old news clippings, that Romney had changed his stance on most every consequential issue.

The rap stuck.

The flip-flops especially hurt Romney later in the campaign, when McCain surged ahead. Because of his own impure past, Romney was unable to get off any clean shots at McCain, who had bucked the party line himself at times.

"He had to spend $45 million just to get known nationally," said a close Romney adviser. "A lot of people wanted him to take harder shots at McCain, and he wasn't willing to do it. ... The reality is that the conservatives rallied around him too late."

While Romney's decision makes McCain the de facto nominee, the Arizona senator still has work cut out for him, as Romney backers weren't streaming to jump on board.

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, an early Romney supporter and his top backer in the Palmetto State, said: "I’m terribly disappointed, but I think it was very classy and selfless to realize the way Republicans are headed."

Would he endorse McCain? " I’ll wait and make that decision later." Could he support McCain? "If he’s the nominee I defintely will."

American Conservative Union president David Keene, another Romney backer said Romney's decision "was very difficult — to look at the delegate totals and think you could turn it around."

McCain? "That's premature. I think John McCain has an opportunity now becuse he has the time to begin putting together the conservative support he’s going to need."