dream ticket or national nightmare
Name recognition may be all the 'baggers and corporadoes have to go on in the coming months until 2016 and the real beneficiaries will be the political communication cadres of hacks and flacks, manufacturing consent as fast as they can.
Fifty-nine percent of Republicans nationwide said they'd like to see Romney jump into the 2016 fray in a new CBS News poll -- a higher number than any other figure in the Republican bullpen, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who clocked in at 50 percent.
Part of that surely owes to Romney's high name recognition as the party's former standard-bearer. But some Republicans think Romney's appeal goes beyond the fact that he's a known quantity.
"I think he is a frontrunner," Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Illinois, said Sunday on ABC. Kinzinger argued Romney has been vindicated on foreign policy issues from the rise of Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria to recent tensions with Russia over Ukraine.
Still, Kinzinger was quick to add, "Between him and Jeb Bush, we have some great candidates."...
Some Democrats, in a virtual re-run of the 2012 campaign, are already poking fun at Romney's privileged lifestyle.
"Oh, poor Mitt. Let him alone. Let him go," joked former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm Sunday on ABC. "Listen, when he stands in front of all these Republicans on Friday night and laments the fact that the rich have gotten richer under [President] Barack Obama when, you know, I mean he pays less tax than the guys who installed his car elevators, there is an authenticity problem."
Granholm argued Bush and Romney would suffer from many of the same problems: "Both of them former governors. Both of them white guys in their 60s. Both of them super wealthy. Both of them are scions, sons of very famous politicians. What is he bringing that's different?"