As Mitt Romney considers a third White House run, his allies are trying to compare him to President Ronald Reagan, the conservative icon with whom Romney has almost nothing in common.
In fact, Romney ran away from Reagan and his legacy when he challenged Sen. Ted Kennedy’s (D-MA) seat.
Romney’s spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom reportedly said “Ronald Reagan never would have become president” had he not run a third time.
“Reagan ran three times. Mitt learns from experience. If he does run, he will run his strongest campaign yet,” Fehrnstrom reportedly said.
Even the mainstream media’s Bloomberg News quickly lambasted the comparison:
Between Reagan’s first (1968) and second (1976) presidential runs, he went from being an inexperienced governor who had given an impressive speech for Barry Goldwater in 1964 to being a successful two-term governor who continued to consolidate his position as leader of the conservative movement. Then, in the run-up to his third try in 1980, Reagan remained the clear conservative leader. A real, influential leader: His attack on the Panama Canal treaties, for example, made opposition to them the standard conservative position.
In other words, Reagan didn’t just get better at running for president. He was a much more impressive politician with far more accomplishments by 1980 than he had been in 1968.
Romney? Not so much.
He first ran for president as a successful one-term governor, although he had to repudiate much of what he had done when he moved to the national stage. He ran for president a second time as a successful one-term governor. He is now running for president yet again as … a successful one-term governor.
As Breitbart News has noted, Romney lost the general election in 2012 when all of the so-called “metrics” indicated that he should have won because he “did not excite the conservative base” and turned off working-class Reagan Democrats “who believed he did not care about their concerns” and was out of touch.