Despite millions of dollars spent on a long campaign, Mitt Romney apparently never wanted to be president. Romney’s son Tagg told the Boston Globe that his father “had no desire” to run for the presidency. In fact it was the Tagg, the oldest of Romney’s children, who, along with his mother Ann, worked to convince his father to run for the nation’s highest office.
He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to . . . run,” Tagg Romney told the Boston Globe. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.”
Even if he was reluctant, Romney did a tremendous job earning the Republican presidential nomination through a stacked primary race, and providing a much greater challenge to Obama than U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., did in 2008. Ultimately the GOP probably could not have chosen a better nominee than Romney, despite his reservations.
Tagg may have held more passion than his father during the campaign, at one point resisting the urge to “rush down to the stage and take a swing” at Barack Obama during the presidential debates. Though he has served as a political advisor for his father, the 42-year-old does not see a run for office in his own future. In an October interview with the New York Times he explained his own reluctance.
I’d be really surprised if I did. It’s a really horrible process, and honestly I just don’t want to go through it, and I don’t want to put my family through it,” he said at the time.
