Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney moved even closer to committing to run for president in 2012 during his Conservative Political Action Conference speech on Friday morning, but still spoke in hypothetical language.
“If I were to decide to run for president,” Romney said, “it sure wouldn’t take me two years to wake up to what’s going on around the country.”
Romney’s wife, Ann Romney, who introduced him to CPAC’s crowd, said she’d like her husband to be president.
“I, for one, would like to see him lead the country as president of the United States,” Ann Romney said.
Romney ripped every policy that has come out of President Barack Obama’s administration. He started off by saying Obama has a serious lack of direction when it comes to foreign policy.
“It is my sincere hope that, somewhere in the near future, this president will finally be able to construct a foreign policy,” Romney said. “Any foreign policy. That would be change.”
He said Obama’s recent attempts to “move to the middle” aren’t showing he’s a new man or a new president. Romney said he replaced Rahm Emanuel and Saul Alinsky, both Chicago politicians, with Bill Daley, another Chicago politician.
Romney attacked Obama’s economic policies and said the president should stop looking to failed European socialist and big government models for ways to fix unemployment problems. He said Obama should have had more to say than, “It could be worse.”
“What’s next? Let them eat cake?” Romney said. “Excuse me, let them eat organic cake?”
Romney said Obama should have focused on the economy first, before he went through with Obamacare and agenda items. Romney also said he wouldn’t need to ask Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner how to create jobs and stimulate the economy, because he already knows how to do so.
Romney compared this upcoming election to President Ronald Reagan’s defeat of President Jimmy Carter by using the “Carter misery index,” saying the 2012 election calls for an “Obama misery index.”
“It’s going to take a lot more than new rhetoric to put Americans back to work,” Romney said. “It’s going to take a new president.”