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| Image from NYT |
COTTONWOOD HEIGHTS, Utah — "Mitt Romney never could resist a race. Since dawn, half-marathoners had been whipping through a mountainside fog here, a short drive from the home he keeps, some 2,000 miles from the office he wants.
Mr. Romney stood just beyond the finish line, bopping in his jeans-and-flannel finest, smiling back at the runners like a distant relative at a wedding, waiting to be greeted. “Well done, well done, congratulations,” he said, handing medals to participants who may not have won in the end but plainly tried their hardest.
He clapped and shoulder-patted. He whiffed on a high-five. He studied the fingers of a woman unlocking her cellphone to take a picture with him, and guessed at the passcode. “Seven-six-four-three-nine-nine!” Mr. Romney shouted.
He laughed. People seemed confused. The camera clicked. Mitt Romney was back.
Six years after a presidential election defeat that loved ones expected to end his political career — and nearly a quarter century (and four campaigns) after his wife, Ann, swore she would “never” abide another run — Mr. Romney wants in again.
". . . All my life I wanted to run for president in the worst way,” Mr. Romney told a crowd recently. “And that’s just what I did. . . He also recalled his late father's failed presidential run. Will this Romney’s fate will be different???
He is insisting on it, betting on a state that views him fondly as a Mormon leader and logistical hero of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
" . . . By January, he will almost certainly be a United States senator, representing a state his ancestors helped settle. He will return to the grand political arena where he is happiest, friends say, after years in semi-exile. He will matter.
The question is how.
Will he be a vocal check on President Trump, a man he once labeled a “phony” and a “fraud”? Or a mostly deferential Republican in a capital full of them?
Those close to him say he can't fade, ". . . if he wants to live without regret — a through-line in dozens of conversations with friends, relatives and former advisers. They cite no shortage of motivations for his candidacy:
- his Mormon faith and its emphasis on service
- the memory of his father
- his irrepressible ambition, coaxed by a family-wide conviction that he is a singular leader of his times, if only the voters could see it.
“Everyone is running out of a burning building. Mitt’s running in,”
Mrs. Romney said in an interview.
“This is Mitt, runs into burning buildings.”
After some 30 minutes, the Romneys returned to the parking lot . . . The pair hopped in the family pickup — just the two of them — and Mr. Romney steered them back into the fog."
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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Grand Stage Romney Can’t Resist, Even if the Show’s Not His.
