Opinion: Mitt Romney’s back and he’s ready to be No. 2

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Mitt Romney is back.

And although no one has asked outside of Fox’s Sean Hannity, Romney says he’d be ‘honored’’ to accept a No. 2 role as Sen. John McCain’s running mate on the Republican ticket this fall. Romney’s very successful fundraising team has already met with McCain’s to offer assistance.

McCain might not be so eager, following the not-always-friendly contest they had. But then look how chummy McCain and George W. Bush were last week barely eight years after their gut-fighting in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

In an interview airing tonight on FOX News Channel’s Hannity and Colmes, Romney speaks about both his own future and the battle between Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton --’like listening to two chihauhaus.’’ McCain, on the other hand, he says is ‘the big dog.’’ Let’s remember, Romnet reminded Hannity, ‘he’s the guy who won.’

“I think any Republican leader in this country would be honored to be asked to serve as the vice presidential nominee, myself included,’’ Romney says. McCain campaign officials have been very close-mouthed about vice-presidential possibilities. And Romney quickly added that the Arizona senator would have his own process for evaluating running mates and ‘a long list.’

Romney has this to say about Clinton and Obama: ‘Listening to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama talk about experience in a national security crisis is like listening to two chihuahuas argue about which is the biggest dog. When it comes to national security, John McCain is the big dog, and they are the chihuahuas.

‘And I think as we talk more and more about their battle with one another, focused on the....

fact that neither one has real experience in dealing with the issues of our time, that that will only augur for his benefit,’’ Romney says.

Romney predicts that Obama will win the Democratic Party’s nomination: ‘“I think so and I hope so…It does look to me like at this stage Barack Obama is the more likely. I think he is the better match-up for Sen. McCain because the public recognizes just how inexperienced he is.

‘With Sen. Clinton there is some confusion in perception that somehow being there while her husband was president made her a foreign policy/national security experienced person,’’ he says. ‘She is not. She doesn’t have any more experience, really, of a significant nature than Barack Obama does.

‘But in Barack Obama’s case, people recognize this guy was a state senator and before that he was a community activist,’’ he says. ‘He has been a United States senator for a short, short period of time. He is in no significant way qualified to lead the country at a time of war, to lead the country out of an economic challenge. This is not a person who can stand up to Sen. McCain.”

Asked about any lingering resentment from his own tough campaign against McCain, which Romney invested $42.3 million of his own money in plus $55.7 million of others’, the former governor says: ‘There are really no hard feelings, I don’t think, on either side of this. There were no pacts and so forth that make people feel like that we will never come together. Instead these campaigns are all coming together. We are supporting our nominee enthusiastically, aggressively.

Romney, who’s promised to campaign for McCain, says Clinton ‘did the nation a big favor by reminding us of the significance of becoming the president of the United States. When -- and whether it is foreign policy or our economy, people are going to recognize that you do want an inspirational speaker to motivate us from time to time, but the presidents of the United States have to be a person of action, not just a person of words.”

He says Obama ‘really hasn’t accomplished anything, not in the life prior to becoming an elected official. And then as a state senator, he was undistinguished. As a U.S. senator, he has been undistinguished. Now he is an inspirational speaker, and that has given him a great deal of following and support. But in terms of accomplishment, there is not much there.’’

‘And so in his case,’ Romney adds, ‘the absence of a record means there is not a lot to poke at. But it is the absence of a record that I think will make it very clear to the American people that you don’t turn over the largest, most powerful nation on the earth to someone who has been unproven and untested.”

--Mark Silva

Mark Silva writes for The Swamp from the Chicago Tribune’s Washington bureau.