Romney

When someone in the Washington area begins to type the president's last name into the search box of Google's home page, the top three terms it suggests as the most popular selections are Obama, Obamacare and . . . Obama phone. Obama phone? A hotline, maybe, to the Oval Office? Hardly. "Obama phone" is the widely used — and misleading — nickname of a 28-year-old federal program known as Lifeline . It provides discounts, averaging $9.25 a month, on phone service for 13.3 million...

Hey, kids, Mitt Romney has a little life advice for you! People who wait until their 30s — or, gasp, their 40s — to get hitched? They're doing it wrong, the failed GOP presidential candidate said in a commencement speech Saturday at Southern Virginia University, where most of the student body is Mormon. His address has somehow managed to fly relatively under the radar. "They're going to miss so much of living, I'm afraid," Romney said of the sad, single losers who opt to spend their 20s without a ring.

Here's the full transcript from Mitt Romney's concession speech on Wednesday morning, Nov. 7, 2012. ROMNEY: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, my friends. Thank you so very much. (APPLAUSE) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I have just called President Obama to congratulate him on his victory. His supporters and his campaign also deserve congratulations. ROMNEY: His supporters and his campaign also deserve congratulations. I wish all of them well, but particularly the president, the first...

Republican Patrick Mara is pushing back against criticism of his support for Mitt Romney in last year's presidential race, saying his endorsement pales in comparison to those made by Democratic candidates. In an interview this week, Mara stood by his endorsement of Romney, saying he knew the 2012 GOP presidential nominee was never going to carry the District's three electoral votes. "We all knew he wasn't going to win in the District of Columbia, but supporting him was an important part of growing a two-party...

One week ago, Newt Gingrich was on the ropes in South Carolina, under near-universal assault on the right from his attacks on Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital. Everyone from Rush Limbaugh to the Club for Growth and the Wall Street Journal had all declared their disgust. The conservative backlash had given Romney a double-digit lead in the polls. At a candidate forum hosted by Mike Huckabee, Gingrich was booed by the crowd when he tried to defend his Bain attacks. Fast forward one week, and Gingrich is the winner of the South Carolina primary...

The strangest aspect of Wednesday night's debate was Mitt Romney's decision to change his tax policies on the fly. Having campaigned hard on a tax proposal that called for $5 trillion in tax cuts, he said flatly that he was not offering a $5 trillion tax cut. "I don't have a tax cut of the scale that you're talking about," Romney said — even though that is exactly the tax cut he has proposed. Was Romney for his tax plan before he was against it? Romney's willingness to remake himself one more time brought into...

TAMPA Candidates often say they write their own speeches, but in the case of Mitt Romney's convention address , it is a claim more plausible than most. It was highly personal, rhetorically unambitious and perfectly imaginable as the product of Romney's iPad. Assuming this to be the case, we have been handed an interesting artifact. Setting aside aesthetic and partisan judgments, what do his preferred arguments and illustrations reveal about Romney himself? First, at least stylistically, Romney is the retro candidate.

APPLETON, Wis. — Mitt Romney's advisers and top supporters have begun informally discussing potential vice presidential candidates and believe that the sooner he can put away the Republican nomination, the more flexibility he will have in picking his running mate. And although they are careful to note that the campaign is far from putting together a short list, key supporters and strategists said Friday that they are beginning to see the outlines of the kind of person Romney will choose — and the kind he will...

While the Supreme Court's upholding of the health-care law was last week's most important event in historical terms, it will not be the decisive event of the 2012 election. In the long run, polling in swing states suggesting that Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital is hurting him could have larger implications for where this campaign will move. It's certainly true that had the court knocked down President Obama's signature domestic achievement, the defeat would have been woven into a narrative of ineffectual leadership and...

Conventions are the seventh-inning stretch of presidential politics, a pause to consider the interminable prelude and the coming climax. Republicans gathering in Tampa face an unusual election in which they do not have a substantial advantage concerning the most presidential subject, foreign policy. This is not because their nominee has weak foreign-policy credentials, which are not weaker than Barack Obama's were four years ago. And it is not because some of Mitt Romney's policy expostulations during the nominating process...

Mitt Romney made a wistful but triumphant return to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, receiving standing ovations from the audience as he expressed optimism about the Republican Party's future and vowed to work with conservatives to achieve "larger victories" after failing to win last year's presidential election. "Of course I left the race disappointed that I didn't win, but I also left honored and humbled to have represented the values we believe in," the 2012 GOP presidential...

The future of the Republican Party took some shots at its recent past on Thursday, as two top potential 2016 White House hopefuls made a conspicuous effort to distance themselves from the past two GOP presidential nominees. Speaking to activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor, Sens. Rand Paul (Ky) and Marco Rubio (Fla) offered sharp, and only slightly veiled, critiques of Mitt Romney and John McCain, the two most recent men to carry the...

In his March 5 PostPartisan blog excerpt, "Post-elec tion sour grapes" [op-ed], Jonathan Capehart cynically suggested that Ann Romney's admission during an interview that she shed tears over her husband's election loss and found it "very hard" was because she, according to previous reporting in The Post, "believed up until the end that ascending to the White House was their destiny. " Mr. Capehart concluded that Ms. Romney needs to quit the waterworks and move on. As a parent and concerned citizen, I spent every day of last...

One hundred seventeen days later, Mitt Romney still isn't over it. Making his first public comments since losing last November's presidential election, Romney appeared mystified still that the country didn't see things his way. He went on the attack against President Obama during a wide-ranging interview on "Fox News Sunday," as if the Republican hadn't lost a beat since giving his last stump speech. Explaining the defeat, Romney and his wife spread around the blame — Mitt to Obama winning over so many blacks and Hispanics by...

RICHMOND — Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli says he is not writing off any Virginia voters. The Republican gubernatorial hopeful rejected criticism that passages in his forthcoming book sound like a version of Mitt Romney's remarks about the "47 percent. " "There isn't a single vote in Virginia that I'm not going after," Cuccinelli said in a brief interview after speaking to a conference of county and city officials in Richmond on Thursday. "So my percent is...

RICHMOND — Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's new book doesn't hit stores until Feb. 12, but a few pages of it have trickled out to The Washington Post. The Republican gubernatorial candidate wrote the book, "The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty," with Brian J. Gottstein, his spokesman at the Attorney General's office. It recounts his legal battles with the federal government. Chief among them: His first-in-the-nation but ultimately...

It's a little maddening to wonks like me, but Mitt Romney's successful, energetic acceptance speech affirmed once more that presidential elections have almost nothing to do with policy ideas. Instead, as his carefully crafted, market-tested, and superbly-delivered (for him) speech showed, they're about creating a kind of gestalt sensation of values and aspirations with which voters can feel emotionally attuned. In this sense, American politics is very different from, say, politics in Britain — where parties and voters take policy...

I continue to be amazed at the attention the media and the public place on Mitt Romney's tax rate, including the front-page, above-the-fold Sept. 22 article " Romney tax rate 14.1% in 2011 . " Who cares how much he paid! Those running for office have an obligation to disclose certain tax information, and I trust that if Romney were doing anything illegal, immoral or unethical, we would know about it. For the most part, politics is a rich man's game, and I personally don't care how much tax candidates pay as long as...

Remember Mitt Romney? Tall guy, slightly awkward. Looks like a 1950s matinee idol. You could be forgiven for having trouble conjuring up Romney's image, even though it's been less than two months since he lost the presidential election . Republicans' rush to erase the memory of Romney from the American consciousness has been breathtaking. Within days of his surprisingly lopsided defeat, those who want to take his place at the top of the party started distancing themselves from a man they had embraced not long before.

I see a delicious irony in the Dec. 12 news article " In election postmortems, Romney's TV advertising strategy comes under fire . " The article described how the consultants and contractors in the campaign spent ad dollars carelessly while collecting huge fees for themselves, and how Mitt Romney's vaunted talent for managing business enterprises did little to restrain their spending. Perhaps those consultants were running their enterprises only to maximize their profits, with no regard to the...