Why does Mitt Romney want to be president?

Why does Mitt Romney want to be president?:

'via Blog this'

The answer, then, to the question “What does Mitt Romney think?” is this: It matters even less what Romney thinks than it matters for most presidents. Romney’s policy preferences are unusually weak, his deal-making instincts are unusually strong and his party will be unusually aggressive in policing his agenda. George W. Bush used his personal prestige to convince Republicans to vote for Medicare Part D, a debt-financed expansion of the welfare state that conservatives would typically have found noxious. Obama convinced his party to support the individual mandate, a Republican idea that he had vigorously opposed in the Democratic primary.

Romney does not have significant prestige within the Republican Party, which largely views him with mistrust. Perhaps more significant, his party has spent the past few years developing its governing agenda without him. “We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference. “We just need a president to sign this stuff.”

In choosing Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the lead architect of the Republican House’s legislative agenda, as his running mate, Romney signaled his broad acceptance of Norquist’s argument. Whether a Romney administration would corral the votes to pass Ryan’s agenda remains an open question. Democrats seem much more likely to hold the Senate than they did six months ago.