The secret brilliance of Mitt Romney 2016

The news that Mitt Romney "almost certainly will" run for president in 2016, following his failed bids for president in 2008 and 2012, has been met in certain portions of the political press with bug-eyed incredulity. "Nothing could convince me that Romney will actually run for president," wrote New York's Jonathan Chait, "not even Romney taking the oath of office." Even The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin, one of Romney's staunchest supporters in the media during the 2012 cycle, conceded that "on one level, another Romney run is preposterous."

But a Romney run in 2016 may not be so preposterous after all, particularly when you consider the bloody gauntlet that is the Republican primary process. The one advantage Romney enjoys over all contenders? He has already gone through it.

To be sure, the skeptics have a point. Many, many points. It would seem borderline insane to re-nominate a candidate who is best known for dismissing nearly half of all American citizens as shiftless moochers; who blamed his election loss on President Obama giving "gifts" to blacks, Latinos, and millennials; who orchestrated an inept get-out-the-vote operation that barely sputtered to life on Election Day; who ran so far to the right on issues like immigration that he endangered his party's long-term prospects with one of the country's most important minority groups; who let an octogenarian Hollywood star ramble unscripted to an empty chair at the Republican National Convention; who once said, in the aftermath of the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, that he "like[s] to fire people"; who in a few ungraceful remarks managed to piss off the entire city of London; who lost to an incumbent presiding over an unemployment rate of nearly 8 percent; who could never square his budget proposal without raising taxes on the middle class or blowing a hole in the budget deficit; and who was blamed by his own party for doing more than anyone else to brand the GOP as the party of the rich and "stuffy old men."

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Romney was a remarkably weak candidate, a poor messenger with a lousy message. There's no reason to think this will change by 2016; indeed, he has already signaled that he will run to the right of Jeb Bush in a Republican primary on issues of immigration and tax policy, all while making poverty a "central theme of his potential 2016 campaign." If that sounds confusing, just wait until Romney explains how it will all work in front of a whiteboard.

Still, his supporters seem to think that third time's a charm. "If he decides to run, I think you'll see a different campaign and I think you'll see a campaign in which the American people get to really know Mitt Romney as a person,” one donor told Politico.

Of course, voters can be forgiven for thinking they know Romney pretty well. After all, he has been running for president for nearly 10 years at this point. They may have bought his book, No Apologies. They may have even seen that Netflix movie about him, which, as his admirers so often point out, presented him in a new light and made him an endearing figure. However, I would hasten to add this this is precisely because he came off as a sane person who would never put himself through the masochistic ordeal of running for president of the United States three times in a row.

Still, for all his flaws, for all the demographic obstacles that lie between him and the White House, the politics for Romney are fairly simple. The Republican nominee for president will be the person who can retain the support of the party's business wing while passing muster with the conservative base. The wealthy donors of the GOP could not find a better representative than the former head of Bain Capital. And as I have argued in the past, the reason why Romney does so well in early primary polling is not just name recognition, but the fact that he is a proven quantity to Republican voters. Though they doubted him at first, he has become, by virtue of winning the nomination in 2012 and leading the party faithful in their quest to vanquish the detested Barack Obama, one of them, to the point that he has become a self-described standard bearer of party orthodoxy.

Jeb Bush is so far the only potential contender capable of competing with Romney for big-money donors, but he still needs to prove his conservative credentials, particularly on issues like immigration and education. The other potential candidates, meanwhile, fall short in one category or the other.

The main attack on Romney will be that he is a proven loser. But that argument will entail suggesting that his positions — on taxes, on immigration, on foreign policy, on gay marriage — are losers, too.

Will anybody do that? And if they do, can they win a Republican primary? Romney seems to be betting otherwise.