Mitt Romney and his family are finished with running for the presidency, his wife Ann insisted in two separate interviews this week.
"Done," she told
The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday. "Completely. Not only Mitt and I are done, but the kids are done,” she said, in reference to their five sons. "Done. Done. Done.”
She also made similar comments to NBC's "Today" show on Tuesday,
reports The Daily Caller.
Story continues below video.
"We’ve done it; we’ve had our turn," she said on Today, about a month after telling Fox News' Neil Cavuto that "we will see, won't we Neil" to a similar question.
Romney told Maria Shriver, a special anchor for NBC News, that the question of another presidential campaign is posed often to her husband.
"As you’re running through airports, everyone’s screaming at you, ‘run again.’ It’s complimentary," she said. "We are having no serious conversations about it because we said at the end we will never do this again. It was hard. We’ve done it; we’ve had our turn."
For now, Romney said their focus was on Tuesday's launch of the Ann Romney Center for Neurological Diseases in Boston, which will focus on cures and research for Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's and brain tumors.
The diseases affect about 50 million people in the United States, and Romney told The Times that the $50-million fundraising goal will just be a start toward allowing researchers to pursue other grants.
"And if we really are starting to make some progress, it will be easier and easier to raise the money,” she said.
The Romneys have not disclosed the amount of the donation they have made to the center.
And with their concentration on the new center, Romney said she and her husband have more on their plates than another presidential campaign.
But she admitted that if he should reconsider a third campaign, it will be a decision they'll make together. But she told The Times, she hasn't "been pushed to that point mentally."
There are many other "really interesting" potential Republican candidates, Romney said, including Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, and Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who was her husband's running mate in 2012.
"We're going to see a nice field shake out," she said of the large group of potential candidates.
Her husband, a former governor of Massachusetts, insists that he is
not running for office, saying just last week that he's "not running and I'm not planning on running. I've got nothing to add to that story."
But Romney himself has added to some of that talk, going from ruling it out completely after the 2012 election to saying things such as "we'll see what happens," in a comment to The New York Times Magazine.
He's also had a higher profile in recent months, traveling to campaign for Republican candidates on a tour of several states where races are hotly contested, including Virginia, Georgia, Oklahoma, Michigan, Kentucky and Louisiana.
And even though he and wife Ann insist he's not running, that doesn't mean voters don't want to see him on the ballot.
Just this week, a Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll
put Romney in first among potential 2016 presidential candidates, with retired Baltimore neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a political newcomer, coming in second place.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.