The Long-Distance Runner

“He was not bringing people together to second-guess,” says Alex Gage, a former campaign strategist who continues to informally advise Romney. “It was not a lot of retrospectives or recriminations or mistakes. I think in his mind he’s thought it through.”

Romney was encouraged by the contents of a fat three-ring binder he brandished for his guests. He leafed through the pages to show dozens of thank you notes and photos -- from Republican candidates for whom Romney had campaigned and raised money around the country -- and passed the binder around his living room so that each of his advisers could linger over it. “He just talked about all the friends he made and people he met along the way,” recalls Kevin Madden, who had been Romney’s campaign spokesman. “The idea was: It’s not for nothing. We were actually helping people. Take a look at how thankful they were.”

During his long presidential campaign, Romney -- the reformed Massachusetts moderate with the salesman’s too-perfect touch -- had struggled to earn a welcome into a conservative movement whose members were often suspicious of his motives. The plastic sleeves in the binder held the good news to emerge from his experience trying to win them over: typed or handwritten confirmation that hard work and collegiality meant something in politics.

People who asked Romney what he would do once his presidential campaign was over say the former businessman and one-term Massachusetts governor did not flinch: He wanted to keep his hand in politics. For more than a year, Romney has done so with the same competitiveness and discipline that has marked nearly every challenge he has taken on in his life, from his foreign assignment as a Mormon missionary and career as a management consultant and founder of Bain Capital to his stewardship of the Salt Lake City Olympics and campaigns for senator, governor, and president.

“He lost a tough race,” says New Hampshire state Senator Jeb Bradley, a Republican and former US congressman. “After that, Mitt could have done anything he wanted with his life: back to the nonprofit world or start a new business. But what has he been doing? He’s kept at it. He’s been busting his butt since losing more than anyone I have ever seen.”

Romney’s has been the metabolism of a candidate-in-waiting, one who started paying attention to his long-term interests even before he withdrew from the primaries. Over the last year, as his fellow Republicans made career-crippling moves or drifted toward irrelevance, Romney’s meticulous approach has left him not only the default front-runner for the party’s 2012 nomination but one of the only stable forces the GOP has left. The six-person operation that Romney built over the last year in a Lexington office complex -- under the flag of his Free and Strong America political action committee -- may qualify as the closest thing there is to a durable Republican infrastructure in the Obama era.

“We realized by last year Mitt Romney was one of the family,” David Keene, the head of the American Conservative Union, said in February when he presented Romney to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the movement’s largest annual gathering. “He is more important to us today than he was last year.”

When Mitt Romney strode onstage just past noon on Thursday, February 7, 2008, many of those attending CPAC did not know that he was no longer a candidate for president. The basement of Washington’s Omni Shoreham hotel is deep out of cellphone range, and so the news that had popped up on blogs 20 minutes earlier -- that Romney would use his speech to withdraw -- barely moved the ballroom, then featuring a panel discussion on books by Barry Goldwater, Russell Kirk, and Ayn Rand. “Mitt! Mitt! Mitt! Mitt!” the crowd cheered upon Romney’s arrival.

The day before, Romney had gathered his senior staff in a conference room in his Boston headquarters to assess his options after Super Tuesday. He had carried all but one of the day’s caucus states, evidence that he had at long last won over conservative activists. But, with the exception of Massachusetts, he had lost the big-population states -- California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey -- which gave their delegates to John McCain, and whose demographics augured poorly for Romney’s ability to build a broad base of support.

Romney enjoys watching debates play out in front of him, and he invited aides to make the case for fighting on. Even another month as a candidate could help Romney establish a national constituency as an alternative to McCain and allow him to quit the race as undisputed runner-up in a party that has long recognized rank. (The Republican nominees in 1980, 1988, and 1996 had each finished second in the previous open primary season, as McCain had in 2000.) But Romney’s advisers were convinced that former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who had tangled with Romney for the votes of social conservatives, would make his own bid for that role.

“Even under the rosiest scenario, it was hard to see how the data worked out,” says Phil Musser, a senior adviser who had by then left the campaign. “He was cleareyed about the math and what continuing meant for his wallet, in order to keep up a long fight with a slim chance of success.”

Romney ended the meeting and went home to Belmont to write a speech for CPAC, while a group of aides decamped, as they often did in the evenings, for burgers and beer at the North End’s Waterfront Cafe. Eventually spokesman Madden’s BlackBerry buzzed with a draft from Romney. Staying in the race, he had concluded, would only weaken McCain’s prospects against Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. “In this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror,” Romney had written.

Romney returned to his office the following week in a T-shirt and jeans, ready to travel to his California home. From there, Romney’s staff informed McCain’s, he would be willing to travel to Arizona for a formal endorsement ceremony. But McCain’s camp volunteered their candidate, campaigning that day in Rhode Island, for an immediate photo op in Boston. Romney wavered about doing it so quickly -- he held a ticket for a middle seat on a JetBlue flight later that day and hesitated about paying the cancellation fee -- but was flattered that McCain would show deference and come to him. Hours later, after postponing his flight and changing into a suit, Romney met with McCain privately for 15 minutes and asked what he could do. McCain made a standard request: He entreated Romney to campaign for him and other Republican candidates. Then the two walked out in front of an American flag and made it official.

It was an early indication that Romney’s long-term strategy would be undiverted by the grudges and pique that often endure among rivals. When McCain found himself in a similar scenario against George W. Bush eight years earlier, he had prolonged the end of his flailing campaign, projected a visible discomfort when he finally endorsed, and participated in a “shadow convention” that drew attention away from Bush’s nomination. Romney decided to be a good soldier.

“That we just put down to him being smart,” says Mark Salter, a McCain adviser who was among Romney’s most vehement detractors during the primaries. “He got out and then graciously said, ‘Put me to work.’ And I don’t think he turned down anything we asked him to do.”

On Friday, May 15, 2009, Romney walked to the podium at the US Airways Center in Phoenix, clasping a brown leather folder under his arm and using the other to wave at the 5,000 members of the National Rifle Association who had gathered for an afternoon of political speeches at the group’s annual convention. “I’ve noticed that the farther west I go, the bigger these NRA meetings get,” Romney told the crowd. “I have to say, the Boston chapter is a little on the small side these days.”

With nearly metronomic precision, Romney seems to emerge monthly from the cuckoo clock he has constructed for his exile. Each time, he delivers a speech with a carefully calibrated new critique of the Democratic regime, and then retreats back to a lower-profile schedule of fund-raisers, Op-Eds, and diligent networking among Republicans nationwide.

While Romney spent much of last year campaigning for other candidates, this year he turned his attention to what advisers acknowledge is the primary objective: financing his own political operations. In the first six months of the year, Romney’s PAC raised more than $1.6 million and spent most of it -- six times more than the committee gave away to other Republican candidates during the 2008 campaign. Much of the budget appears to have paid for salaries, consultant fees, and fund-raising expenses, including direct-mail printing, postage, and tens of thousands to the Romney for President campaign to acquire contributor lists. Romney is incubating a national organization ready to become a presidential campaign at a time when victory could cost $1 billion.

“He’s sensitive to that, and so he’s making smart and continuing investments in his own political infrastructure to keep his options open,” says Musser, the former adviser. “No one else is doing that today.”

Other potential Republican candidates have fought to earn a national profile, and most have stumbled from the overreach. Huckabee has launched a Fox News variety show and Alaska governor Sarah Palin abruptly quit her office midterm. Others trying to raise their profiles have made political enemies: Florida governor Charlie Crist outraged members of his own party by campaigning in favor of Obama’s stimulus bill, while Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal frustrated his state’s residents when he rejected a portion of the federal money. South Carolina governor Mark Sanford and US Senator John Ensign of Nevada were both forced into exposing comi-tragic dalliances.

Each misstep has been dutifully chronicled by the Democratic National Committee, which already has researchers documenting the follies of the opposition’s potential contenders. The only post-election Romney embarrassment Democratic operatives have uncovered for reporters was his swipe at Palin’s inclusion on Time’s list of most influential people. “Was that the issue on the most beautiful people or the most influential people?” Romney asked, joking that he was “not real cute” himself. But a Democratic memo to reporters announced that Romney had been on People’s Most Beautiful list in 2002.

Romney’s schedule is a testament to his measure and caution as he has worked to stay in front of crucial conservative constituencies and away from unnecessary squabbling on news shows. “He’s not a talking head, and he doesn’t want to be critic-in-chief,” says spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom. Romney turns down 95 percent of the media requests he receives and has refused to cooperate with what he calls “Romney-in-exile” profiles, including this one. “He is not a candidate, he is a private citizen,” says Fehrnstrom. “He does not want to invite or encourage speculation about 2012.”

Instead, the PAC’s project has been to position Romney as the thinking man of the Republican Party. (Here he faces competition from former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who has his own policy-oriented PAC and well-earned ties to the conservative establishment.) The material that has survived since the campaign is the stuff that presents Romney as a sage, full of geo-strategic concepts and a passel of rhetorical tricks to elucidate them: analogies and typologies and copious references to great-man figures and historical “inflection points.” At the National Rifle Association convention, Romney spoke only cursorily of gun issues, saving most of his energy for a schematic account of the “four strategies competing to lead the world in this century” and a comparison of modern-day liberals to “monarchists.”

Romney is hoping to crystallize this worldview in his second book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, which he has been writing, with a research assistant’s help, from a laptop at his Lexington office and on the beachside patio of his home near San Diego. (It will be published in March.) Those who have read parts of the book say not to expect any surprises, just a coherent synthesis of Romney’s views that will help demonstrate his seriousness to a broad audience.

Romney also seems to be quietly aligning with a faction of conservatives bidding a quiet farewell to the party’s overarching obsession with culture. Last summer, Romney met Virginia congressman Eric Cantor when the two were dispatched for a day of spokesman duties at the Democratic Convention in Denver. In November, Cantor was elected House minority whip and quickly invited Romney to address congressional Republicans when they gathered for their first post-election retreat. Now the two speak regularly by phone.

When Cantor unveiled his National Council for a New America, perhaps the most concerted of the efforts within the party to rebrand the Republican agenda, he had Romney by his side for the early May photo op. At a suburban Virginia pizzeria, Romney and former Florida governor Jeb Bush were perched on wooden stools as two of Cantor’s five “national experts”: a tableau of a smart, good-natured party in search of a common-sense future. The group’s founding documents promised “a conversation with America that seeks to remove ideological filters” on issues like health care, education, energy, national security, and economic issues. There was no mention of immigration, abortion, judges, or gay rights, and Republican leaders most popular with religious conservatives -- Palin and Huckabee, in particular -- were glaringly not included.

“He’s someone who is solutions-oriented. He’s about results, it’s about deliverables. He says: Let’s put a goal out there,” Cantor says of Romney. “So much of what our party needs right now is the respect that we can implement our conservative vision.”

As Romney advisers mined their 2008 experience for potential 2012 lessons, several rued the fact that he had been introduced nationally as an ideological purist and not as a businesslike pragmatist. Instead, his campaign focused too intently on winning over Iowa’s evangelical voters, for whom Romney’s Mormonism had likely been an insurmountable hurdle, aides concluded after the election. “If you’re looking for a mistake we made, we should have made [the campaign] more about competence,” says Ron Kaufman, a lobbyist and former White House official who advises Romney. “If a Republican can win in 2012, it will be because competence matters.”

Advisers say Romney can likely wait until after the 2010 midterm elections before deciding whether to run and beginning to build a formal campaign organization. (Romney officially announced his last candidacy in February 2007, although staff and strategy had been in place for months beforehand.) “He’ll have the greatest flexibility to wait and not do all these things, because he’s done it before,” says Kaufman.

“My sense is, if Romney runs for president again, he won’t have the same problems with the ideological purists and those skeptical of his faith, his past position on abortion or guns. All those issues have been largely placated by him proving himself as a committed team player,” says Musser. “My bet is you’d see Mr. Fix-It on full display.”

The grander challenge is whether Romney, a proud strategist of reinvention who called his first book Turnaround, can get away with such a stylistic makeover -- even if Romney’s heart is far more that of a technocrat than a true believer.

This spring, Romney sold his homes in Belmont and Utah, bringing his recession-era inventory of houses to two (in California and New Hampshire). But he may add another: He has started shopping for a condo in Boston. “He’s slowing down a bit, and realized he has more than he needed,” says Tagg Romney, who now hosts his parents in a kitchenette-equipped guest room at his own Belmont home when Mitt and Ann need a place to sleep in Boston. (Romney’s staff is still struggling to capture the language of residential austerity: Fehrnstrom talks of “opening up the house” on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee for summer as though it were a weeks-long activity.) The property shift sets Romney up to claim home-field advantage in New Hampshire, a state he needs to win. But Romney will remain registered to vote in Massachusetts, Fehrnstrom says.

When he geared up to run the last time, Romney went to Iowa and bivouacked there for much of 2007. Romney advisers are already beginning to see New Hampshire as a stronger base from which to launch the early days of a 2012 candidacy; when Romney volunteered to do future National Council events, he told Cantor he wanted to do them in the Northeast. “Iowa will be reassessed by both parties -- whether people should be planting the flag there as much as they have,” says Gage, the former Romney consultant. “My takeaway personally is that New Hampshire is still the king. It really is the most important, and not Iowa.”

The most audacious option would be to completely bypass Iowa -- as McCain did in 2000 and toyed with doing last year -- and with it downplay the circuit of conservative interest groups to which Romney felt obliged to pay fealty in advance of 2008. “He doesn’t have to do that again,” says Keene, the American Conservative Union head. “That’s the plus side of his candidacy. A lot of people got comfortable with him, and he didn’t make a fool out of himself. You don’t always lose by losing.”

Sasha Issenberg, the Washington correspondent for Monocle, is the author of The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy. He previously covered national politics for the Globe. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.