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… in 2012.

Or so says my wife Kathy - and as always, I think she may be right.

While Kathy does not spend her every waking moment glued to the information super highway looking to glean any new nugget of political information (like me), nor has she spent countless hours reading and studying political history (like me) - she can look at a political situation and dissect it with absolute yet simplistic precision. Such is the case with Mitt Romney.

The other day we were sitting in the living room talking about the days events and one of the myriad of cable news shows was on the TV in the background. The pundits on the tube were post-gaming last week’s CPAC conference and they were focused on Romney.

“I can’t get over how much Romney reminds me of Reagan,” I said echoing what everybody else has been saying as of late. “He’s always so positive about everything. You’ll never hear him say anything nasty about anyone. He’s constantly upbeat - just like Reagan.”

“He can’t win this time,” Kathy said, “and he knows it. This is all about 2012.”

Wow, and that’s when it hit me, she could be right. I was curious about her reasons so I asked her, “what makes you say that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t think this is his time, and I think he knows that. It’s like he’s doing this to test the waters.”

While I don’t agree that this is a ‘test the waters’ candidacy for Romney (after Clinton’s ‘test the waters’ campaign of 1992, there are no ‘test the waters’ campaigns… all of them can have real consequences), I do think that this really is about 2012 - and it is just like Reagan in 1976 and 1980.

Here’s why:

In 1976, Reagan made a run at Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination and almost came away with a huge upset. At the time, Reagan was considered something of a novelty. Even though he had successfully served as the governor of the country’s most populous state, California, he still was “an actor” to many Americans. In the ‘76 race he ran as the conservative alternative to Ford - even though many rank and file party members were still skeptical of his credentials. After all, he had been governor of one of the craziest states in the country. The ‘left coast’ certainly did not come to that moniker by accident and his political resume was tied intrinsically to its legacy regardless of what efforts he had made in the name of conservativism.

The 1976 campaign offered Reagan the opportunity to press the flesh, and the public the chance to see through the veneer of the MSM. Sure Reagan looked good on TV, but nobody could be that upbeat in person; could they? And slowly, but surely Reagan proved them wrong.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) for Reagan, in 1976 the stain of Nixon and Watergate was too much for Republicans to overcome. It was unfortunate because Reagan was running against an entrenched Republican establishment that was so afraid of taking chances and switching gears that they chose to ride the horse they had in Ford rather than changing mounts. It was fortunate for Reagan because it’s likely that no matter who the Republican candidate was, it’s unlikely that they would have been able to overcome the stacked deck that the Nixon scandal had created. Additionally some credence should be placed on the value of the Carter administration’s disasterous perfomance and how it helped propel a Reagan Republican victory in 1980.

Fast forward to the 2008 race for the Republican nomination for president. Let’s assume that the race boils down to Romney and McCain (I’m going with McCain for this reason). Regardless of the fact that he lost to George W. Bush in 2000, McCain has been running for president ever since. He’s known nationally, has commitments from many rank and file GOP leaders and is likely to follow the John Kerry Democratic nominaton strategy of 2004 (come out early as the frontrunner, fade for a while, then surge back when it counts).

While McCain’s been running for president all of these years, Romney’s been doing something else - rescuing the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and governing the state of Massachusetts. The similarities to Reagan are eerie - Romney (while not an actor) was thrust on the national stage via the MSM as the savior of the winter games (which to most Americans is just one long version of the old ABC TV show ‘Wide World of Sports’). He gets elected governor of Massachusetts (which is the east coast equivalent of California in its liberal approach to politics) and helps to improve the state’s operations through pragmatic (sometimes conservative, sometimes not) practices. Romney announces his candidacy for president and becomes the target of skeptical conservatives (after all he’s a Mormon, and they don’t quite get it… but they will).

As the race for the nomination comes down to the wire it’s like 1976 all over again. In Romney’s case, he doesn’t get the nomination because McCain is the establishment candidate and the party leaders decide to stick with who they know. This isn’t all bad for Romney though because the Democratic landslide that started with the 2006 mid-term elections continues into 2008 and the Democrats pick up not only more legislative seats, they also win the White House. The war in Iraq is the 2008 version of a White House stain that cannot be washed out…

and now Romney is the odds on choice for 2012.

It’s nice being married to a woman who’s smarter than me.