Politico already has Romney's obituary written: "Mitt Romney was a historically bad candidate" (HA!)

[Texas Lawyer]

Mitt Romney was a historically bad candidate

Republicans weren’t overjoyed about nominating Romney in the first place, partly because he was a shade too moderate for their taste, but also because he was such an inept competitor in the 2008 primaries.

Win or lose, Romney has validated many of those fears, careening from misstep to misstep throughout the 2012 race. If Romney wasn’t fumbling his response to the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act ruling, he was offending the British on the eve of the London Olympics or getting caught on tape bashing Americans who don’t pay income taxes.

On a deeper level, Romney was a problematic candidate for 2012. In a campaign still shadowed by the meltdown of the financial services industry, the GOP picked a candidate as close to Wall Street as any in history. Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said in August that Democrats had branded Romney as a “wealthy plutocrat married to a known equestrian.” He was right, and Romney may have been more vulnerable to such attacks than any other major Republican in America.

Relentlessly attacked by Democrats for his Bain Capital record, Romney never responded in an effective way. He stuck to his script that Obama hadn’t successfully steered the economy back to solid ground, failing to flesh out his own agenda until late in the game and even then only vaguely.

If Republicans come up short in Senate or House races, too, they’ll gripe about the lack of Romney coattails. It probably won’t be fair for the party to blame Romney for all its failings down-ballot, but it’ll happen anyway.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83302.html#ixzz2BNuaFSqG