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Romney's Hoped For, Nov. 2012 Headline: 'Mitt Is It'

Mitt Romney greets supporters at Giese Manufacturing, Monday, Nov. 7, 2011, in Dubuque, Iowa.
Charlie Neibergall
/
AP
Mitt Romney greets supporters at Giese Manufacturing, Monday, Nov. 7, 2011, in Dubuque, Iowa.

Mitt Romney was in Dubuque, IA Monday partly to demonstrate that he's really serious about competing in a state he has mostly been absent from.

That had been in doubt since he's only been to Iowa just five times compared with more than a score of visits by some of the other candidates.

While in Iowa where he visited a steel plant where a fabricated metal sign made by the plant's workers awaited him, Romney asked his audience to look ahead a year with him.

According to the National Journal, this happened:

"About a year from now, you're going to wake up and turn on the TV and it's going to say one of two things," Romney told an audience at the Giese Manufacturing steel plant in Dubuque. "One, it's going to say President Obama has been reelected to a second term. If that's the case, you know what the next four years look like; they look like the last four years we've just endured.... The alternative, of course, is that you turn on your TV about a year from now and instead of seeing the Obama camp celebrating you'll see something on the TV that says, 'Mitt is it.' And I will have won."

Reporters in attendance noted that Romney didn't mention his GOP rivals at all, just Obama, suggesting that he doesn't feel the need to skewer his Republican challengers for the nomination since they seem to be doing a fine job hurting themselves.

As Kathie Obrado, the Des Moines Register's political columnist wrote:

He didn't offer a scenario for Herman Cain or Perry winning the nomination. Perry was at 7 percent in the most recent Register Iowa Poll, tied with Newt Gingrich for fifth place. And Cain, well, it doesn't seem like the Romney campaign's too worried about him.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Frank James joined NPR News in April 2009 to launch the blog, "The Two-Way," with co-blogger Mark Memmott.

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