Jon Chait is mystified, incredulous, bewildered, spittingly puzzled and hilariously unconvinced:
When the Washington Post reported last Friday that Mitt Romney had assembled donors and told them he wants to be president, I refused to believe it. Then the Post reported last night that Romney has said he "almost certainly will" run for president. I still don’t believe it. I don’t care how many people he tells. Nothing could convince me that Romney will actually run for president, not even Romney taking the oath of office.
Chait's is a pretty good spoof of the phalanx of political observers who seem indomitable in their conviction that Mitt Romney isn't really serious. Post-election, early 2013, Romney was already making curiously restless noises of re-interest, which his wife was denying wholeheartedly, which is usually a signal of definite interest. Many — indeed most, at the time — political observers scoffed. A couple months ago Romney emitted much stronger signals of interest. The same observers scoffed again. Now Romney is bloody well assembling a staff, calling donors, formulating a strategy and shrieking to all within earshot (and in possession of press connections) that he's by God running a third time, and yet the aforementioned observers still scoff.
What does the poor demagogue have to do to convince punditry's wise men that if he's quacking like a duck …