Larry Downing/Reuters
EARLY LOSS Mitt and Ann Romney in Washington in 2008 after Mr. Romney dropped out of the race.
BOSTON - Not long after dropped out of the presidential race in early 2008, a titan of New York finance, Julian H. Robertson, flew to Utah to deliver an eye-popping offer.
He asked Mr. Romney to become chief executive of his hedge fund, Tiger Management, for an annual salary of about $30 million, plus investment profits, according to two people told of the discussions.
For Mr. Romney, who had spent the previous decade in public life forgoing any paychecks, the position promised to catapult him back to the pinnacle of American business and into the ranks of the stratospherically rich. Several friends and relatives urged him to accept. “Let's put it this way,†said Mr. Robertson. “He could have made a lot of money.â€
But Mr. Romney was uninterested. His mind - and his heart - were elsewhere, still trained in the raw days after his political defeat not on Wall Street but on the White House and an urgent quest: to be understood by an electorate that had eluded him.
From the moment that Mr. Romney ended his first bid for the Republican nomination, he complained to friends, advisers and family that he had felt cheated out of a chance to explain himself to the country. He had emerged from his debut on the national political stage, he told them, as a caricature he did not recognize: emotionally uncaring, intellectually inauthentic, ideologically malleable.
Over the next three years, a little-examined period in his life, he sought to reclaim his public identity with the self-critical eye, marketing savvy and systematic rigor of the corporate consultant that he once was.
When Willard Mitt Romney, 65, delivers his acceptance speech Thursday night in Tampa, Fla., reveling in his success at winning over a fractious party and endeavoring to sell himself anew to Americans, he will owe the moment in no small measure to what he did during this time.
It was a restless period when he labored to persuade voters to see him as he saw himself: a man of deep convictions and big ideas, a credible party leader and inevitable presidential nominee.
He coolly assessed the failings of his 2008 campaign and undertook an intensive yearlong tutorial on everything from the tax code to global jihadism. He wrote a book laying out his vision and values to answer conservative doubters and counter charges of flip-flopping, elbowing aside a ghost writer who he felt could not accurately channel his voice. He bought good will in his party by crisscrossing the country to raise money for hundreds of candidates, even cutting a check for one lawmaker's portrait in the New Hampshire State House.
Mr. Romney returned as a far stronger candidate - a crisper debater, a more decisive manager, a better strategist and a stick-to-his-message campaigner whose chief selling point this time around, his business expertise, was well suited to the political moment. But he also ran up against the limits of his own overhaul.
“This is who I am,†he told a publisher while pitching his book. “And I want the book to reveal it.†But instinctively uncomfortable with public introspection and averse to exposing his private life, he offered no personal narrative for people to feel they really knew him.
His exhaustive campaigning between presidential races did little to diminish his awkwardness with voters. And for all his preparedness on foreign policy - he had traveled to Afghanistan and the Mideast - he managed to offend his hosts and inspire unfortunate headlines on his first overseas trip as his party's presumptive nominee.
Mr. Romney's quick reimmersion into politics after his 2008 loss was revealing for a man who, at 60, had already conquered high finance and state government but who still needed to set ambitious goals and yearned to fulfill the grandest of them. Suddenly rudderless for the first time in his adult life, he recoiled at the prospect of an unstructured existence, telling an adviser: “I'm not just going to meet with people. I need a plan.â€
