The joke was that he wanted to be President because he thought it would look good on his resume.
But I assume we’re *not *going to see a photo of him walking on the beach wearing wingtips.
It’s not unprecedented for a nominee to lose interest before the election - it only came out afterward that Mike Dukakis ran mainly because his hyperambitious wife goaded him into it. Then she turned to drink when he lost.
Him checking his watch in the middle of a debate was a big clue.
Elvis-I heard somewhere that Mary Todd Lincoln was hellbent on becoming First Lady, and only married Abe because his prospects were better than Douglas.
I have to keep saying it: the idea that Romney spent the better part of five or six years campaigning for this job and then lost interest months before the election is pretty goofy.
Things often sound better in theory. Especially when you’ve pretty much gotten whatever you’ve wanted your whole life without much heavy lifting.
The idea that things aren’t working out the way he thought they would, that they’re out of his control, and that he’d actually have to take public responsibility for his defects as well as his strengths, that all of that is actually a revelation he hadn’t had before because he’d never really had to face it in his previous campaigns, is not at all goofy.
This was just what my wife said when she heard that Romney had picked Ryan – “Deep down, he’s probably tired and sad about pretending to be someone he’s not, and hopes to lose. Heck, he could afterwards go back to his real self, and maybe even join Obama in a cabinet position or something!”
ETA: For my wife and I, the clincher was when Romney presented Ryan, with no hesitation, as the “next President of the United States”. A telling slip of the tongue, we think.
Just because things are getting harder doesn’t mean he still doesn’t want it.
I think, as an outsider speaking, that what’s happening is nt so much Romney becoming fatigued - although there is that - it’s that he’s just taking a lot more shots to the body. A boxer is usually a lot slower and less effective in the tenth round as he was in the first, but that doesn’t mean he wants to win any less, does it? It’s just that it gets a hell of a lot harder to keep your head up after ten rounds of punishment.
Romney is currently in about Round 7 of a 12-round championship bout, except in the fight he’s in the rules are that its not a regular 12-round fight, it’s seven rounds against another contender and then five more against the reigning champion.
If you were to find a large collections of reports, articles, and video et al for past elections I think you notice similar signs of fatigue for candidates in similar situations; Dukakis, Dole, Kerry, all ran campaigns that at one point or another made it look like they weren’t super duper interested in winning the job. For that matter it’s probably true of most Presidential campaigns, period. The 2008 Obama campaign was a steamroller, but that was not the normal way of things; it could be reasonable argued that Obama’s campaign was the best Presidential campaign ever run. It is not a good example by which to judge other campaigns. It’s like finding all hockey players wanting because they are not Wayne Gretzky.
While fatigue may be a part of this, I also think one has to consider the fact that it’s at about this time, depending on when the nominee is clearly decided, that the challenger starts to become as known and as analyzed as the incumbent. Even having run before, even having served as governor of a state, Romney today is twice as famous as he was a year ago, maybe more than that. He’s facing challenges he’s never faced before and a level of scrutiny he’s never before experienced, in a era where any misstep is Youtubed down your throat in minutes; his “corporations are people” thing went viral more or less instantly. You’re not seeing disinterest, you’re seeing punch drunkenness.
Ha! Yes. Very possible 
Maybe Romney will “leak” his own damaging tax returns soon and then “step down” for the sake of “party unity”, allowing Ryan to go for the nomination at the convention!
We can dream, right? Haha.
Your wife feels similarly to me, it seems. Don’t see him taking a position with Obama though. He’ll want to be making more money by cashing in on his name recognition by doing lectures and a book deal (that’s what I’d do anyway).
Perhaps he figures that any people who are so stupid as to be this easily distracted by a non-issue when this campaign SHOULD be ALL about ‘the economy is still bad’ aren’t worthy of his time. 
I don’t think there is anything to the OP, but my guess that if there is it’s about how easily people are diverted from important issues such as the economy and unemployment to silly stuff like this.
Frankly, it would probably be smarter to lose this election, since I think we are about to be driven off a cliff due to bi-partisan bickering and stupidity.
I never heard that, but Bess Truman hated being First Lady and living in the White House. She almost left Harry when he accepted the VP slot.