How Mitt Romney backed down after saying, 'I want to be president'

On Sunday, The Washington Post published some of the backstory on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's (R) decision not to run for president in 2016.

In a massive, year-end summation of the presidential race so far, the 2012 Republican nominee surprised his inner circle at one point last January by declaring that he was seriously considering the race.

"I want to be president," Romney reportedly told the group then.

And as he looked at the polling data, Romney apparently found evidence that he could win.

"It's like, 'Wow. Wow.' That's not a bad place to start from," Romney told The Post of his thinking at the time.

However, Romney felt a little boxed out by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), who had already announced his exploration of a campaign and was aggressively fundraising for it.

"This wasn't going to happen by a claim of some kind or other people having a difficult time getting traction and then people turning to me and asking me to run," Romney recalled during a late-December interview with The Post.

He continued: "If I wanted to be president, it was a decision I had to make. And Jeb, I think very wisely, had begun raising money and getting things started early on, so the time frame to make that decision was earlier than I might have thought."

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