Romney's son: Dad reluctant candidate

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BOSTON, Dec. 23 (UPI) -- Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's eldest son Tagg said his father "wanted to be president less than anyone I've met in my life."

The Boston Globe reported Sunday that Tagg Romney wanted to focus on a list of 12 people his father had helped in having a professional documentary made that would have shown his father's humanitarian side, but Stuart Stevens, Romney's strategist, wanted instead to focus on showing how President Barack Obama's economic policies were not working.

"He had no desire to ... run. If he could have found someone else to take his place ... he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them. He has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn't love the attention," said Tagg Romney, who the Boston Globe said worked with his mother to convince Mitt Romney to run for president.

National GOP officials said they intend to "reverse engineer" the Romney campaign to see what went wrong.

They said it was the Romney team's failure, until too late, to try to convince voters of Romney's leadership abilities and personal qualities, which allowed the Obama campaign to successfully paint Romney as uncaring about average people.

The Globe said Romney's campaign made political, strategic and financial errors that essentially assured Obama's victory.