Romney making all the right moves for a good run in '12

BOSTON — Mitt Romney doesn't have a job, for the first time in his adult life. That hardly means he's not working.

In ways both subtle and overt, the 2008 Republican presidential contender, former Massachusetts governor, one-time Olympics chief and high-flying businessman is building toward a 2012 White House campaign by judiciously engaging and disengaging with the national debate.

Today, he's in Chicago to speak at a fundraiser for a prospective state treasurer candidate. On Wednesday, he's in Washington to headline a fundraiser for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. On Thursday, he's again the keynote speaker at a fundraising dinner for Republicans in New York City.

After that, he's heading back to his oceanfront home in La Jolla, Calif., to continue writing newspaper columns and a political book. Based on the '60s tome "The American Challenge" by Frenchman Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, it will be aimed at shaking American economic and political complacency, he said.

Romney's also supervising the sale of houses he owns in Massachusetts and Utah, the type of excess real estate that brought ridicule to John McCain last fall. And his political action committee is seeding money to candidates across the country.

"This is a quiet time," Romney insisted Friday during a telephone interview with The Associated Press from Park City. He had just completed loading a U-Haul trailer with personal effects from the ski home he's selling and was about to set out — alone — for the 111/2-hour drive back to California.

"At this stage, running again is way beyond the horizon," said Romney, 62. "This year is working on a book. The next year will be helping in Republican campaigns. And I don't know what the year after that will bring."

Republican strategist Mary Matalin says she can easily see a second campaign — and a more successful one, at that.

"There's nothing like going around the track once to broaden the field," Matalin said. "He has an intellectual base. He has a politics-faith base. He certainly has an economic base. If there's anything illogical about it, it's that he — and not some of the other people who may appeal more strongly to one of those elements — has the greatest potential to pull all those factions together."

A year ago, Romney was little more than one of the 10 vanquished contenders on the road to the Republican presidential nomination. McCain won after an especially nasty Florida battle with Romney.

Yet rather than wallowing in defeat, Romney re-engaged. He dispatched his top fundraisers to McCain's cause, and he urged former business colleague Meg Whitman, once the chief executive of eBay, to sign on as a senior McCain adviser.