Willard Romney & Sons, GOP multi-taskers! Jason Horowitz, in the Washington Post:
PARK CITY, Utah — John Schoenfeld came to an exclusive resort here to do business with Mitt Romney. But he stayed for the politics.
Schoenfeld spent most of Wednesday in a downstairs conference room of the Stein Eriksen Lodge assessing the investments of Solamere Capital, the firm co-founded by Romney’s son Tagg and increasingly managed by Romney himself. Then he learned that several potential GOP presidential candidates would be attending a separate Romney conference at the same exclusive lodge.
“I’m going to stretch my clothes another day,” the Chicago-based lawyer said after moving upstairs to join hundreds of Romney’s top donors to kick off the former Republican presidential nominee’s Experts and Enthusiasts 2013 conference. Schoenfeld said he became enthusiastic about the prospect of spending Friday morning driving golf balls with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), breaking bread with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or shooting skeet with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Romney’s running mate in 2012. “That looked like fun.”…
The former Romney campaign aides who haunted the old alpine hotel played down the overlap between the two conferences, arguing that they had planned the ideas conference for the following weekend but moved it up for logistical reasons.
Romney himself made no mention of Solamere as he spoke onstage about “great challenges for America.” Former adviser Ron Kaufman shrugged about Solamere’s sponsorship of the event: “Someone has to pay for it.”
Instead they characterized the three-day event as Romney’s own Aspen Ideas Festival, a significant step in his return to public relevance and proof of his political clout. But the retreat also highlights the enduring flaws that helped sink Romney’s candidacy.
His ideas conference, much like his campaign, had no specific agenda and would define itself over time, aides said. The off-the-record sessions, the cigar rooms and the vanilla homogeneity of the exclusive event evoked the elitism of his disastrous speech to donors about the “47 percent.”…
The Experts and Enthusiasts (E2) event featured serious policy chats about education, the economy, disease and foreign policy. It also included a horseback riding session with Romney and a hike early Thursday morning with Hewlett Packard CEO, failed gubernatorial candidate and Solamere investor Meg Whitman. (“I got a tear in my muscle but I still hiked the mountain,” Ann Romney announced as she limped down some stairs.)
In addition to panel discussions Friday with the Republican hopefuls for 2016, there were other featured speakers, including former Clinton administration insider Erskine Bowles, longtime Obama adviser David Axelrod and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Organizers said they had also reached out to potential Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Andrew Cuomo, though spokesmen for both said they had no knowledge of an invitation.
On Wednesday afternoon, fleets of black Mercedes sedans and luxury SUVs dropped off men in suits in front of the lodge’s facsimile of the Olympic flame. Blond ushers directed them to either turn left at the stone fireplace for the “Solamere Capital Founders Fund Update,” or to hang a right and register for the “E2 summit.” The blue canvas E2 swag bags came with Solamere-branded jackets, shirts and hats.
Attendees mingled on a veranda overlooking ski slopes spotted with patches of snow, and said things to each other like, “Why are you protecting your downside? This is a billion-dollar opportunity.”…