Not long after Mitt Romney dropped out of the presidential race in early 2008, a titan of New York finance, Julian H. Robertson, flew to Utah to deliver an eye-popping offer.

He asked Mr. Romney to become chief executive of his hedge fund, Tiger Management, for an annual salary of about $30 million, according to two people told of the discussions.

For Mr. Romney, who had spent the previous decade in public life forgoing any paychecks, the position promised to catapult him back to the pinnacle of American business and into the ranks of the stratospherically rich. Several friends and relatives urged him to accept. “Let’s put it this way,” said Mr. Robertson. “He could have made a lot of money.”

But Mr. Romney was uninterested. His mind — and his heart — was elsewhere, still trained in the raw days after his political defeat on an urgent quest: to be understood by an electorate that had eluded him.

From the moment that Mr. Romney ended his first bid for the Republican nomination, he complained to friends, advisers and family that he had felt cheated out of a chance to explain himself to the country. He had emerged from his debut on the national political stage, he told them, as a caricature he did not recognize: emotionally uncaring, intellectually inauthentic, ideologically malleable.

Over the next three years, a little-examined period in his life, he sought to reclaim his public identity with the self-critical eye, marketing savvy and systematic rigor of the corporate consultant that he once was.

When Willard Mitt Romney, 65, delivers his acceptance speech Thursday night in Tampa, Fla., reveling in his success at winning over a fractious party and endeavoring to sell himself anew to Americans, he will owe the moment in no small measure to what he did during this time.

It was a restless period when he labored to persuade voters to see him as he saw himself: a man of deep convictions and big ideas, a credible party leader and inevitable presidential nominee.

He coolly assessed the failings of his 2008 campaign and undertook an intensive yearlong tutorial on everything from the tax code to global jihadism. He wrote a book laying out his vision to answer conservative doubters and counter charges of flip-flopping, elbowing aside a ghost writer who he felt could not channel his voice. He bought good will in his party by crisscrossing the country to raise money for hundreds of candidates, even cutting a check for one lawmaker’s portrait in the New Hampshire State House.

Mr. Romney returned as a far stronger candidate — a crisper debater, a more decisive manager, a better strategist whose chief selling point this time around, his business expertise, was well suited to the political moment. But he also ran up against the limits of his own overhaul.

Averse to exposing his private life, he offered no personal narrative for people to feel they really knew him. His exhaustive campaigning did little to diminish his awkwardness with voters. And for all his preparedness on foreign policy, he offended his hosts on his first overseas trip as his party's presumptive nominee.

Romney's quick reimmersion into politics after his 2008 loss was revealing for a man who, at 60, had already conquered high finance and state government. Suddenly rudderless for the first time in his adult life, he recoiled at the prospect of an unstructured existence, telling an adviser: “I'm not just going to meet with people. I need a plan.”

This 1,211-day stretch shows much of what still animates Mr. Romney: an abiding belief that corporate methods can be applied to the political sphere, a longing to be accepted by the world beyond his close-knit community, and a relentless drive for self-improvement.

“He felt he had been — he knew that he had been — unable to connect with the voters,” said Peter Matson, Mr. Romney’s book agent. “In his mind,” Mr. Matson said, “he had to do better.”

‘The Message Wasn’t There’

Mitt Romney was unsparing on Valentine’s Day in 2008 when he summoned a dozen top aides into a conference room overlooking the Charles River in Boston.

He handed out copies of a single-page document on which he evaluated his bid for the nomination, breaking it into two categories, the candidate and the campaign. What had worked: his strategy for raising money and collecting delegates. What had not: his relative lack of foreign policy experience and muddled positions on social issues.

Participants recalled the exercise in self-analysis as both eerie and impressive, saying that it seemed as if Mr. Romney were talking about someone other than himself. His diagnosis: “The message was not there,” according to several aides, who said he accepted much of the blame.

With a book, Mr. Romney reasoned, he could avoid any ambiguity about what he stood for, circumventing the news media and the political enemies who he felt had misrepresented him in 2008. “I can write what I want to write. I can say what I want to say,” his son Tagg recalled his father explaining.

So in the fall of 2008, at the suggestion of a top political adviser, Stuart Stevens, Mr. Romney signed on with an unlikely writing partner — an Obama-loving Democrat named Russell Martin, who helped write a PBS documentary that won an award for combating homophobia.

It was an uneasy collaboration from the start: Mr. Romney soon rejected an agreed-upon system of tape recording his thoughts, which Mr. Martin would massage into prose. Mr. Romney insisted on drafting every chapter then letting Mr. Martin edit.

“The roles were effectively reversed,” said Mr. Matson, the book agent. “The Romney experience of 2008 was that the people who wrote speeches for him were not good enough. He said that if he had been able to write his speeches on his own, he would have been better off.”

Mr. Romney, a voracious reader and avid student of history, relished what he began to treat as a crash course on the United States military, Russian-American relations, public education reform and federal regulation.

Mr. Romney’s book, “No Apology,” published in March 2010, was a forceful conservative manifesto: an argument for preserving America’s military supremacy, free-market economic edge and energy independence. “He wanted his vision for American to be pretty black and white, which was probably inspired by people calling him a flip-flopper,” said Kirk Jowers, a family friend.

Mr. Romney had rejected suggestions that he write a tell-all memoir. But delving into his biography even in a cursory way did not come naturally. His book agent, ghost writer and editor urged him to apply his personal experience to his policy prescriptions, which unfurled in sometimes dense passages about “purchase power parity exchange rates” and “dynamic regulation.”

“The constant refrain was, ‘This needs more of you,’ ” said one person familiar with the process.

In the end, though, he offered only glimpses of himself in the book, which even Mr. Romney’s agent acknowledged is not a page turner. (“Not fully revelatory,” The New York Times said in its review, noting, not unkindly, that it lacked the “treacly intimate anecdotes meant to reveal the politician’s softer side.”)

Mr. Romney excelled, though, in one facet of publishing: marketing. Competitive about sales and delivering his message, he kept tabs on the book of a potential Republican rival, Sarah Palin, whose memoir hit stores a few months before his did, making its debut at No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list.

His team left little to chance, requiring venues on his book tour to place large orders for “No Apology.” By March 2010, it topped the best-seller list, with an asterisk — bulk orders had most likely skewed its performance.

Constructing a Leader

Publicly, Mr. Romney was coy about his aspirations, telling those who asked that he would not make any decisions about a run until late 2010. Privately, he prepared for the race, one Iowa breakfast round table, Nevada barbecue and Virginia state party dinner at a time.

The Romney playbook remained unchanged from his days at Harvard, at Bain Capital, at the Olympic Games and the governor’s office: He out-hustled those around him. In 2009 alone, he attended 53 events for Republican candidates and causes, made 44 television appearances, gave 11 newspaper interviews and held 8 news conferences, records show.

He kept in close contact with his 2008 campaign staff through e-mails and reunions. And his political action committees made payments to his four top aides from the first race and paid at least three dozen others who would join his 2012 campaign.

Perhaps most crucially, Mr. Romney raised hundreds of thousand of dollars from longtime friends, which he used to saturate state and federal candidates with campaign donations. By setting up a network of political action committees, he tiptoed around donation limits to local officials. From 2008 through 2011, he gave nearly $600,000 to more than 200 officials and party organizations in at least 27 states.

Some recipients became Mr. Romney’s loudest cheerleaders this year.

Last-Minute Jitters

Inside Mr. Romney’s living room in La Jolla, Calif., in December 2010, his top advisers switched on a PowerPoint presentation sketching out a possible 2012 campaign. It included two worrisome names as likely opponents: Ms. Palin and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor. Darlings of the conservative movement, both posed the same far-right threat that had undone Mr. Romney in 2008.

The Tea Party movement was suddenly ascendant, and Mr. Romney, who had governed as a moderate and championed a state-sponsored health care overhaul in a Democratic state, hardly embodied the angry ethos of the new movement. But his advisers counseled calm. They envisioned a campaign with a single-minded focus on the economy, an issue they believed would transcend intramural Republican squabbling, and took comfort in their record of fund-raising for Tea Party candidates.

They saw a path to victory — not a resounding win, they cautioned, but a win nonetheless. But Mr. Romney did not share their optimism.

A few weeks later, Mitt, Ann, and their five sons and daughters-in-law convened at the beach house for a ritual: a family vote on a presidential run. The decision had been unanimous in 2006, but this time around, the enthusiasm was gone. There was a good chance he might not make it through the primaries, Mr. Romney warned, anticipating scrutiny of his Massachusetts health care plan and his Mormon faith. “Why go through the process just to lose again?” he asked, one relative recalled.

The vote was 10 to 2, with only Ann and Tagg favoring a run.

Over the next few months, Mr. Romney told his family three times that he had decided against a race. After all the planning, he had flinched.

In Mr. Romney’s retellings of this period, it was his wife who made the most compelling case for running. But she had crucial allies: trusted aides who argued that he was uniquely qualified to run in 2012 and owed it to himself, and the country, to try.

During a conference call in the spring of 2011, they made their final pitch, asking Mr. Romney if he believed, as they did, that he could fix the economy. He said that he did.

There was nothing left to discuss.
For Mr. Romney, who had spent the previous decade in public life forgoing any paychecks, the position promised to catapult him back to the pinnacle of American business and into the ranks of the stratospherically rich. Several friends and relatives urged him to accept. “Let’s put it this way,” said Mr. Robertson. “He could have made a lot of money.”

But Mr. Romney was uninterested. His mind — and his heart — was elsewhere, still trained in the raw days after his political defeat on an urgent quest: to be understood by an electorate that had eluded him.

From the moment that Mr. Romney ended his first bid for the Republican nomination, he complained to friends, advisers and family that he had felt cheated out of a chance to explain himself to the country. He had emerged from his debut on the national political stage, he told them, as a caricature he did not recognize: emotionally uncaring, intellectually inauthentic, ideologically malleable.

Over the next three years, a little-examined period in his life, he sought to reclaim his public identity with the self-critical eye, marketing savvy and systematic rigor of the corporate consultant that he once was.

When Willard Mitt Romney, 65, delivers his acceptance speech Thursday night in Tampa, Fla., reveling in his success at winning over a fractious party and endeavoring to sell himself anew to Americans, he will owe the moment in no small measure to what he did during this time.

It was a restless period when he labored to persuade voters to see him as he saw himself: a man of deep convictions and big ideas, a credible party leader and inevitable presidential nominee.

He coolly assessed the failings of his 2008 campaign and undertook an intensive yearlong tutorial on everything from the tax code to global jihadism. He wrote a book laying out his vision to answer conservative doubters and counter charges of flip-flopping, elbowing aside a ghost writer who he felt could not channel his voice. He bought good will in his party by crisscrossing the country to raise money for hundreds of candidates, even cutting a check for one lawmaker’s portrait in the New Hampshire State House.

Mr. Romney returned as a far stronger candidate — a crisper debater, a more decisive manager, a better strategist whose chief selling point this time around, his business expertise, was well suited to the political moment. But he also ran up against the limits of his own overhaul.

Averse to exposing his private life, he offered no personal narrative for people to feel they really knew him. His exhaustive campaigning did little to diminish his awkwardness with voters. And for all his preparedness on foreign policy, he offended his hosts on his first overseas trip as his party's presumptive nominee.

Romney's quick reimmersion into politics after his 2008 loss was revealing for a man who, at 60, had already conquered high finance and state government. Suddenly rudderless for the first time in his adult life, he recoiled at the prospect of an unstructured existence, telling an adviser: “I'm not just going to meet with people. I need a plan.”

This 1,211-day stretch shows much of what still animates Mr. Romney: an abiding belief that corporate methods can be applied to the political sphere, a longing to be accepted by the world beyond his close-knit community, and a relentless drive for self-improvement.

“He felt he had been — he knew that he had been — unable to connect with the voters,” said Peter Matson, Mr. Romney’s book agent. “In his mind,” Mr. Matson said, “he had to do better.”

‘The Message Wasn’t There’

Mitt Romney was unsparing on Valentine’s Day in 2008 when he summoned a dozen top aides into a conference room overlooking the Charles River in Boston.

He handed out copies of a single-page document on which he evaluated his bid for the nomination, breaking it into two categories, the candidate and the campaign. What had worked: his strategy for raising money and collecting delegates. What had not: his relative lack of foreign policy experience and muddled positions on social issues.

Participants recalled the exercise in self-analysis as both eerie and impressive, saying that it seemed as if Mr. Romney were talking about someone other than himself. His diagnosis: “The message was not there,” according to several aides, who said he accepted much of the blame.

With a book, Mr. Romney reasoned, he could avoid any ambiguity about what he stood for, circumventing the news media and the political enemies who he felt had misrepresented him in 2008. “I can write what I want to write. I can say what I want to say,” his son Tagg recalled his father explaining.

So in the fall of 2008, at the suggestion of a top political adviser, Stuart Stevens, Mr. Romney signed on with an unlikely writing partner — an Obama-loving Democrat named Russell Martin, who helped write a PBS documentary that won an award for combating homophobia.

It was an uneasy collaboration from the start: Mr. Romney soon rejected an agreed-upon system of tape recording his thoughts, which Mr. Martin would massage into prose. Mr. Romney insisted on drafting every chapter then letting Mr. Martin edit.

“The roles were effectively reversed,” said Mr. Matson, the book agent. “The Romney experience of 2008 was that the people who wrote speeches for him were not good enough. He said that if he had been able to write his speeches on his own, he would have been better off.”

Mr. Romney, a voracious reader and avid student of history, relished what he began to treat as a crash course on the United States military, Russian-American relations, public education reform and federal regulation.

Mr. Romney’s book, “No Apology,” published in March 2010, was a forceful conservative manifesto: an argument for preserving America’s military supremacy, free-market economic edge and energy independence. “He wanted his vision for American to be pretty black and white, which was probably inspired by people calling him a flip-flopper,” said Kirk Jowers, a family friend.

Mr. Romney had rejected suggestions that he write a tell-all memoir. But delving into his biography even in a cursory way did not come naturally. His book agent, ghost writer and editor urged him to apply his personal experience to his policy prescriptions, which unfurled in sometimes dense passages about “purchase power parity exchange rates” and “dynamic regulation.”

“The constant refrain was, ‘This needs more of you,’ ” said one person familiar with the process.

In the end, though, he offered only glimpses of himself in the book, which even Mr. Romney’s agent acknowledged is not a page turner. (“Not fully revelatory,” The New York Times said in its review, noting, not unkindly, that it lacked the “treacly intimate anecdotes meant to reveal the politician’s softer side.”)

Mr. Romney excelled, though, in one facet of publishing: marketing. Competitive about sales and delivering his message, he kept tabs on the book of a potential Republican rival, Sarah Palin, whose memoir hit stores a few months before his did, making its debut at No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list.

His team left little to chance, requiring venues on his book tour to place large orders for “No Apology.” By March 2010, it topped the best-seller list, with an asterisk — bulk orders had most likely skewed its performance.

Constructing a Leader

Publicly, Mr. Romney was coy about his aspirations, telling those who asked that he would not make any decisions about a run until late 2010. Privately, he prepared for the race, one Iowa breakfast round table, Nevada barbecue and Virginia state party dinner at a time.

The Romney playbook remained unchanged from his days at Harvard, at Bain Capital, at the Olympic Games and the governor’s office: He out-hustled those around him. In 2009 alone, he attended 53 events for Republican candidates and causes, made 44 television appearances, gave 11 newspaper interviews and held 8 news conferences, records show.

He kept in close contact with his 2008 campaign staff through e-mails and reunions. And his political action committees made payments to his four top aides from the first race and paid at least three dozen others who would join his 2012 campaign.

Perhaps most crucially, Mr. Romney raised hundreds of thousand of dollars from longtime friends, which he used to saturate state and federal candidates with campaign donations. By setting up a network of political action committees, he tiptoed around donation limits to local officials. From 2008 through 2011, he gave nearly $600,000 to more than 200 officials and party organizations in at least 27 states.

Some recipients became Mr. Romney’s loudest cheerleaders this year.

Last-Minute Jitters

Inside Mr. Romney’s living room in La Jolla, Calif., in December 2010, his top advisers switched on a PowerPoint presentation sketching out a possible 2012 campaign. It included two worrisome names as likely opponents: Ms. Palin and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor. Darlings of the conservative movement, both posed the same far-right threat that had undone Mr. Romney in 2008.

The Tea Party movement was suddenly ascendant, and Mr. Romney, who had governed as a moderate and championed a state-sponsored health care overhaul in a Democratic state, hardly embodied the angry ethos of the new movement. But his advisers counseled calm. They envisioned a campaign with a single-minded focus on the economy, an issue they believed would transcend intramural Republican squabbling, and took comfort in their record of fund-raising for Tea Party candidates.

They saw a path to victory — not a resounding win, they cautioned, but a win nonetheless. But Mr. Romney did not share their optimism.

A few weeks later, Mitt, Ann, and their five sons and daughters-in-law convened at the beach house for a ritual: a family vote on a presidential run. The decision had been unanimous in 2006, but this time around, the enthusiasm was gone. There was a good chance he might not make it through the primaries, Mr. Romney warned, anticipating scrutiny of his Massachusetts health care plan and his Mormon faith. “Why go through the process just to lose again?” he asked, one relative recalled.

The vote was 10 to 2, with only Ann and Tagg favoring a run.

Over the next few months, Mr. Romney told his family three times that he had decided against a race. After all the planning, he had flinched.

In Mr. Romney’s retellings of this period, it was his wife who made the most compelling case for running. But she had crucial allies: trusted aides who argued that he was uniquely qualified to run in 2012 and owed it to himself, and the country, to try.

During a conference call in the spring of 2011, they made their final pitch, asking Mr. Romney if he believed, as they did, that he could fix the economy. He said that he did.

There was nothing left to discuss.