Mills on the Hill: Mitt Romney’s Top Ten

by Jim Mills - 04/18/08 9:07 AM ET

It’s that special time of the year here in the nation’s capital. The cherry blossoms have bloomed. Our baseball team has cranked out its annual allotment of 150,000 “Wait Till Next Year” T-shirts. And the reporters and politicians are breaking bread as they temporarily cohabitate at any one of 136 annual black-tie dinners honoring the press, the First Amendment, and the 21st Amendment, for that matter …

The Gridiron. The Alfalfa National Press Foundation. White House Correspondents. Insect World. All God’s children have a dinner this time of year and if you ARE someone, or HOPE TO enter into at least the outer fringe of someoneness, you must attend at least one of these dinners sooner or later …

And Wednesday night of this week was no exception as I attended the Radio-Television Correspondents’ Association Dinner at the Hilton Hotel, where 2,000 cleaned and scrubbed reporters shared that fakey kind of intimacy with the folks they typically make fun of the other 364 days of the year …

… Cutting to the chase: Bush didn’t show, so Cheney was his backup. Cheney: Pretty funny. Comedian Mo Rocca: Kinda funny. And Mitt Romney: Really, really funny. Just two minutes of a brilliant cameo dreamed up by dinner organizer Steve Chaggaris of CBS.

Romney’s stellar performance convinced Mills on the Hill that the esteemed former candidate-governor is most certainly campaigning to be John McCain’s pick for Veep.

Romney absolutely brought the House down with his Letterman-style Top Ten List of reasons why he didn’t win the GOP nomination. I don’t know for a fact, but Kevin Madden was nearby with that Cheshire Cat grin, so I expect he had a big role in this too.

In any case, Mitt proved, once again, the old adage regarding leaving the stage quickly and with the audience wanting more. Enjoy:

WHY MITT ROMNEY DIDN’T WIN THE GOP NOMINATION

10. There weren’t as many Osmonds as I thought.

9. I got tired of corkscrew landings under sniper fire.

8. As a lifelong hunter, I didn’t want to miss the start of the varmint season.

7. There wasn’t room for two Christian leaders.

6. I was upset that no one had bothered to search my passport files.

5. I needed an excuse to get fat, grow a beard and win the Nobel Prize.

4. I took a bad fall at a campaign rally and broke my hair.

3. I wanted to finally take off that dark suit and tie, and kick back in a light-colored suit and tie.

2. Once my wife Ann realized I couldn’t win, my fundraising dried up.

1. There was a miscalculation in our theory: “As Utah goes, so goes the nation.”