Politico just sent out an e-mail with a surprising piece of news in it:

"Everybody in here can go tell your friends that I'm considering a run," Romney told donors at a private meeting with about 30 former donors, according to one source.

The meeting was called a few weeks ago and was held in midtown Manhattan.

I wasn't convinced before that Romney was taking all this 2016 talk seriously, but a candidate simply doesn't tell supporters something like this without having one foot in the race already. This can only mean Romney doesn't believe Jeb Bush is a formidable enough candidate to win the nomination, a suspicion that's probably being shared a lot in the higher echelons of the Republican Party right now. Now, Romney will gauge the response he gets and make a decision accordingly; I'm willing to bet that if he's telling his supporters this, he's probably got a couple advisors working on a branding campaign for his 2016 run.

The thing is, I could easily see Romney winning the nomination if he decides to run. Bush is going to be a hard sell for teabaggers, Rand Paul has a whiff of his dad's crazy that he just can't clean off, Scott Walker is a suckhole of charisma, and I agree with Nate Silver's assessment that Chris Christie is not likely to go anywhere as a presidential candidate. It's a much wider field of potential candidates than we had in 2012, but it's still not a very deep field. It's a field that's practically begging for a competent national-level politician to come in and dominate. And Mitt Romney might be the closest thing to a competent politician that that Republican Party has right now.