Romney, 59, will make his White House bid official on Tuesday in Dearborn, Mich., a campaign source confirmed. That's not far from where he was born and 39 years since his father, then Michigan Gov., George Romney, announced his unsuccessful presidential campaign in Detroit.
The former head of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, who formed a presidential exploratory committee last month, will travel to several early primary states and cap his announcement tour with a fundraiser event in Boston.
Michigan makes political and personal sense for Romney, according to Bill Ballenger, editor of Inside Michigan Politics, a newsletter and Web site.
"He's a son of Michigan," says Ballenger, a longtime political observer there. "He obviously feels personal ties; he's got roots here."
Romney will be the fifth Mormon to seek the White House and so far, observers say, he is one of three front-runners for the Republican nomination, behind former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Arizona Sen. John McCain. Giuliani said this week that he will file a "statement of candidacy," and McCain has formed an exploratory committee.
Romney will make his announcement at the Henry Ford Museum, whose Web site calls it a showcase of "the people and ideas that have fired our imaginations and changed our lives." Ballenger says Romney could promise such inventive thinking in a state whose economy and domestic auto market are in "terrible trouble."
Romney has tried in his stump speeches so far to define himself as a person who can turn around troubled enterprises. He cites his revival of the struggling Bain & Co., a venture capital firm, and the scandal-plagued Olympics and also notes that Massachusetts wiped out its budget deficit during his single term as governor.
Several presidential candidates have made their intentions known farther in advance than in previous election cycles, a move likely spurred by the fact it's the first election since 1952 that there is no incumbent president or vice president seeking his party's nomination.
"Every month that goes by makes it more difficult to get started," says Christopher Arterton, dean of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. "Given the dynamics of competition on both sides of the aisle, the decisions of other candidates are forcing action out of people like Mitt Romney."
Romney was born in Detroit and grew up in the tony suburb of Bloomfield Hills. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University and earned his master's of business administration and law degree at Harvard University.
His father made his presidential announcement on Nov. 18, 1967, only to withdraw a few months later after saying on a national televised news program that he had been "brainwashed" by the U.S. military into supporting the Vietnam War.
