1 of 3. Former U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney stands onstage for remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, March 15, 2013.

OXON HILL, Maryland | Fri Mar 15, 2013 7:47pm EDT

OXON HILL, Maryland (Reuters) - At a gathering for conservatives to plot their future, there was a stark reminder of the past on Friday as failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney made his first public speech since election night.

"I am sorry that I won't be your president," Romney told the audience of the Conservative Political Action Conference, "but I will be your co-worker and I will stand shoulder to shoulder beside you."

Since he accepted defeat to President Barack Obama in the early hours of the morning on November 7 in Boston, Romney has largely vanished from view. He is occasionally spotted on the ski slopes with his family, pumping gas, or shopping at Costco.

He and his wife Ann have retired to La Jolla, California, where the Romney family keeps a home, although they did give an interview to Fox News last month.

The former Massachusetts governor was the first losing presidential candidate in nearly 25 years not to be in Washington on Inauguration Day.

Looking tanned since his time off the campaign trail, Romney delivered what sounded very like his campaign speech. He told vignettes about the Americans he met as he traveled across the country on the way to his eventual defeat.

Romney said he realized the awkwardness of his position.

"As someone who just lost the last election, I'm probably not the best person to chart the course for the next election," he said.

ROCKY RELATIONSHIP

Romney has never had a simple relationship with the conservative base, which always suspected he was too moderate on healthcare, abortion and other issues.

In past years, Romney won the conference's straw poll for preferred presidential candidate, but audiences like CPAC are often filled with the sort of Republicans who were most suspicious of his conservative credentials.

Appearing at the same event last year, Romney declared himself to be "severely conservative." That strained formulation did not warm conservatives' hearts and led to ridicule from some in the media.

For many gathered at a hotel here south of Washington, the lesson from Romney's loss is a simple one: Republicans nominated a candidate who wasn't conservative enough.

On Thursday, Texas Governor Rick Perry, once Romney's rival in the presidential primary, told the crowd: "The popular media narrative is that this country has shifted away from conservative ideas, as evidence by the last two presidential elections. That's what they think, that's what they say. That might be true if Republicans had actually nominated conservative candidates in 2008 and 2012."

"The fact is the base didn't come out for him," said Bob Vander Plaats, the president of the Family Leader and a prominent social conservative in the early-voting state of Iowa. "No matter how much we did to push our base towards him that was a hard rope to push."

Romney was received warmly by the audience and the former candidate thanked them for their "earnest support."

He did have one warning for conservatives.

"We particularly need to hear from the governors of the blue and purple states," he said, advising conservatives not to give up on the states where he lost to Obama.

Romney mentioned two governors — New Jersey's Chris Christie and Virginia's Bob McDonnell — who were not invited to participate in the influential conference.

Both governors have been criticized for taking positions that part with Republican orthodoxy. But a Reuters/Ipsos online poll on Friday showed Christie as the Republican with the best rating against possible 2016 Democratic opponents Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden. [ID:nL1N0C76P2]

LARGELY IGNORED

Since his defeat, Romney has rarely been mentioned by conservatives.

Speaking a few hours before Romney, Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential nominee, centered his remarks on the federal budget and made no mention of his former running mate.

In the aftermath of the last campaign, Republicans have set about refashioning their image, moving away from Romney's campaign positions.

Romney's campaign was marked by a hawkish view on immigration and was hindered by his remarks in secretly recorded video deploring nearly half of all Americans as "victims."

Now, Republican congressmen are playing leading roles in trying to reform immigration laws and leaders are encouraging reaching out to African-American and Hispanic voters, two groups that backed Obama by wide margins.

Influential Republicans like Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal have called on their party to embrace the people Romney appeared to reject in his infamous "47 percent" remarks about voters who receive government aid.

Despite his downfall, Romney was undeterred.

"It's fashionable in some circles to be pessimistic about America, about conservative solutions, about the Republican Party," Romney said. "I utterly reject that pessimism."

(Editing by Alistair Bell and Claudia Parsons)

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1 of 6. U.S. President Barack Obama announces his nomination of White House chief of staff and budget expert Jack Lew (R) as his next treasury secretary, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, January 10, 2013.

WASHINGTON | Thu Jan 10, 2013 8:22pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The first black U.S. president is coming under fire from some of his own Democratic Party for naming a stream of white men to key cabinet and leadership posts in his second administration.

President Barack Obama on Thursday named Jack Lew as his Treasury secretary, the fourth white male he has named to the most prized cabinet posts in recent weeks.

Lew's nomination follows Obama's pick of Senator John Kerry to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. He has also named former Senator Chuck Hagel to be defense Secretary and John Brennan to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

Against this, he lost the first Hispanic woman in the cabinet when Labor Secretary Hilda Solis announced her resignation on Wednesday. And last month Lisa Jackson, who is black, announced she was stepping down as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

"It's embarrassing as hell," New York Democrat Charles Rangel, one of the most senior black members of Congress, said of the Obama appointments.

New Hampshire Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, whose state has the only all-female delegation in Congress, described the appointments as "disappointing."

"We need a government that looks like America so we can address the concerns that we hear from across the spectrum," she said.

Republicans joined in the criticism with former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee accusing Obama of waging a "war on women," using the same words Democrats coined to criticize Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney during the election campaign last year.

"Now a lot of those females who supported Barack Obama are scratching their heads, and they're saying, ‘Whoa! How come there is so much testosterone in the Obama Cabinet and so little estrogen?'" the former Arkansas governor said on his radio show.

Obama beat Romney 55 percent to 43 percent among women, according to Reuters/Ipsos exit polling on Election Day. He also won large majorities of the African-American and Hispanic vote.

DIVERSITY AND DEMOGRAPHICS

Diversity in the United States is usually defined as including women and racial minorities, especially Hispanics and African-Americans. U.S. political pundits parse polling data of women, Hispanics, African Americans and other groups for signs of voting patterns.

They track the "gender gap," which is the percentage difference between Democratic and Republican support among women. Since Obama's re-election in November, many analysts have noted the rising percentage of U.S. ethnic minorities and described his victory as a reflection of changing demography.

The criticism of Obama is surprising because Republicans usually are the party accused of insensitivity to diversity.

Former President George W. Bush deflected this by pointing to the two secretaries of state during his eight years in office -- African-Americans Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. They were followed by Hillary Clinton.

If confirmed by the Senate, Kerry will be the first white male to hold the top U.S. diplomatic post in more than a decade.

Almost overlooked in the criticism is that the White House announced this week that Attorney General Eric Holder, who is black, will stay on as the nation's senior legal officer.

Obama also was widely reported to be considering an African-American woman, United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice as Secretary of State. She pulled her name from consideration because of Republican objections to her statements about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

White House spokesman Jay Carney urged critics on Wednesday to make their judgments only after Obama had completed his team.

"Women are well represented in the president's senior staff," he told reporters, noting that his team included Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Debbie Walsh, director of Rutgers University's Center for American Women in Politics, which tracks women in elective office, said Obama's choices were a missed opportunity to put women into powerful jobs such as heading the Pentagon.

"A case could be made that Barack Obama won on the strength of the support that he had with women, given the gender gap," she told Reuters.

With women filling 36 percent of Cabinet posts in his first term, Obama had the highest percentage of women in top jobs of any president other than fellow Democrat Bill Clinton, she said.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Greg McCune)

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Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney answers a question during the second U.S. presidential debate in Hempstead, New York, October 16, 2012.

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