1. It is tough to see Santorum going all the way. I’m not sure how he wins New Hampshire no matter how well he does in Iowa (short of a some kind of personal Romney “heaaaahhh” meltdown.) So that makes South Carolina huge if (IF) Santorum does well in Iowa. He also would have to build a national organization, deal with frontrunner scrutiny (and the attacks from better funded opponents that go with it), and fundraise to get a national media message all on the fly. Santorum has a lot of needles that need to be threaded if he is going to turn a strong Iowa performance into a nomination (and he hasn’t even gotten the strong Iowa performance yet.) I suspect that, in a primary situation, Romney might be turn out to be a more popular second choice candidate than his polling ceiling (in Iowa and the national polls) has demonstrated.
Still, he deserves his surge a lot more than Cain or Gingrich and we might actually get some decent debate about income mobility and such out of it.
2. Peter Lawler is right that Santorum is what liberals love to hate. The closer Paul comes to actually winning anything, the more they’ll hate Paul too. And they will HATE him. You can look over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen to see how liberals will talk themselves into hating Paul and supporting Obama if it ever comes to that.
3. The X Factor is how the right-leaning populist media (especially talk radio) treat Santorum. If Gingrich and Bachmann do badly in Iowa (finish lower than third), then do they get ignored? In fact it is tough to see why Bachmann even goes on. Do the right-leaning populist media treat Santorum as the only “real” conservative left standing between the RINO Romney and the unofficial mascot of the MSM? If so, then Santorum could get positive free media worth tens of millions of dollars. He could pick up a lot of support very quickly. It also depends on how Perry’s support holds up in the South. If Perry stays a real player in South Carolina, then Santorum could be squeezed out.
4. The media is treating Santorum like a social conservative-identity politics abortion/gay marriage candidate, but that isn’t really how he has run. He has been talking about income mobility, has a record on health care, etc. I don’t like his plan for eliminating the corporate income tax on manufacturers, but lots of people might like it. He needs to pivot hard, on Caucus night, to being the candidate of higher economic living standards for families, earned social mobility, family friendly tax policy, and free market (Cough *Romneycare* Cough) health care reform that will increase family disposable income while maintaining health care security.
