Well I think most of us have gone through some form of the following calculation:
Most of us see Romney as RINO, moderate, liberal, and/or the devil incarnate.
Ron Paul’s libertarian ideas are interesting until he becomes a fruit loop on foreign policy that would get us all killed.
Bachmann and Perry never were ready for prime time, and the MSM and party smear machine denied us the opportunity to vote for someone completely unique like Herman Cain.
So that leaves us with the choice of Santorum or Gingrich. If you set debate and rhetorical capability aside for a moment and assess the comparative weaknesses of each man and the number of things in their past record that they have to apologize for or try to explain away, Santorum comes out on top. Factor the debate skills and persona back in, and it gets a lot closer. Neither candidate is perfect but neither is fatally flawed, and both have pros and cons vs one another.
And that’s where we are. If the Santorum Surge continues to hold, it will tell us which factors have held the greater influence.
Santorum may turn out to be the accidental president in all of this. I don’t think he was the first choice of many but he hung around and now seems to be the “compromise candidate” for a lot of folks who just don’t want to see Romney on the ticket.
I know I won’t like everything he says or does but he’s a far sight better than any of the other three, including Newt who had his chance to steal the limelight and then blew it just like Cain, Bachmann and Perry did. Only Newt’s bloated ego won’t admit it the way Perry did.
Santorum may turn out to be as unelectable as Newt is (60% negatives in national polls) but he’s not yet and has the chance to define himself where as Newt has already been defined to most of America.
IMO, Santorum is the only chance we have left to keep Romney off the ticket. If Santorum wins Michigan and Arizona, the dollars to fund his campaign will follow and he won’t have to run the election on a shoestring.