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Political parties that hold their noses and go for the guy who seems most presentable tend to swing hard in the other direction when the stiff doesn't deliver.

So the question about Rick Santorum shouldn't necessarily be "Can he win this year?" but "What strain of Republicanism does he represent; will it gain the intra-party upper hand should Romney lose to Obama, and what does that tell us about the modern GOP?"

From my perspective as a small-"l" libertarian and political independent, the answers to these question are grim.

Rick Santorum represents the type of Republican who considers it a pressing national issue in 2012 to persuade Americans that our godless and secular Constitution is actually imbued with a "moral code" and sense of responsibility emanating from God. "Our country never was a libertarian idea of radical individualism," he says, often. "We have certain values and principles that are embodied in our country. We have God-given rights."

Santorum is your go-to Republican if you think the U.S. should bomb Iranian nuclear sites and instigate regime change in Tehran; if you think we didn't intervene in Libya soon enough and need to get working on Syria; if you think jihad is coming from South America and that the problem with the 50-year-old embargo on Cuba is that it just isn't strong enough.

Santorum is your man if you think social conservatives need to play more offense instead of just defense in the culture wars, proactively using the federal government to buck up traditional families and re-moralize a country that has strayed from the path.

In short, Santorum is George W. Bush without the taste for immigration reform and the pre-9/11 preference for a "humble" foreign policy. More compassionate conservatism at home, more neo-conservatism abroad.

If Romney is the tabula rasa Republican, representing nothing and everything in a bid to get elected by any means necessary, Santorum after Tuesday has cemented his place as the GOP's ideas-and-values man. It's his vision--as opposed to the principled limited-government stance of a Ron Paul--that will have pole position if and when Romney loses to Obama.

At a time when the country is heading over a fiscal cliff, it is nothing short of astonishing that the GOP cannot manage to rally around a candidate actually talking about, let alone forthrightly addressing, the signature challenge of our time. A party that takes Rick Santorum seriously is not a party serious enough to govern. http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/14/opinion/welch-santorum-second-place/inde
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