Election 2012 Can Anyone Stop Romney?

After a photo finish in the first real voting of the 2012 Republican nomination process, the surviving candidates had very different rides awaiting them. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, winner on Jan. 3 by the unlikely margin of eight votes–remember that number, for it speaks volumes about Romney’s situation–climbed onto the front-runner express with a tank full of money and a club car packed with very important friends.

However, with 3 out of 4 participating Iowans voting for someone else, Romney may be in for a rough road ahead. Next up is New Hampshire, Romney’s home away from home. He has a big lead in this state that loves to take leaders down a peg. After that, South Carolina, the conservative firewall–and Romney has never been a conservative favorite. You can read an eight-vote victory in Iowa as a sign of Romney’s strength (he dashed in late in the game and won on the cheap) or as a sign of weakness (shouldn’t a guy who has been running for more than five years be able to crack 25%?).

There’s a lot of history to suggest that he’s inevitable now, but there are also some good reasons to believe history could be rewritten this year. The wild ride of 2011–when one Republican candidate after another surged to the front only to lose a wheel or three–is not yet over. Romney’s foes have a little time left to stop his relentlessly chugging locomotive.

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum was the Cinderella story, transformed from a rounding error in the polls to a virtual tie for first place almost overnight. Iowa always crowns a Cinderella somehow, but the poor thing never seems to win that second slipper. Ask President Mike Huckabee about that. Santorum’s ticket is for a pumpkin in need of some bippity-boppity magic: he’s short on money, staff and supporters in the three states–New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida–that will make or break him in the remaining days of January.

Then there’s Ron Paul, the third-place Iowa finisher who captured better than 1 in 5 caucus votes. The libertarian purist rode out of town as he rode in, on his own private track. No one can predict the course of an American politician whose idea of a victory speech includes the triumphant cry “We’re all Austrians now!” For his fellow devotees of the patron saint of unregulated markets, Ludwig von Mises, that’s celestial music. But as Adlai Stevenson might have said, Yes, but he needs a majority.

As for the other also-rans, they were all poll toppers at one point or another along the strange GOP path. Newt Gingrich, at 13%, promised to soldier on to New Hampshire and South Carolina, nursing a nasty grudge against Romney over a barrage of critical ads. Texas Governor Rick Perry, on the other hand, sounded relieved to be heading home to Austin after winning just 1 vote in 10 (even as he promised to hang in there a bit longer). And last, Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann, winner of the 2011 GOP Ames straw poll, quit the race the morning after the vote. You might think this would teach America’s political pundits something important about the Ames straw poll. But you already know: those people never learn.

Primogeniture, American Style

So can anyone stop Romney? As first Bachmann, then Perry, then Herman Cain, then Gingrich, roared past him in the polls, it seemed that everyone could beat Romney, but no one has. Now the answer depends on whether the GOP, after its tempestuous Tea Party uprising, has turned a new page or is back to the same old nominate-the-next-guy story.

The appearance of Paul among the top three finishers certainly felt like a new story. Strange times produce strange characters, and there aren’t many characters like Paul–a 76-year-old Texas ob-gyn who fits perfectly on the backbenches of Congress because he wants to lead the country in an about-face. Then the backbench would be the head of the pack. After a lifetime of being dragged behind the growing behemoth of big government, Paul would be the drum major in a parade to the past, a time before floating currencies, before the war on drugs, before the safety net, before the Fed, before the U.S. developed its expensive interest in foreign affairs and its intrusive desire to outlaw harmful medicines. How far back he would take us is hard to pinpoint–more than a century, for sure. Definitely past both Roosevelts.

The epic scale of Paul’s singular vision–the impossible radicalism rather than the details–suits him this election year. Conventional candidates with plausible agendas are sufficient for ordinary times. But when economies are teetering and continents are imploding and earthquakes spawn tsunamis to wipe out nuclear reactors–well, a certain percentage of voters naturally seek something more dramatic than a payroll-tax debate.

That percentage, according to Iowa, is 21. It’s a highly devoted 21%, however. Nearly half of Paul’s voters are under age 30, by some accounts. They wear his gear and wave his signs and chant his name when he enters a room. At one event just before the Iowa voting, a group of Ronulans sat in the front row with P-A-U-L loudly painted on their shirts, like modest versions of the beer-guzzling lads who paint their chests at football games. One couple dressed their young son as a libertarian superhero, complete with a cape and a hat emblazoned with AUDIT THE FED.

Romney’s worry is not so much that Paul will grow that tribe into a majority–not as long as Paul shrugs at Iranian nukes and gay marriage while taking the hard line against the Patriot Act and aid to Israel. The worry is that Paul will never go away. Voters drawn to him are not likely to embrace a cookie-cutter candidate like Romney as long as they have a choice. Paul can pound away with his Austrian purity–making Mitt look like a wobbly trimmer by comparison–all the way to the convention and beyond. Will he? Who knows? He tells TIME he could support Romney; he also tells TIME he wouldn’t rule out a third-party bid.

Take away Paul and the story looks more familiar. Iowa produced its usual cast of characters. Romney, starring as the Favorite, has the role previously played by the likes of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. As the Surging Social Conservative, Santorum steps into the shoes of Huckabee and Pat Robertson. Gingrich and Perry are vying for the role of the Underperformer. It seems inevitable that even with Paul on the stage, Republicans will reprise their familiar script, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Back the Front-Runner.” The end result of Tea Parties, Twitter and trillion-dollar deficits may be the ho-hum re-enactment of the GOP’s tried-and-true tradition of nominating the next guy in line.

That’s Romney, who finished the 2008 campaign season behind John McCain, who finished in 2000 behind George W. Bush, who never had to finish behind anyone because he was the second nominee named George Bush. He ran after Bob Dole, who finished in 1988 behind the other George Bush, who finished in 1980 behind Ronald Reagan, who finished behind Gerald Ford in 1976. The House of Windsor is more unpredictable than the House of Reagan.

A Circular Firing Squad

Santorum would love to rewrite that ending by picking up the anti-Romney pieces scattered in Iowa. With his strong opposition to abortion and gay marriage, he can make a plausible case that he is to the right of Massachusetts Mitt on social issues. And having surged at just the right moment (after 381 often lonely appearances in all of Iowa’s 99 counties), he’s in a position to bid for the supporters of popped bubbles like Perry and Bachmann.

But he will have to move fast, and it won’t be easy. He has his powerful work ethic on his side: not only did he spend 100 days in Iowa, but he has also clocked more time in New Hampshire than any candidate other than Romney and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who has all his chips on the Granite State. He’s better organized in South Carolina than his rivals realize.

On the other hand, he and Perry will have to compete with Gingrich for the anti-Romney vote, and now that he has burst from the pack, it will be his turn under the microscope that proved so unflattering to his fellow candidates. There are reasons Santorum was the last to surge. Dour and officious during debates, he lacks the charisma of Cain, the donor network of Perry and the magnetism of Bachmann. Santorum has been described as a “Tea Party kind of guy before there was a Tea Party,” but he also has ties to K Street, a taste for pork and a record of supporting the kind of government expansion–including Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind–that the Tea Party was born to resist. He lost his last race, in a swing state, by 18 points–the most by any incumbent Senator in 26 years.

To consolidate the right-wing vote, Santorum will have to eliminate Gingrich, and that may mean continuing to spend ammunition in what proved to be a circular firing squad in Iowa. The struggle to be the most conservative in the bunch left everyone wounded–but Romney perhaps least of all. “Voters have been like a little kid in an ice cream store, always distracted by the flavor of the month,” says Cary Gordon, an Evangelical Sioux City pastor and Santorum supporter. Romney slipped through an interminable series of debates with few bruises as the others battled for a chance to fight him. He wasn’t flashy, but he wasn’t foolish either. He set out from the beginning to be the last man standing.

In the process, Romney revealed himself to be a better candidate than he was four years ago. Then, he spent $10 million on an effort to win Iowa, only to finish a distant second, after which his campaign went into a tailspin. This time he skirted the caucus until late in the game, then dashed in to snatch a win when he saw how splintered the field had become. He heads to New Hampshire above the fray, already talking like a nominee–Obama, Obama, Obama–and daring his remaining opponents to interrupt such a popular GOP chorus.

Romney is, in other words, ready to scale up to a national campaign. Iowa and New Hampshire spell the end of the season when a candidate like Santorum can levitate by sheer hard work. There will be no more 100-day, 381-event gradual get-to-know-yous. The remaining GOP delegates will be awarded in quick blizzards from coast to coast, heavily influenced by governors, Senators, state party chairs, county commissioners–yes, the party establishment–who have already, by some strange telepathy, settled on Romney, the next in line.

“Never forget that most of the delegates at a Republican convention, 50% to 80%, have been to conventions before,” says GOP veteran Ed Rogers. “Romney’s not a particular favorite of the Washington insiders,” and he isn’t the first choice of conservative purists. But he has been collecting those governors and those county party chairs, which means that in spite of his tie with Santorum in the first balloting, he’s much closer to the 1,145 delegates needed to sew up the nomination.

Santorum will never forget the thrill and G-forces of his steep trajectory during the last days in Iowa. But can he defy gravity? He’d be the first Iowa rocket ever to do so on the Republican side.

The Iowa caucus is always less an election than a plot twist. It’s a relatively small sample from a relatively square state. And its track record at picking winners is poor. What it’s good for–what it has done again this year–is to focus the drama of a presidential campaign. And focus is welcome, given the rather unfocused story up to now. As he seeks to write an ending to his long fight for the nomination over the next few weeks, Romney might take a look at the collected lyrics of Paul Simon. “After changes,” he wrote in “The Boxer,” “we are more or less the same.”