Experience the excitement of a Mitt Romney rally at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday–without having to be there.

It’s called “service journalism.”

Team Romney previews their line of attack on Santorum.

Rick Santorum arrives in the Granite State.

(And yes, I would have killed to have gotten that headline into the Standard.)

Mitt and McCain, together again for the very first time.

More from Iowa, a couple days old at this point, though.

A long, long day.

In the course of making the strongest case you’re likely to read for  Romney, Galley Friend Ramesh Ponnuru writes:

The current surge for Newt Gingrich looks like one last fling before Republicans settle down with Romney.

There’s something deeply funny about picturing the Gingrich candidacy as a drunken, slutted-up one-night stand from a Vegas bachelor party. I’d pay good money to see Gary Locke or Tom Fluharty do a quickie rendering.

I understand that you quibble with Ann Coulter at your own peril because she’s wicked smart and very funny. And she makes a perfectly sensible argument in favor of Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee.

She does, however, oversell two points concerning his electoral powers:

* “Among Romney’s positives is the fact that he has a demonstrated ability to trick liberals into voting for him.”

That’s true enough–he won a single state-wide election in a very Democratic state. However, I’d remind people that Romney won this race with less than 50 percent of the vote. And also that it isn’t entirely unheard of to have Republican governors in Massachusetts. Romney was elected in 2002. At that point, Massachusetts had had a Republican governor for 11 years.

Romney was preceded by Jane Swift, Paul Cellucci, and Bill Weld.

Weld was elected in 1990 with 50.19 percent of the vote. He won reelection in 1994 with 70.85 percent.

Cellucci, who stepped in for Weld, won his own term in 1998 with 50.81 percent of the vote.

Swift, who stepped into office for Cellucci, did not run because the state party pushed her aside for Romney in 2002.

I’m not suggesting that a Republican winning the governorship of Massachusetts isn’t impressive–it is! But it’s worth understanding that Romney’s 49.77 percent of the vote in 2002–a generally very good year for Republicans nationally–was the worst showing for a Republican gubernatorial candidate in the state in a decade.

* “He came close to stopping the greatest calamity to befall this nation since Pearl Harbor by nearly beating Teddy Kennedy in a Senate race.”

Depends on what you think “close” is. Romney lost by 17 points in a mammoth Republican year nationally. And he ran 30 points behind a popular Republican governor on the same ballot.

I keep having to say this–I’m not anti-Romney. Maybe he’d make a good nominee and be well-positioned to fight Obama. Maybe his experience and intelligence would make him a really great president. And if Coulter is on that bus, then good for her.

I’d just caution that Republicans should have their eyes wide open about Romney’s electoral track record. And that, whatever his other merits, Romney’s electoral experience suggests more bugs than features.

Was that ugly, or what? I’ve been trying to think of a worse debate moment and the only thing that comes close is Bentsen-Quayle. There’s no telling what structural damage it inflicted, but my guess would be more rather than less.

That said, the entire episode is instructive of how unpredictable electoral politics can be. A few thoughts:

(1) There were plenty of Perry skeptics from the beginning. (I was not one of them.) But it turned out that none of the weaknesses they noticed actually hurt him. Remember, the argument against Perry was that he was prone to shooting from the hip; too bible-thumpin’ conservative; and would remind voters too much of W.

But what really damaged Perry was (a) He was too liberal on immigration; and (b) He had two debate moments (his attempted flip-flop attack on Romney and the Lost Third Agency) in which he looked old and doddering and lost.

The other thing that hurt Perry is that he emerged prepared to counter attacks from Romney, but was totally blind-sided when Santorum, Paul, Bachmann, et al took after him like he was a spliced hybrid of Nelson Rockefeller and Saul Alinsky. (This was not an unreasonable assumption on his part, since this group had given Romney a pass for several months.)

(2) Debates have never played as important a role in the primaries as they have this cycle. It’s unclear whether this is an aberration or a new reality. But try to remember a single moment from any primary debates since 1999. The only thing I come up with is “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” The gang-tackle of Perry in his early debates clearly crippled his candidacy–I’d argue more so than his one-on-one jousts with Romney.

(3) Is it fair that Herman Cain gets to say that China doesn’t have nuclear weapons and that he’s for-and-against abortion and that he’d trade hostages with terrorists, but that Perry doesn’t get to have a couple of brain blanks? Nope.

But fair’s got nothing to do with it.

(4) Unless the conversation changes between now and the convention, it would seem that immigration has replaced abortion as the key ideological litmus test in the Republican party. Now, maybe that’s just a function of the candidates needing a club to beat Perry with and immigration being the best-available weapon. But maybe it’s a more foundational shift. If the latter is the case, then this is a real tragedy for conservatism. A few reasons:

* Illegal immigration causes very real problems, but those problems tend to be economic. (Though some of them certainly have a cultural aspect.) Economic problems can be fixed more easily than cultural problems.

* The argument over abortion is–at least to pro-abortion forces–about a lot more than just the killing of babies. It’s about an absolute, iron-clad right to consequence-free sex. Which is, if you think about it, probably the single biggest legacy of the 1960s. If the left holds to anything at all, it’s that sex must never have negative consequences–no unwanted pregnancies, no diseases, no moral disapproval from third parties. That’s why the AIDS campaign was such a vital left-wing cause in the ’80s and ’90s. It’s the root of liberal support for same-sex marriage. It’s behind the idiotic claims that “love can never be wrong.”

All of this is why the only liberal cause Bill Clinton wasn’t willing to sell out for political gain was abortion. He vetoed the partial-birth ban at some real cost. But ingrained in liberal boomers is that this first principle is the cornerstone for the entire structure of sexual “freedom.” Admit that abortion (even in some cases) is wrong and you undermine a continent-sized chunk of liberal ideology and a huge portion of what has become our dominant cultural mores.

* For a host of complicated reasons (I go into this at some length in the book), illegal immigration is likely to significantly decrease in America during the next 20 years–no matter what policies we pursue. (Short version: As fertility rates go sub-replacement, a country’s outmigration dries up, as it has, for example, with Puerto Rico. Nearly all of Central and South America will be sub-replacement within 20 years.)

So debates over, say, building a fence or giving in-state tuition to illegals are more about ideological purity than actual consequence. Unlike abortion, where 50 million lives have been taken since 1973, with no end in sight.

Boy, how about that press conference. Herman Cain was using the third-person in reference to Herman Cain before the end of the first paragraph of his remarks. Also–and I may have misunderstood him, I’ll need to look at the transcript–but I think he might have suggested that some women have sexually harassed him.

But the most interesting moment, for my money, was when Cain was asked about Romney’s remarks on the situation. (He called the allegations troubling or some such.) Keep in mind, Cain is the guy who jumped all over Perry when the Washington Post tried to tar him for being racists. So what did Cain do? He alibied Romney and explained that Romney didn’t mean it the way the reporter–and everyone else in America–took it. Because Romney is a man of immense “integrity.”

I’m not quite sure what the moment meant, but it was pretty interesting.

I’d vote for this guy in a heartbeat:

I’m getting enough email about Perry that I want to, again, clarify something: I’m not in the tank for the guy. I’m not even sure I like him and I’m certainly not sure that he’d be a good president. Let me put it this way: I was never very impressed by George W. Bush and the best line about Perry is that he’s the guy W. was always pretending to be.

People seem to confuse what I think about Perry’s prospects with what I, personally, want to see happen. (In much the same way some people thought that I was a Federer hater just because I realized his eclipse had begun. I doubt you’ll find anyone who loves Federer more than I do, and I hate watching him in decline. But that doesn’t mean that he’s not declining.)

And so: Despite everything, I still like Perry’s chances.

Now, one big thing happened, which I certainly didn’t expect: I thought Perry would unite the insurgent and establishment wings of the party. Not only has that not taken place (yet?), but the opposite occurred. The establishment pushed back against Perry, hard. Like, Palin-in-2009 hard.

But the big question is whether establishment types (both in the actual establishment and the voters who reflect their thinking) are enough to win the nomination today. I think that’s also a very open question.

I’d remind people that for the last two cycles, everything we knew about the nomination fight changed drastically and quickly in the lead up to the actual voting. Dean imploded. Kerry used Iowa to catapult himself away from the entire field. (It helped that he had the money and organization to take advantage of the win.) Huckabee came out of nowhere in Iowa, and Romney was never able to make the sale in any of the other important early states. Obama used the split anti-Hillary vote in Iowa to drive the early part of his march through the caucuses. (If he loses Iowa, I think it’s an open question whether or not he wins the nomination.)

I mention all of this not to say that Perry is Kerry (or Obama, or anyone else) but just to remind people that with three months before the voting, I think fundamentals are more important considerations than a tight-grouping in the polls.

So what are the fundamentals of the race that (for now) we know?

* Romney has firmly secured the GOP establishment, as he did in 2008.

* Romney is an improved candidate, but is still the guy with a very poor electoral record. This doesn’t mean voters will never warm to him. But I’d like to see it happen before I’ll believe in it.

* Supporting the idea that voters are resisting Romney is the pinging around of poll numbers among the other candidates. First Bachman. Then Perry. Now Cain. Clearly there is a substantial anti-Romney vote that’s coalescing, breaking up, and then re-forming around other candidates.

* The question is, will these voters give up the ghost and sign up with Romney at some point? Maybe. But maybe not. In 2003 people thought, My God, the Democrats can’t be crazy enough to nominate someone like Dean! And despite Dean’s lead, they were right. It seems entirely possible that, like the anti-Dean votes in 2004, the anti-Romney votes are eventually going to stop being split among Santorum, Bachman, Gingrich, Perry, and Cain and coagulate around one of them. Of that group, Perry has the money and the infrastructure to best take advantage of such a move.

* That doesn’t mean it will happen, of course. But I keep coming back to this: There must be a reason why Republican voters haven’t rallied around Romney the way they did George W. Bush in 1999. Remember, there was an anti-Bush vote then, too. But it was never substantial enough to challenge the front-runner. Bush was up over the 40 percent mark by summer of 1999 and was at 62 percent by October 1999. If Romney had those kinds of numbers, he’d be unassailable. But I think it’s telling that, despite his money, his organization, his establishment backing, and the fact that he’s been running the longest–he hasn’t been able to get over the mid-20s. If you like Romney’s chances, you have to have an explanation for why this is.

* Remember: Even Bush, with his 40-point lead, got dragged into a dogfight with John McCain–who was in third place until late fall of 1999. Why? Because one of the axioms of American politics is this: All races tighten.

* None of this means that I want Perry to win or that I want Romney to lose. (The only thing I really want is for Mitch Daniels to suddenly jump in and ride to the nomination. And that ain’t happening.) What it means is that I believe Romney has structural weaknesses and has not been seriously challenged by his opponents yet; that early momentum from Iowa has proved very powerful; that Perry has positional and political strengths (to go along with his obvious weaknesses in the debates and on immigration); and that a 7-point gap between lead candidates right now is not dispositive.

* I still think it more than an even-money proposition that someone other than Romney will be the nominee; and of those alternatives, I’d give Perry the best odds. (Though probably all of them–even Santorum and Huntsman–will get a second look by the time New Hampshire rolls around.)