That darn Tea Party is at it again, by saying what it means and meaning what it says.  The February 7 Santorum trifecta, in which the AntiRomney du jour thumped Mitt Romney by 30 in Missouri, 27 in Minnesota, and 6 in substantially Mormon Colorado (wow), is more of what has been the primary point of this 2012 Republican nomination contest:  that the Tea Party wants what it considers a real conservative, and not Mitt Romney, to run against Barack Obama.  While I picked Newt Gingrich to win the Republican nomination because he was the last AntiRomney standing, my error was not in assessing the Tea voters.  It was in failing to notice that the Republican Party still had a viable AntiRomney to whom it could turn -- former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.  Santorum became the eleventh Republican to lead national primary polling during this election season when PPP's national poll released Friday read Rick 38, Mitt 23.  So can the Romney Inevitablists finally pipe down?  How wrong do you have to be before you see it?

The best proof that the GOP voter really doesn't want Mitt lies in the weird variety of AntiRomneys thus far given meteoric rises in national polls by the GOP voters.  These AntiRomneys are united only by being unelectable (except perhaps for Chris Christie) and not Mitt Romney:  Rick Perry (good ol' boy evangelical AntiRomney), Michele Bachmann (family values AntiRomney), Herman Cain (entertaining businessman AntiRomney), Newt Gingrich (smart-acting gravitas AntiRomney), Chris Christie (northeast moderate hoped-for AntiRomney) and Rick Santorum (social conservative purist AntiRomney).

Let's get the obligatory discussion of Mormonism out of the way up top -- to be an AntiRomney you can't be a Mormon.  None of this gaggle of AntiRomneys is Mormon.  And a different Mormon with a very strong resume ran against Romney, but no one cared.  Jon Hunstman may be the only Republican besides my dad who wasn't enlisted as an AntiRomney by the Tea Party in this primary cycle.  The evangelical allergy to Mormonism evidenced in Romney's dismal showings in South Carolina in 2008 and 2012, and the unsurprising failure of Hunstman to catch fire, both illustrate though fall short of proving the antiMormon bias that continues to dog Mitt Romney.  Polling better proves the bias.  But in a party that values overt religiosity, the bias is not surprising, now exposed as the GOP primary voters lurch from one remarkably implausible general election candidate to another.  So we note that a necessary but not sufficient condition to being the AntiRomney is not being a Mormon.

Yet the real bedrock characteristic of the AntiRomney is not religion, but being a darling of the Tea Party movement.  The Tea Party coalesced behind nonpolitician Herman Cain, which made sense because the Tea Party, despite periodic spitballing from the left to the contrary, is a populist political movement, and is in some sense antipolitical.  Yet hating politics as it has existed is only a strain in the Tea Party.  Hating large government and the Obama presidency is another.  So it made sense that the Tea Party then turned to consummate insider Newt Gingrich, because he was the person best able to mount in biting language the conventional hard-right arguments against Obamaism and its many works.  (That he had not authored RomneyCare helps.)  If you read polls, you could see this happening before it happened.  Before the Newt surge, Newt led Romney in one-on-ones among Tea voters, and when Cain withdrew, Newt's favorability with Cain voters was roughly 60/20, while Mitt's was roughly 33/55.  So how does that relate to Santorum?  Now that Santorum has won a few states and is plausible, he wins among Tea Party voters by the same 50 or so/17 or so/17 or so that Gingrich did at his high water mark, with Gingrich and Santorum swapping places.  R-money in both cases remains mired in the teens.  The Tea Party coalesces around one AntiRomney, and has done this with striking clarity as to Perry, Cain, Gingrich, and now Santorum.  The only real question is whether Santorum, now that he is plausible, will get the influx of money needed to go toe-to-toe with Romney.  If so, he should win, or at least deny Romney the majority of delegates.

His amen corner to the contrary, the case that Romney will win remains remarkably weak.  He has won his home state.  After campaigning there at the last moment, he narrowly won adjacent Maine, splitting the delegates with Ron Paul, who is now at 8% nationally.  He won Florida after Gingrich could not withstand millions in attack ads.  And he won heavily Mormon Nevada, but by less than he did in 2008.  Mitt lost Iowa to Santorum despite carpet-bombing it, proving only that Romney could buy his way into being the AntiGingrich.  (Point made.)  Romney was a distant third in Minnesota, in the teens.  He got his 25% in Missouri, but with Gingrich off the ballot, Santorum more than doubled him up at 55-25.  And he couldn't even win Colorado, a substantially Mormon state, with delegates at stake, despite winning it handily in 2008.  And he has achieved this equivocal outcome by spending enormous sums of money, and with enormous sums expended on his behalf.  PPP shows Santorum up 38-23 nationally, which seems wrong.  But Gallup shows Santorum now as close as 34-27, and those numbers will get closer as the early-week days fall out of the survey and are replaced with post-trifecta input.

I had maintained all along that Romney would not beat Gingrich because the race would eventually be one-on-one (requiring finishes at or above 40 to win), and Romney, I argued, performed too badly among Tea Party voters to win the Republican nomination in that environment.  This is still true, other than my failing to grasp (like almost everyone else analyzing American politics, Howard Kurtz possibly excepted) that Gingrich could fail and Santorum could rise to the point of coalescing the AntiRomney vote (Santorum beat 40 in CO and MN, and beat 50 in MO, Romney didn't hit 35 in CO, and didn't exceed 25 in the other two).  Santorum lacks the personal weaknesses of Gingrich.  Romney has already raised his own negatives by scorched-earth attacks against Gingrich.  He may lack the capital within the conservative wing of the Republican Party to savage someone else to his right, particularly as Gingrich and Santorum complain of Romney's negative campaigning.  And on Super Tuesday, while Romney should win Michigan and Massachusetts (almost exhausting his supply of home states), Santorum should win Oklahoma and North Dakota, with the biggest delegate prize, Georgia, going to Gingrich, who has led in every poll there to date, including recently.  The picture will remain unsettled into late March, giving us the entertaining prospect of Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney dueling it out in the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, and American Samoa.

Polls over the last year consistently suggest that the best thing the Republican Party could do would be to nominate the generic Republican -- a Republican without a name, a history, or attributes of any sort.  Such a featureless cube would poll pretty well against the President, who of course has a name, a history, and a record.  This inspired a bit on Comedy Central I really enjoyed in which an announcer at a political rally introduces to great cheers a Republican wearing a bag over his head adorned with red, white, and blue question marks, saying, "You're going to love him.  He's serious.  He stands for a series of positions you favor.  He's someone really, really credible who you admire.  He could even be Jeb Bush -- you never know!"  Yet polls have shown that actual Republicans with actual names generally lose to Obama, even though generic Republicans poll roughly even with him or sometimes ahead.

The Tea Party has given this idea of the electably generic Republican a special Tea Party twist, as it lurches from one nominee who would lose in the general election to another, all obviously in search not of the Republican most likely to win (he's the one they're bent on defeating), but instead, in search of the generic AntiRomney.  Thus far, none of them has closed the deal, for once the AntiRomneys get particularized, they do come under attack:  Cain for his silly 9-9-9 plan (and mistress), Perry for his rock and remarkably bad debate performances, Gingrich for his lobbying (and mistress).  But Mitt Romney hasn't yet tried to peel the bark off of Rick Santorum, and given Santorum's generally positive bearing, overt religiosity, and campaigning while his daughter struggles with an inevitably fatal illness, Romney is wise not to try to carve particular negatives into him.  Santorum thus gets to be the generic AntiRomney, at least thus far.  If only Newt Gingrich would quit the field after Super Tuesday on March 6 or Alabama on March 13 and endorse Santorum, Santorum could be the One True AntiRomney.  I ate crow on the Gingrich prediction, but my logic holds:  in a one-on-one race, the AntiRomney should defeat Romney,  especially if he remains generic, as none of the others were able to do.  The Santorum surge has just begun.  If you're on InTrade, buy generic.  Or do you say gener-Rick.  Because Romney remains far from inevitable.  The only inevitability in this predominantly conservative, white party is the teabagging, and that Santorum would come from behind.