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In Iowa, salad days for Rick Santorum

YOU KNOW what they always say - when things are going really good, they name a chicken salad after you.

YOU KNOW what they always say - when things are going really good, they name a chicken salad after you.

Indeed, these are the chicken-salad days for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, whose rapid rise to here from obscurity in the Iowa caucus polls was celebrated yesterday when the popular Pizza Ranch outlet in Boone, Iowa, renamed an in-house creation its "Santorum Salad."

Just two weeks ago, there weren't many "naming opportunities" for a stalwart GOP culture warrior who was rejected by Keystone State voters in a landslide five years ago and then seemed mired in Iowa's single digits despite all but moving to the nation's first caucus state.

But Santorum - aided by both the millions that GOP-establishment-backed Mitt Romney spent to destroy short-lived Iowa front-runner Newt Gingrich and by late endorsements from evangelical leaders - is surging at just the right time. One key tracking poll showed that by the end of last week he was second to Romney and closing in.

After a series of debates that ran longer than most network sit-coms, it seemed as if tonight would never come, but by this time tomorrow the first results of the 2012 presidential race, from an estimated 120,000 hardcore Iowa Republican partisans, will be on the scoreboard.

What to look for tonight?

1. Santorum - is he for real? Of all the major candidates, aside from too-moderate-for-GOP-prime-time Jon Huntsman, Santorum had been the only one in the unsettled Republican field not to see an upward spike, and some pundits doubted that it would ever happen.

Bidding to become the first president from Pennsylvania since the ill-fated James Buchannan in 1856, Santorum seemed earnest but unexciting, perhaps weighed down by his 16 years in Congress amid an electorate that gets inspired - albeit in short bursts, we now know - by politicians who talk more like talk-radio's Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.

The rapid collapse of Gingrich, creating a large pool of undecided Iowans at the last minute, apparently is convincing the state's large evangelical-Christian bloc that Santorum would be a steady if unspectacular hook-up at the political altar.

"A large segment of the electorate in Iowa is socially conservative - pro-life and anti-gay," said G. Terry Madonna, the Franklin & Marshall College political scientist and pollster. He estimated that if 30-40 percent of tonight's caucus-goers are Christian conservatives, that could spell an upset Santorum win just as a similar turnout carried Mike Huckabee in 2008.

But then what? Experts say that Santorum lacks the time or money to cut deeply into Romney's entrenched lead in New Hampshire, which votes a week from today, and that Romney will also turn his large political checkbook on the Pennsylvanian's support of earmarks and other spending programs while in Congress.

"You present him as just another creature of Washington, just like Newt Gingrich, and say they need a candidate who's been an executive and a business person," said Larry Sabato, University of Virginia historian and presidential pundit.

2. Whither Ron Paul? Every recent poll shows the libertarian congressman from Texas in the Top 3 and possibly even winning Iowa, thanks to support from non-traditional Republicans, including young people who like his stances against the war in Afghanistan and against "the war on drugs."

But most experts believe that his unconventional-for-a-Republican views will make it hard for Paul to poll much above 20 percent in any state, and so his influence will fade as older GOP voters rally behind one or two other front-runners.

3. Who gets voted off the island? A single-digit performance could spell doom for either Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann or Texas Gov. Rick Perry, two front-runners of last summer who have been in trouble for saying wacky things, some of them intentional and some accidental. But some pundits doubt that Perry or Bachmann will quit yet, not with votes in tea-party hotbeds such as South Carolina and Texas coming soon.

4. Ozzie Myers was right: Money talks. If Romney, who didn't campaign extensively in Iowa until the last minute, does win the Hawkeye State, he will have done so the old-fashioned way . . . by buying it.

Gingrich's reign as front-runner in Iowa ended after a so-called Romney-supporting "Super PAC," raising unlimited dollars from corporations and wealthy individials like hedge-fund managers, spent $4.1 million on omnipresent TV ads attacking the former House speaker's record, including his consulting work for mortgage giant Freddie Mac.