We will have to wait to see whether Rick Santorum’s jump to a virtual dead heat with Mitt in Iowa is enough to bring out the anti-non-Mitt assassination squads. Santorum is an unusually fervent Roman Catholic for a presidential candidate and such an emergence would doubtless treat us all, one more time, to Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times dusting off their former little selves as intellectually abused Catholic choir girls and Garry Wills acolytes in dogmatic schism. Who better to impose the inverse auto-da-fé than the twin Zouave giggly snipers of the Times?

For those of us who take an interest in the vagaries of the Roman Church, the virtuoso performances of Ms. Collins and Ms. Dowd as earnest, questing papists, almost heartbroken at the failure of the last two popes to undergo sex-change operations and turn the Church into a polling organization, and at other, less glaring illiberalities, are like the concluding number in Chicago of Catherene Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger.

Of course, there have been reasonably observant Roman Catholic seekers of national office before, but Al Smith, the Kennedys, Ed Muskie, Geraldine Ferraro, John Kerry, and Joe Biden were not fueled by the divine fire in the way Rick Santorum is. It would be interesting to see, if he becomes a late-blooming but viable non-Mitt, whether the assassination squads move to larger-bore, higher velocity firepower than they have employed against Mitt’s Mormonism and Newt’s conversion to Catholicism (allegedly after hearing his present wife sing in the National Shrine choir before Pope Benedict). That has just been like Fifth and Park Avenue diners-out whose fish has gone off — looking down their noses in muted distaste. Rick Santorum in full cry could generate a call for the instruments of torture to be shown, and other nostalgic references to the Inquisition.

There is also some suspense over whether Newt Gingrich has been sufficiently bullet-riddled to be left for dead, or whether he will require a final fusillade, like (to keep my feeble cinematic similes going) Bonnie and Clyde, and Sonny Corleone at the turnpike kiosk. He served notice Tuesday night that he will pitch into Mitt for the governor’s negative ad blitz against him when Newt had his 15 minutes as chief non-Mitt. I refuse to take Ron Paul seriously, though I agree with his plan to make the splendid Jim Grant Federal Reserve chairman. Paul’s views on terrorism and foreign policy generally have disqualified him so far, even as target practice for the snipers. The fact that 21 percent of Iowans voted for someone who thought America had it coming on 9/11 deserves serious analysis, when this campaign is over.

But the gripping drama will be the struggle, which will intensify next week after New Hampshire, between the bandwagoners who will, on behalf of Mitt, behave like a team that has just won the Super Bowl with a dramatic touchdown, dancing jigs, clapping behinds, and embracing like lottery winners; and the naysayers who fail to find the arithmetic, still beat the bushes for live non-Mitts, and start the preliminary linguadental exercises for the greatest American blank-verse epic since Longfellow, on the theme “He can’t close the deal.”

Not to stoop to sacrilege, if Santorum’s levitation is less than an ascension, and Newt is only twitching but otherwise stilled and incapable of taking back support from Mitt in New Hampshire in this payback week, the Republicans will be on a razor’s edge. Unless Jon Huntsman arises in New Hampshire and smites Mitt in his own backyard, it will be a contest that was long traditional in both parties, of whether the frontrunner has the steam to assemble a convention majority before the convention opens.

In such contests, favorite sons (the mayor of Chicago controlling the Illinois Democrats was the most frequent, but Rick Perry will still have the Texas delegation to deliver and could probably trade them for the vice-presidential nomination, as Democrat John N. Garner did in 1932) held back state delegations to decide whether to be kingmakers, resisters, or dark horses themselves. The proliferation of primaries, immense expense of campaigns, and decline of local political machines have tended in recent decades to decide races before they got to the conventions.

But there have also generally been stronger leading candidates than Mitt: Twenty-five percent or so in Iowa and neck-and-neck with an underfunded turbo-Catholic pitching the evangelicals, and only 4 points ahead of a loopy challenger like Ron Paul (though his fiscal and libertarian ideas have considerable merit), are not going to knock the hat off anyone who doesn’t need headgear to think clearly. There is no real bandwagon now, only the perfervid efforts of the Mittsters to pretend that that is what they are riding, rather than a mud-spattered, rumpled-fendered SUV with some broken springs (but no dog on the roof).

If the non-Mitts aren’t ground to powder, but divide a tenacious non-Mitt majority through the primaries, and Mitt wins by fewer than 15 points in New Hampshire and loses by 10 or more in South Carolina, despite the serial killing efforts of the snipers and the assassination squads, my prediction here several weeks ago of a convention choice of the candidate will come to pass.

As for the election campaign itself, the Republicans must remain the favorites. These colossal deficits the federal government has been running, with no leadership from the administration, including the Federal Reserve, about how to reduce them, and every attempt at even the slightest incremental reductions, such as the debt-ceiling fiasco and its sequels, listlessly punted forward, rightly and profoundly distress the country.

Of course, there is no consensus regarding the ingredients of a deficit solution because no one with the authority to implement a solution has proposed one. The president’s budget was an insult to the intelligence of the country, with its freeze on less than 10 percent of spending. His response to House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan was just a tantrum. But the best that can be said for Speaker John Boehner’s performance is that he has ceased to be America’s Mossadegh, with his unpredictable outbursts of tearfulness and glottal stops, and has graduated to being a simple bungler, as in the shambles over the payroll tax.

The deficit problem can be solved (I won’t inflict upon you another airing of my own suggestions here), but not if this president or his successor doesn’t propose a solution. The Republican platform should contain a commitment to entitlement reform and, thanks to the most severely perforated sniper target among the non-Mitts, Herman Cain, to tax simplification also. This should put them across, whoever the nominee, because the Democrats are no more believable on these issues than they were about terrorism in 2004.

The wild card in the electoral deck is Iran. Sanctions haven’t accomplished much; they almost never do, and Mrs. Clinton’s talk of “crippling sanctions” was just what you get when you press the button to air-dry your hands in a public lavatory. But the combination of the unfathomable incompetence of the Iranian government and escalating sanctions may stir the ayatollahs to impetuosity.

Their threat last week to close the Strait of Hormuz provoked worldwide censure, and an intelligently judicious warning from the Pentagon. If the Iranians attempted any such action, there would be general support for an American military response. The U.S. Fifth Fleet could clear any and all Iranian obstructions out of the Strait of Hormuz in one day, and sink any Iranian sea-borne unfriendly device, down to booby-trapped pieces of firewood with offensive decals on them, in one more day.

Such an outrageous initiative by Iran would so galvanize international opinion, and so vividly highlight the madly belligerent nature of the regime, that there would be no serious opposition to taking out Iran’s nuclear program while the U.S. military was at it. Any such action would be justified and admirable and beneficent in itself. It would also probably reelect this administration. Presumably, the president is aware of that.

Confecting foreign conflict for domestic purposes is pretty cynical (though it worked well in the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars). Profiting politically from successfully responding to the spontaneous aggressions of an enemy is the statesman’s just reward. In this hypothesis, such a double-barreled blow would probably bring down the Iranian theocracy, as Margaret Thatcher’s rout of the Argentinean junta in the Falklands restored democracy to Argentina. This would be a gigantic geopolitical step forward, a tremendous achievement for this country and this president, who would not be tempted by any post-war George W–istic harebrained notions of nation-building.

Finally, one more foray into geopolitics. The proportions of the U.S. fiscal debacle have been mitigated by a flight of money from a Europe that is judged even more worrisome than America because the currency itself could come unstuck. The heart of the Eurozone, Germany, has no debt problem; enjoys robust economic growth and moderate unemployment; and has nearly half of its GDP in sophisticated manufacturing exports. If, as I have also predicted in this space, the German government authorizes use of Germany’s credit for the issuance of European Central Bank bonds for the benefit of the more distressed countries in Europe, in exchange for their replication of German entitlement, tax, and labor-market reforms, Europe will quickly become economically stronger than the United States.

Then, unfashionable though such a perspective is at the moment, huge amounts of capital will flow back to Europe, and the pressures on this country to pull itself together will become too intense for even the most blasé administration and obtuse Congress to ignore. The U.S. has done nothing to assist Europe, with the mad Obama-Geithner wails to paper the ground with freshly minted euros from the Vistula to Gibraltar and the North Cape to Cyprus. But Europe could, by jettisoning the unaffordable and de-motivating chunks of its failed social democracy Obama so admires, help the U.S.

This dispatch first appeared in the National Review.