Seriously lay off the conspiracies. Santorum was in it to win it. So was Gingrich. They don't care about Ron Paul- after Iowa they didn't even think he was a threat.
There's no reason these can't both be true. I suspect that individual candidates often -- probably usually -- enter races to win; if that's not the role their backers have for them in the race, they're oblivious to it, either because they're not smart enough or are too self-absorbed to see how they're being played.
Joel Skousen (one of the sharpest conspiracy analysts in the world, who's been studying this stuff longer than I've been alive) has said all along that the establishment doesn't want Romney. He has too much money, has little history of personal corruption, and entered the race both times uninvited and unvetted. That doesn't mean he's a good candidate from the perspective of a Paul supporter, nor does it mean he isn't a statist, or that he hasn't sucked up to the establishment and surrounded himself with establishment advisers. He has, which Joel has acknowledged. But they still don't seem to want him, likely because they have doubts about how well he can be controlled.
I think he's right; this race makes a lot more sense if you look at it that way.
Last time, corrupt insider Huckabee entered the race right after Romney, and dropped out right after Romney. He was likely recruited to split the evangelical vote, although (an example of what I noted above) he may have been oblivious to his real role.
This time, the media narrative all along has been that the GOP doesn't want Romney and is looking for an alternative, and the establishment has thrown one corrupt insider after another at him as a new "front-runner;" every time one didn't stick, they brought in someone else -- and tried to bring in even more, like Christie, who didn't take the bait. That's not how someone is built up as the nominee. (Compare it to how they built up Lieberman in 2003, or Giuliani in 2007.)
A couple of weeks ago, Joel speculated in his newsletter that Frothy and Gingrich are being kept in because the elite are trying to deliberately engineer a brokered convention in a final attempt to stop Romney, and he predicted that, if one of those two is too weak to win on the convention floor, they'll insert someone else, probably Jeb Bush. He said he felt that, if Gingrich lost both Mississippi and Alabama, but stayed in, that would be an indication that his guess is right. That happened. But, again, that doesn't mean Gingrich knows; his advisers may be playing to his ego, telling him there's going to be a brokered convention, so he can still win; that he's the smartest, best guy for the job; "your country needs you;" etc.
This week, after Jeb Bush endorsed Romney, Joel guessed that either the elite have decided to go with someone else and save Bush for 2016, or Ron Paul's delegate strategy has them panicking that their plan may backfire at the convention and that Ron could win if it gets to a second ballot, and they may have decided to reluctantly take Romney (whom Joel readily concedes that they'd take a million times over before they'd take Ron Paul), then throw it to Obama in the general.
vowing to fight on until the GOP’s convention in Tampa, it bears mentioning that he could enter that convention without his name on the first ballot.
