-or, stay home and stick with his party

  

"I am not a know-nothing: that is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneration appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal". We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except Negroes". When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and Foreigners and Catholics". When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

Lincoln to Joshua Speed, August 24, 1855 in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832-1858 (NY, Library of America, 1989), 363.

 Andrew Sullivan says let's have it all out in the open:

          Is Santorum unelectable in a general election? Yep. The current polling says Rick loses to Obama by 6.3 percent. But Mitt loses to him by 5.1 percent. How big an argument do you want over 1.2 percent?
          I despise what the GOP has become. But it is what it is. And Santorum is its logical leader. Let this party stand up and be counted. Romney would shroud it in bullshit and blather - while not deviating from it a scintilla. If he won the nomination and lost the general campaign, the GOP would simply blame it on his lack of "real conservatism". And we'd be back where we started. With Santorum, we'd finally get to test whether that "real conservatism" is indeed the future of the GOP or what I think it is - a reactionary form of madness.