Sorry, Rick, you haven’t made it yet as an Eastwood-style make-my-day cultural icon. But in different ways, Santorum and Eastwood have demonstrated the limits of both an entirely negative slant on politics and a pessimistic take on America’s future.

For Rick Santorum, they are everything. If Santorum can pull off a victory in at least one of the three states — Minnesota seems to be his best shot — he has a rationale for going on. If he were to win both Minnesota and Missouri, where Newt Gingrich isn’t even on the ballot, Santorum would earn legitimate bragging rights and could make a plausible case that he is the more viable alternative to Mitt Romney in the coming showdowns.

Tony was a warm gentleman in the truest sense of that old-fashioned term. He was a conservative by temperament as well as philosophy. You saw this in his careful use of words and in the meticulous, yet often quite flashy, way he dressed. There were few conservatives I enjoyed arguing with more.

Mitt Romney knew he had to win Florida. He did. He knew he would have to take down Newt Gingrich and destroy Gingrich’s standing with the voters. He did. He and his allies spent lavishly on television ads attacking Gingrich. And they worked.

Members of the Tea Party insisted they were turning the GOP into a populist, anti-establishment bastion. Social conservatives have long argued that values and morals matter more than money. Yet in the end, the corporate and economically conservative wing of the Republican Party always seems to win.

Not so long ago, many in conservative and Republican ranks were eager to paint him as an alien creature far removed from American life as most Americans understand it. A determined cadre insisted Obama was not even eligible to be president, claiming he was born outside the United States. Obama eventually put that to rest by making public his birth certificate, which proved he was born in Hawaii.

It isn’t every day that political candidates are asked whether the 10th Amendment allows states to nullify federal laws, but that was precisely the question Rick Santorum faced at a forum here a few days ago organized by a libertarian-leaning group.

I love watching Republicans engage in class warfare. They condemn it as a sin when Democrats come within 100 miles of even mentioning the sharp and growing class inequalities in the United States. But when conservatives play the class card, they see it as a high ethical calling involving the defense of good and moral folk against the depredations of a liberal elite.

First, the split in the Republican Party is no longer between conservatives and moderates, but between members of the party who are very conservative and those who are only somewhat conservative. The days of Rockefeller Republicans are long gone. Close to half of Iowa caucus-goers thought of themselves as very conservative; a third said they were somewhat conservative. Fewer than a fifth were moderates, including a very tiny (and brave) group of self-described liberals.

Barack Obama was unlike any candidate the country had seen before. More than a mere politician, he became a cultural icon, “the biggest celebrity in the world,” as a John McCain ad accurately, if mischievously, described him. He was the object of near adoration among the young, launching what often felt like a religious revival. Artists poured out musical compositions devoted to his victory in a rich variety of forms, from reggae and hip-hop to the Celtic folk song. (My personal favorite: “There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama.”) Electoral contests rarely hold out the possibility of making all things new, but Obama’s supporters in large numbers fervently believed that 2008 was exactly such a campaign.

Perhaps I should confess that, having called the attention of readers nine days ago to the Rick Santorum Iowa surge that is now the object of considerable journalistic interest, I have a pundit’s vested interest in having an early call pan out. (We’ll talk about my mistakes another day.) As I see it, only one thing can stop the former Pennsylvania senator from doing exceptionally well in Tuesday’s caucuses, and that is Texas Gov. Rick Perry hanging on to the support he now has.

No matter what happens in Iowa, Mitt Romney has a safety net in New Hampshire.

And that could rank as the year’s most perilous sentence. Why shouldn’t Romney be surprised in the state that temporarily derailed Barack Obama’s supposedly rapid march toward nomination four years ago? Hillary Clinton humbled many a pundit here in 2008, reason enough to challenge the rapidly jelling conventional wisdom about the Republican presidential campaign.

Is Rick Santorum the next non-Romney to emerge from the pack? Could he conceivably win Iowa?

That these are plausible questions tells you all you need to know about the unsettled nature of the Republican presidential contest — particularly here, the state whose caucuses on Jan. 3 have become a bookie’s nightmare. At the moment, anyone among the six major candidates has a reasonable chance of coming in first or second, and the contest is becoming less settled as the brief Christmas interlude in campaigning approaches.

Jindal, the Louisiana governor, endorsed Perry early, and he has loyally stuck to his commitment. He was campaigning for him in Iowa on Tuesday and made an excellent case for Perry. The problem was that Jindal may have made a better case for Perry than Perry made for himself.

Since all things seem possible in the Republican presidential contest, is there another turn coming that could benefit Jon Huntsman?

That would be the former Utah governor who is polling nationally at 3.2 percent, according to Wednesday’s Real Clear Politics average of national polls, slightly behind Rick Santorum. Huntsman is occasionally touted by the sort of commentators who would never go near a Republican primary ballot box; they like his reasonable, genial and intelligent tone. Many conservatives, on the other hand, see those traits as the marks of a dreaded liberalism.

Still, their encounter at St. Anselm College here did send several messages: That both men know quite a lot about foreign affairs; that they could sound far more reasonable than several of their challengers (one thinks of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and former candidate Herman Cain); and that they are happy to join forces against Mitt Romney, even if they never said a word about him during their formal discussion.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, wants his people to think that those who have taken to the streets to express their rage over rigged elections are nothing but tools of American foreign policy, put to work by none other than Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The obvious Republican nominee was Texas Gov. Rick Perry — obvious because his government-bashing, ideology-mongering, secessionist-flirting persona was a perfect fit for a Republican primary electorate that has shifted far to the right of Ronald Reagan.

Everyone on the left side of American politics, from the near end to the far end, has advice for Occupy Wall Street. I’m no exception. But it’s useful to acknowledge first that this movement has accomplished things that the more established left didn’t.