Forget the polls. You don't need to monitor the public opinion polls to track which Republican presidential candidate is surging. All you need to do is see which rival Texas Rep. Ron Paul is attacking - and how sarcastically he gets doing it. In the earlier debates, Paul went after Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Wednesday night, in Mesa, it was Rick Santorum's turn in Paul's sights.

The first question from CNN moderator John King was why Paul is calling Santorum a fake in his television commercials. With the bluntness that has gained him a cult-like following, the veteran congressman man responded, "Because he's a fake."

Immigration advocates are raising hackles over today's endorsement of Mitt Romney by former California Gov. Pete Wilson. Wilson, of course, championed California's Proposition 187, which would have barred illegal immigrants from public schools and other government services. The referendum, which passed but was struck down in court, caused a sweeping anti-GOP backlash among Hispanics. "Didn't any of (Romney's) so-called smart operatives tell him that Pete Wilson has lower approval ratings than the devil himself?'' demanded a hyperbolic Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice.

The group pointed out in its e-mail blast today that Romnney's backers also include Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who helped write the controversial law cracking down on illegal immigrants in Arizona, and Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, another immigration hardliner.

But to be fair, Romney's supporters also include some of the Republican party's few and most prominent backers of a pathway to citizenship: Arizona Sen. John McCain, former Florida Sen. Mel Martinez, former U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and U.S. Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehntinen and Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida.

In conclusion, sometimes it's tricky to assign motives to a candidate based on their friends. What is clear, however, is Romney's own words and policies, which have a lot more common with the hardliners than the reformers and could thwart Hispanic outreach if he is the GOP nominee.

Four years after it was trendy in Democratic circles to liken Barack Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt, it is safe to conclude that no one in the Obama re-election campaign will be borrowing FDR's "Happy Days are Here Again" as the theme song for 2012. Judging by recent speeches by the president and the first lady, a much likelier choice is the 2009 tune by He is We, "A Mess it Grows." Or maybe Avril Lavigne's "I'm With You," with its line, "'Cause nothing's going right. And everything's a mess."

Both Obamas left little doubt this week that things are still a mess even after three years of Obama rule. In a speech in Richmond, the first lady talked about "this mess." But she struck the right campaign theme, adding ,"Fortunately, over the past three years, we've worked very hard to dig ourselves out of this mess. Your president has worked very hard. And there's been a lot of wonderful progress made."

Then on Friday, the president pitched his government reorganization plan, even making rare use of a colorful chart. "I don't usually use props in my speeches," he acknowledged to laughter. But he wanted to show how complicated the current government makes things. "This is the system that small business owners face.  This is what they have to deal with if they want even the most basic answers to the most basic questions like how to export to a new country or whether they qualify for a loan."  Reflecting on the way, government treats businesses, he concluded, "It's a mess."

There must be something in the Iowa air that impels politicians to give off-key speeches after the votes have been cast in the caucuses. Eight years after Howard Dean committed political suicide by screaming out the names of states and four years after Hillary Clinton put so many oldsters on stage that she looked like she was taping an AARP commercial, the Republican candidates Tuesday night gave us so many fresh memories to cherish.

There was Ron Paul declaring, "I'm waiting for the day when we can say we're all Austrians now." The Texas congressman was referring to the Austrian school of economics and his favorite economist, Freidrich von Hayek. But television viewers could be excused if they wondered whether the rally would break into a rousing singing of "Edelweiss." And Paul wasn't finished with the strangeness. In a first in modern American politics, he welcomed to the stage an active-duty soldier wearing his camouflage uniform and critical of American foreign policy.

Corporal Jesse Thorsen, of West Des Moines, is only 28 years old so perhaps he could be excused for forgetting the Defense Department regulation hammered into all members of the Armed Forces that they may not "participate in partisan political... rallies" and "cannot appear at any kind of political forum in uniform." But Paul, himself a veteran, should have known better than to put Thorsen in a position where he could be disciplined by the Army.

A lighter - but also odd - touch was in Rep. Michele Bachmann's valedictory after her sixth place finish. She praised her husband, Marcus, but drew a wince from him when she disclosed that on the day before the caucuses "he was out buying doggie sunglasses for our dog Boomer."

CONCORD, N.H. -- Here are five things I learned about the New Hampshire primary campaign in my first 24 hours on the ground:

SALEM, N.H. -- Mitt Romney's rise in Iowa and his huge lead in New Hampshire polls are causing some commentators to wonder whether the Granite State still matters. The answer is yes. Definitely, yes, especially if the former Massachusetts governor squeezes out a victory in Iowa's caucuses Tuesday night.

Sarah Palin. Michele Bachmann. Donald Trump. Rick Perry. Herman Cain. Newt Gingrich. And now, Rick Santorum: The former Pennsylvania senator is the latest in a series of GOP presidential fads. The question is, will he fade like the rest? Or peak in time for Tuesday's voting in Iowa?

In the end, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich decided that resistance was futile and maybe even counter-productive. A week before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, the two are finally about to launch bus tours of the state.

A bus tour is a great way to experience the under-appreciated glories of Iowa. (Seriously folks, the state is beautiful). It's also a valuable tool in a place that prizes personalized retail campaigning and hasn't seen all that much of it this year - especially from these two leading GOP presidential candidates.

Romney has been tending to his firewall in New Hampshire and trying to seem like he's not working too hard in Iowa lest he be embarrassed on caucus night. Gingrich has played the VIP celeb, counting mainly on debates to make him a contender.

That's changing this week in the final stretch. Romney gives a speech Tuesday night in Davenport and launches a three-day bus tour the next morning.  Gingrich and his wife Callista will be riding a bus for the duration. Their "Jobs and Prosperity" tour starts Tuesday with 11 stops in its first three days. 

That's small potatoes next to the 10 stops Michele Bachmann has scheduled for Tuesday alone. Bus tours have been a staple for Bachmann as well Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Ron Paul - the other candidates competing hard in Iowa. 

Polling in the unsettled race suggests Paul, Romney or Gingrich could win it. Bachmann and Santorum, short on money, are looking for a better-than-expected finish to keep them afloat. If Perry makes a surprise show of strength, he could re-emerge as the chief alternative to Romney.

Adam Smith of the Tampa Bay Times pointed out this week that some 370,000 Florida Republicans already have requested absentee ballots for that state's Jan. 31 primary -- more than all the Republicans who voted in the 2008 Iowa and New Hampshire contests combined.

Still, the snowball effect of doing well in Iowa and New Hampshire cannot be ignored. Thus the bus tours, the ads, the descending of the national media. 

The most accurate indicator of how candidates will fare Jan. 3 in Iowa is the Des Moines Register poll conducted by Selzer & Co. of Des Moines. In the final days of 2007, it was the only poll to pick up on Barack Obama's growing lead over Hillary Clinton, due to his success at bringing new voters into the arcane caucus process.

The caucuses that year were also held Jan. 3 and the final poll was released Dec. 31 based on interviews conducted Dec. 27-30. Obama led Clinton 32 percent to 25 percent, a margin almost identical to his 8-percentage-point victory over Clinton and John Edwards a few days later.

The Register won't disclose when it is in the field this year. But judging by the 2007 time frame, interviewers will be talking to Iowa Republicans throughout this week of intensified candidate activity, advertising and press coverage.

Did Paul peak too soon? Did Romney and Gingrich wait too long to make a full-court press, or are they coming on strong just in time? The Register poll will be our best clue to what is likely to happen next week when Iowa Republicans cast the first votes of the primary season.

"People should have facts before they make wild accusations,'' sniffed Newt Gingrich in Thursday's debate in Sioux City after Michele Bachmann accused him of lobbying on behalf of Freddie Mac.

Bachmann didn't back down. "Well after the debate we had last week, Politifact came out and said that everything I said is true.''

(RELATED: Bachmann Keeps Up Attacks on Gingrich)

Not even close. The Pulitzer Prize-winning site reports today: "In fact, Bachmann earned two ratings from us at that debate, a Mostly True for her claim that Newt Gingrich advocated for the individual mandate in health care and a Pants on Fire for her claim that Mitt Romney set up a health plan in Massachusetts that is "socialized medicine." We then rated Bachmann's new claim and gave it a Pants on Fire. (The fact that Bachmann would cite us was interesting given that her PolitiFact report card shows 60 percent of her ratings have been False or Pants on Fire."

Later in the debate, Gingrich fired another shot at Bachmann's truthfulness. "Sometimes Bachmann does not get facts accurate,'' he said. Again, she stood her ground: "I don't get my facts wrong...I am a serious candidate and my facts are accurate.''

The subtext of Bachmann's remarks is that she gets picked on because she's a woman, a conservative one no less, who isn't afraid to be outspoken.

There is something to that. But at least according to Politifact's standards (and obviously the statements they choose to fact check are self-selecting so it's not a scientific study) Bachmann has the biggest problem with truth-telling in the GOP field. Herman Cain, no longer a candidate, came in second place with 57 percent of his statements called false or pants on fire. Gingrich earned those ratings for 41 percent of his fact-checked statements, Rick Perry got 30 percent wrong, and Mitt Romney got 24 percent wrong.

And the fight for truth and justice continues...

SIOUX CITY, Iowa -- Does Mitt Romney have the fire in his belly to be president? We still don't know, because the former Massachusetts governor chose conciliation over confrontation Thursday night and let his flame-throwing rivals attack front-runner Newt Gingrich.

SIOUX CITY, Iowa -- Luciano's is an Italian restaurant known for its blond, wooden racks of wine and its politically connected owner, Ray Hoffman. I stopped by Wednesday night for dinner, and got some food for thought.

Newt Gingrich has the momentum and Mitt Romney has the GOP establishment's blessing, but they are not the only candidates capable of winning the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses.

It's a wide-open race.

Was that a wink?

Looked like it to me: As Rep. Ron Paul accused Newt Gingrich of flip-flopping, lobbying and putting taxpayers' money in his pockets, the former House speaker looked into the audience and winked. As if to say: "I got this."

Shortly before Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry is scheduled to make his pitch to Jewish voters at a forum sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington, he released a new ad that would make many of them squirm.

Said the 2008 Republican nominee John McCain on Sunday: "If I had, frankly, a criticism of the process, it is that I think maybe we're really getting a little too heavy on the debates.''

It's not an uncommon refrain. But so far, there have been roughly the same number of debates in this election cycle as there were in the last Republican primary.

McCain participated in 10 debates televised on major network or cable channels as of this time four years ago, missing only the PBS debate in Baltimore on September 2007, for a total of 11 debates in all. He subsequently appeared in six more before clinching the nomination.

This year, if you don't count the May 5 debate in South Carolina that didn't include several major candidates, Thursday's debate in Des Moines will be - you guessed it -- No. 11.  (No, I'm not counting Mike Huckabee's Saturday night special or Donald Trump's wanna-be reality show or the Newt Gingrich's Lincoln-Douglas-esque debates.) Another 11 debates are proposed between Thursday and March 19^th, but who knows how many of those will materialize.

The perception that the 2012 GOP primary has been overloaded with debates may stem from their impact more than their quantity. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich have all seen their poll numbers soar after strong performances, while Tim Pawlenty and Rick Perry endured the opposite.

The best test of whether there are too many debates is the number of people watching them, and some have attracted twice as many viewers as they did four years ago. 

The conventional wisdom has whipsawed with particular speed during this campaign. A few weeks ago, Newt was dead. Now he's the not-Mitt. And, of course, the not-Mitt has swung from Bachmann to Perry to Cain and now to Newt. The conventional wisdom is that with just five weeks to go before real people start casting real ballots that the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award has settled on the former Speaker.

Could there be a Santorum moment coming? A Huntsman moment? It's hard to imagine, really hard. But so was a Newt moment back when his staff quit, he went off on a cruise and everyone was making fun of his Tiffany fetish. A two term Senator from one of the biggest swing states would seem at least as plausible. So would a serious governor from Utah. Yes, they both have their flaws--that whole man-on-dog thing for Santorum and Huntsman's odd belief in science. But they're less implausible than the pre-alleged-harassment-and-affairs Herman Cain. We'll see.

The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll of California Republicans released yesterday shows that the basic divide in the GOP presidential race extends even to states not yet in the center of the action.

The survey, conducted from October 30 to November 9, found the race closely bunched among Republicans who identify with the tea party movement while Mitt Romney held a big lead among Republicans who do not. That follows the pattern evident in most national surveys about the race, as well as the recent CNN/Time Magazine/ORC polls in the big four contests that will kick off the competition next January: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. California isn't scheduled to vote until June 5 of next year.

The latest CNN/ORC national survey showing Newt Gingrich surging to a statistical tie with Mitt Romney captures not only the continuing volatility of the GOP's most conservative wing, but cracks in Romney's standing among the party's more managerial and moderate voters.

Most directly, the CNN/ORC poll underscored the persistent inability of the GOP's conservative vanguard to settle on an alternative to Romney. In the poll, Gingrich now leads among Republican voters who identify with the tea party movement, drawing 29 percent. That's an 18 percentage point increase over the 11 percent Gingrich attracted among those voters in CNN's mid-October poll. Gingrich's gain among the tea party contingent is matched almost exactly vote for vote by Herman Cain's loss: he plummeted from 39 percent among them in October to just 22 percent now. Cain's ascent with the tea party came after Texas Gov. Rick Perry suffered a similar collapse with those voters from September through October.

SPARTANBURG, S.C. -- Herman Cain sums up his world view in an all-too-simple phrase: "Peace through strength and clarity," he tells adoring audiences. "Clarify who our friends are and clarify who our enemies are."

Easy for Cain to say until faced at Saturday night's foreign policy debate with a question about Pakistan: Friend or enemy, Mr. Cain?

SPARTANBURG, S.C. _ Rick Perry hopes to salvage his GOP presidential campaign with a self-flagellation tour, topped Thursday night by this appearance on "Late Night with David Letterman."

But the betting in Spartanburg is that Perry is toast. Republican leaders say they don't see how he can recover from his agonizing memory lapse in Wednesday's debate, the latest stumble in a fumble-prone candidacy.

Two weeks after Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann's staff in New Hampshire up and quit, she is announcing a seven-member team in South Carolina headed by Ron Thomas, a former political director of the state party.

Former Bachmann advisors like Ed Rollins and Ed Goeas have urged Bachmann to focus exclusively on Iowa, where she won the state party's straw poll in August and subsequently dropped to the bottom of the polls. Iowa's Jan. 3 caucus is the first nominating contest, and political strategists are skeptical she can continue her campaign if she doesn't place at the top.

But her campaign manager, Keith Nahigian, said at Monday's National Journal 2012 Election Preview that the campaign was not "one-state only.''

"We're positioned in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida,'' he said. "It's kind of an odd question we get more than others.''

One reason the Republican presidential contest has been so unusually volatile is that it's become two races running along parallel but very distinct tracks. One of those races seems to be settling down, steadily if slowly. The other still appears perched on an earthquake fault. If that dynamic persists,  former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will remain the favorite for the nomination- even though a significant proportion of the party remains resistant to choosing him.

The evolution of the GOP contest into two distinct races becomes apparent when looking at the long trend in public opinion polling. In the twelve national CNN/ORC surveys about the race conducted since January four different candidates have held or shared the national lead: ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and businessman Donald Trump (neither of whom actually entered the race), Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Other national polls this year have recorded leads for former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and more recently businessman Herman Cain.