He also seems to believe that the sex act should be reserved solely for procreation, which in a country where an estimated 98 per cent of women have at some stage in their lives used birth control must cast doubt on his electability too. It does seem strange, therefore, that in a country of over 300 million people, the choice for one of the greatest and oldest political parties in the Western world should boil down to two  people with as many potential or actual negatives as Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.

Something that might help Santorum over the coming weeks is the White House's slightly deranged decision to take on the Roman Catholic Church through a federal mandate that forces employers — including Catholic churches, schools and charities — to provide contraception and sterilisation coverage under the Obamacare health law. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York has charged that White House officials failed to consider the American bishops' complaints that this clearly violated religious freedom, and although the policy is being tinkered with by the administration the underlying provisions look as if they will remain in force. This has given Santorum a superb stump line defending religious liberty from Obama's overweaning statism, while simultaneously bringing Romney's Achilles heel — the fact that Romneycare in Massachusetts presaged Obamacare — to the fore. (This being America, there are conspiracy theorists arguing that the Obama campaign's communications director, the machiavellian David Axelrod, has deliberately courted the bishops' ire in order to help Santorum beat Romney.)

Obamacare, Santorum said at a recent campaign rally, "is usurping your rights. It is creating a culture of dependency. Every single American will be dependent on government, thanks to Obamacare. There is no more important issue in this race. It magnifies all that is wrong with what the president is trying to do." There is much to this in an economy where federal spending — i.e. not including state and city spending — has increased to 24 per cent of GDP against a postwar average of 20 per cent, even before Obamacare has begun to kick in. The president will try to focus the election on the gradually improving unemployment numbers and the risks attendant on changing horses midstream, and he'll probably succeed. But Santorum argues that if the issues of Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, the $800 billion stimulus package (much of which now looks to have been wasted and misdirected) and the federal spending boom can be kept unwaveringly before voters — in a way that Romney can't do due to Romneycare — then the president is eminently beatable. 

With only a couple of hundred fewer delegates than Romney and over 2000 still to be elected, and Gingrich running out of his Las Vegas casino-owners' money, Santorum believes that there's still everything to play for, in a race that has already had no fewer than eight front-runners — if you count Donald Trump. Which I do, not least because he's my landlord.