The problems facing Romney are many, varied and serious, though ultimately those facing his opponents are far greater. They start with the fact that beyond "free enterprise" — which he has yet to define adequately — and his own business curriculum vitae, he doesn't seem to stand for anything. His evident lack of passion makes even friends worry that he isn't hungry enough for the prize. There is no cause to which Romney cleaves, nor even an uplifting soundbite that works for him yet. Much as one might despise the slickness of Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America", George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" and especially Barack Obama's "Hope and Change" — let alone "Yes We Can!" — at least they encapsulated neatly the fundamental appeal that each man was trying to make.

To many non-Americans the United States' system for choosing a president seems arcane, absurd, grossly plutocratic and more than faintly corrupt. Yet it does have a positive side, though more by luck than judgment. Iowa is a small, poor Christian Midwestern state, New Hampshire is a relatively well-off eastern seaboard state, South Carolina a small Southern and Florida a big Southern state. Then they move to the three midwestern states before heading back to east coast Maine. These states all require very different messages, different expertise, different types of involvement from the candidates. Super Tuesday — the simultaneous votes taken across ten states on March 6 — ends all that.

Romney's next problem is that the Super Tuesday states are all ones where the delegates are awarded in proportion to the number of votes cast, not, as with Florida's 50 delegates, winner-takes-all. This means that it will be far harder for Romney to deliver the knock-out blow that would take both Gingrich and Santorum out of the race. (Ron Paul has the fanatical support of enough libertarians to ensure that he will probably stay in all the way to the convention, come what may). What Romney does not want to happen is for conservative Republicans, who are pretty much the only demographic he does not have sewn up despite the CPAC vote, to coalesce around Santorum before Super Tuesday, as they did in Iowa, thereby effectively ending the hopes of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, especially once Herman Cain so spectacularly self-imploded. To lose Gingrich from the race too early would automatically raise Santorum's numbers, although the largest of the Super Tuesday states, with 76 delegates, is Gingrich's home state of Georgia, so he can be guaranteed a good platform that night, come what may.

There are plenty of reasons why anti-Romney Republicans have begun coalescing around Santorum rather than Gingrich, indeed the surprising thing is that it hasn't happened earlier. Gingrich's disastrous performance in the Florida debate, in which he looked nonplussed when Romney assaulted him over his attack ads, and in which he utterly failed to cow CNN's Wolf Blitzer in his now traditional attack on the media, was also the occasion when Santorum delivered some powerful blows on Romney over the Romneycare health plan, which presaged Obama's own scheme, which is wildly unpopular with Republicans of all stripes. In the several hours I spent touring the Miami suburbs the day before the Florida vote, I only spotted one single forlorn Gingrich poster.