As a sparring partner, Hillary Clinton made Obama a stronger candidate. But Santorum’s slugfest is just making Romney look soft.

JACKSON, Mich.— Rick Santorum is a much braver man than Mitt Romney. We know this because Rick Santorum says so. When he finishes a speech—one that’s at least twice or three times as long as Romney’s—he gives his audience an opening for questions.

“I always like to take a few questions,” said Santorum on Sunday, speaking at a church in Davison, Mich., to a crowd that occupied every carpeted inch of the small room’s balcony and stairs. “Unlike a lot of other candidates—I want to hear what you have to say. Not just what I have to say. And by the way, I don’t read from a script!”

Applause.

“I don’t preselect the audience.”

More applause. “I don’t read from the teleprompter!”

Loud, knowing, conspiratorial applause.

“Of course, all those things scare the living daylights out of the Washington, D.C., establishment. They want it to be scripted. They want to write the script!”

Santorum had just slapped Romney, with a special bonus drop kick of Barack Obama. (You’re not a 2012 Republican candidate if you don’t make a teleprompter joke—or five.) The risks, at this speech, were extraordinarily low. The first question from the crowd was: “Gas prices, Rick. What’ll you do about ‘em?” The second was about what he’d do to end abortion, “the genocide of the next generation.” Santorum whacked the softballs into the ionosphere, and every reporter in the room had time to ponder: Yeah, why doesn’t Romney do this? A Romney aide who’d been tracking Santorum tried to convince me that the former senator was weakening himself with his lecture-length events—why, as many as 10 percent of voters left before he was done! But there’s no actual evidence that this hurts Santorum.

If Mitt Romney loses the Michigan primary, he will face a crisis of Dunkirkian proportions, with questions about which campaign staffers he’s about to sack, and new calls for the Mitch Daniels Charisma Machine to come in and save the party. If Romney wins here, just by a little, it’ll be the same crisis, with slightly fewer explosions. A narrow win would mean that Romney effectively lost to Santorum on Election Day and tumbled over the goal line, clutching a box of absentee votes between bandaged arms.

Neither of these situations is ideal, for either Romney or Santorum. At a glance, the 2012 Republican primary looks a lot like the 2008 Democratic race. But that campaign pitted a well-liked candidate who would be the first African-American president against a well-like candidate who would have been the first female president. Neither ran a particularly negative campaign. Go and check out the most brutal ad that Obama aired against Hillary. He criticized her because the New York Times, “her hometown paper,” said she was “taking the low road.” That was it. With precious little ideological or policy space between them, the candidates waged war over whether the Democrats should nominates a figure of hope or a pragmatist.