Now that the midterms are in the books, it's time to start talking 2012, even though we have been for a while now.

Pennsylvania's own Rick Santorum, as visitors to this site are well aware, is laying the groundwork for a long-shot presidential campaign. Today he's in Bedford, N.H. -- his sixth visit to the key early primary state this year -- to give a speech about the midterms at a "Politics and Eggs" forum, hosted by the New Hampshire Political Library and the New England Council and top destination for presidential hopefuls.

Santorum was also recently profiled in Philadelphia Magazine, in which Tom McGrath offers the following observations after following Santorum through South Carolina:

If you haven’t seen Rick Santorum in a while, let me just say this: He looks good. Really good. Lean. Tan. Hair slightly longer than he used to wear it, lessening the scrubbed-seminarian thing he always had going on. And if you’ve never seen Rick Santorum in the flesh, let me just say this: In person, he’s far softer and friendlier than he typically comes across on TV or in sound bites, much more like the next-door neighbor you enjoy chatting with about your kids or your lawn or the baseball playoffs.

At least until the subject turns to America, at which point Rick Santorum, well, goes off the reservation a bit, as they say. Standing at the front of the room, he says appropriately enthusiastic things about [attorney general candidate] Alan Wilson, then smoothly segues into the apocalyptic message he has come here today to deliver, that he somehow feels he must deliver:

After nearly 235 years, the very idea of America is now, suddenly, at risk.