And now for your daily Rick Santorum Might Actually Be Running For President Update: The former U.S. Senator from Penn Hills will be in Iowa on Wednesday and Thursday for his eighth trip to the Hawkeye State. His Political Action Committee announced that Senator Rick will be holding many meetings with "activists and party leaders" and will stage one public event, a Wednesday evening meeting with the members of the Quad City tea party at the library in Bettendorf.

Also today, the Washington Post dispatched Karen Tumulty to New Hampshire to report on Santorum's ambitions for an A1 profile. The full piece is certainly worth a read, but here are some highlights:

It is an especially tall climb for a Republican like Santorum. Democrats have a history of taking chances on unknowns and fresh faces. The current occupant of the White House was two years out of the Illinois Senate when he sized up the competition, asked himself the same question and decided he was up to it.

But the GOP has a tradition of anointing the next person in line. With more than a dozen other names being mentioned, Santorum is nowhere near the front. The last time he was on a ballot, in a 2006 bid for a third Senate term in Pennsylvania, he lost by 18 percentage points.

Yet Santorum believes that this is an altered political environment - and that this time, the process of selecting a presidential nominee could be different for Republicans.

Others agree that the old GOP script could be rewritten in 2012. "People are desperate to the point of panic in wanting to get rid of Barack Obama, and increasingly anxious about the prospects of some of our choices," said a prominent Republican strategist, who did not want to be quoted by name suggesting that anything is lacking on the GOP bench.

"Every one of these people is either deeply flawed or irredeemably polarizing, and that's why a guy like Santorum is going to get a look."

Then there's the fact that the Republican establishment may not be in the driver's seat this time. And the other fact that Santorum was a tea party kind of guy before there was a tea party.

...

Except for the whisper of white around his temples, Santorum at 52 appears little changed from the boyish provocateur who stormed Washington two decades ago. But if he hasn't mellowed exactly, he has been tempered - by age, by experience, by defeat.

As he was taking questions recently at a gathering of College Republicans at American University, one student asked what he would tell someone who was entering Congress now.

"Keep the fire, but don't burn the place down," Santorum said. "It's a great country. It's a great institution. It makes mistakes, but you're not perfect, either."