I'm not sure if it's a matter of east coast bias, his groundbreaking health care proposals, or simply everybody getting their turn in the spotlight, but I find the hopes being placed on Mitt Romney interesting. Not just hopes, but expectations. The ordinarily astute Ross Douthat:

I think Schmitt is too hard on the chances of McCain and Romney - not because both men don't have their weaknesses, but because, as he notes, the rest of the competition is pretty thin, and it's very thin-ness will tend to highlight McCain and Romney's strengths. Which means that unless Giuliani gets into the race - and perhaps even if he does - it's probably going to come down to those two.

I find it pretty difficult to believe that the GOP is going to ultimately leave the race to someone whose made his career publicly thumbing his nose at his party (while privately voting with it a vast majority of the time) and a Mormon aristocrat from Massachusetts. The two principle candidates would be varying degrees of disliked by one of the party's core constituencies: evangelicals.

I'm not saying that neither of these men will win, but one of them is going to suck the wind from the sails of the other pretty quickly and the smart money has got to be McCain. Then the race will probably come down to McCain and a social conservative favorite (interestingly, with the establishment warming to McCain, it'll be McCain and the establishment against a rebellious religious - or cultural - conservative in a party supposedly run by religious nuts) such as Sen. George Allen or Sen. Sam Brownback. It may go down quite differently than that... but I am almost certain that by the time we get past South Carolina the strongest candidates will be McCain and Romney.