Bob, David Brooks agrees with you:

It’s hard to know how his campaign will fare after a late surge that he is experiencing in Iowa. These days, he is a happy and effective campaigner, but, in the past, there has been a dourness and rigidity to him. He’s been consumed by resentment over unfair media coverage. As his ally in the AIDS fight, Bono, once told a reporter, Santorum seems to have a Tourette’s syndrome that causes him to say the most unpopular thing imaginable.
But I suspect he will do better post-Iowa than most people think — before being buried under a wave of money and negative ads. And I do believe that he represents sensibility and a viewpoint that is being suppressed by the political system. Perhaps, in less rigid and ideological form, this working-class experience will someday find a champion.

And on Meet the Press Sunday, Brooks said:

You know, Iowa has produced some candidates who have not gone on to great success. Huckabee, Pat Robertson may years ago. I don’t think Rick Santorum is one of them. He–in part because he’s got some working class credentials as opposed to Romney, in part because he tells a very good story about connecting moral concerns with the economy. And partly he’s just a good politician. You know, I covered him in the Senate when he lost badly in Pennsylvania. He was a pretty bad politician. If you look at him today, like you’re a baseball scout looking at a pitcher, you’d say, yeah, this guy’s good enough to play in the major leagues. So I think he’s going to be reasonably strong. I’m not sure he’s going to win the nomination, but reasonably strong going out of here.

Brooks also borrowed from a 2006 column in which he wrote: “If serious antipoverty work is going to be done, it’s going to emerge from a coalition of liberals and religious conservatives. Without Santorum, that’s less likely to happen.” In that column, Brooks also gave a fuller version of the Bono quote: “I would suggest that Rick Santorum has a kind of Tourette’s disease; he will always say the most unpopular thing. But on our issues, he has been a defender of the most vulnerable.”

Bono’s Tourette’s line may need revision after this campaign. If you have been listening, Santorum hasn’t quite been the social-issues lightning rod he is portrayed as.

I am done with my predictions for 2012, but I enjoyed this from Santorum today on Fox & Friends:

I feel very confident that we’re not going to be finishing last as most had predicted