GOP insiders reaching for panic button in face of Santorum surge and rise of social issues

Mitt Romney's continuing weakness against Rick Santorum heading into Michigan has GOP strategists and pundits scrambling. Many fear that Santorum represents an impending disaster of Goldwater proportions, tipping dominoes all down the ticket in congressional and state races.

An anonymous high-ranking GOP senator told ABC's Jonathan Karl that if Romney does not win Michigan he (the senator) will publicly call for a new option.

“He’d be too damaged. If he can’t even win in Michigan, where his family is from, where he grew up,” the senator said, dismissing both Santorum and Gingrich as nonstarters.

Another "tippy top Republican" outlined a plan for Politico's Mike Allen, where a new candidate would enter several of the later primaries, sweep them and go to a contested convention as the presumptive savior.

In Indiana, Governor Mitch Daniels is facing an onslaught of calls for him to enter the race.

“The whispers have become shouts, the knocks on the door have become fist pounding," said Eric Holcomb, one of Daniels' key advisers, as quoted in Politico.

“Republicans are fretting the four dancing now can’t beat Obama in the fall, so their national talent search continues,” Holcomb said. But Holcomb also adds that resistance to a run from Daniels' family has not changed.

Over at Powerline, a prominent conservative group blog, division and frustration reigns. John Hinderaker is all in for Romney, and down on Santorum: "With Santorum launching one social issues bomb after another, there is no time to talk about the economy. Is this the Democratic Party’s dream, or what?"

Hinderaker's colleague Scott Johnson, meanwhile, wrote that Romney's weakness reflects on the candidate, not the electorate: "The inclination of Republican primary voters and caucus goers to support Gingrich or Santorum is not the sign of a character flaw or mental defect on their part. It is a sign that Romney is a problematic candidate for the party whose standard bearer he seeks to be."

The overriding concern with Santorum is that his preoccupation with social issues plays directly into the hands of the Obama campaign, which would prefer to focus on contraception to divert attention from debt, entitlement funding or economic malaise. Santorum heightened these concerns again over the weekend when he said that Obama’s is “not a theology based on the Bible.”