This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 7, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Mitt Romney may have won the battle, but the war for control of the Republican Party

is far from over.

Troubling is the fact that the apparent consensus choice for not Mitt Romney

is Rick Santorum, who is openly hostile to Libertarian ideas. John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government,

offers his thoughts.

What are the big takeaways as you see it for libertarians watching Super Tuesday.

For libertarians that, I guess there's the sort of slow reality

that Mitt Romney is going to be the nominee of the Republican Party and it depends on what the alternative

is in your estimate of that. The next alternative seems to be Rick, so I think most libertarians would probably say if they had to make that choice,

that Mitt Romney is better than the candidate who is explicitly and self-consciously anti-libertarian.

But Romney has avoided essentially the kinds of traps that would do away with his nomination at this point.

In other words, he was not beaten decisively in Michigan.

He won Michigan and he didn't lose Ohio.

He managed to pull out a small victory so he doesn't seem to be a candidate that

attracts much enthusiasm but he seems to be able to do well enough and on the delegate side he's going the organization and he'll have enough

support to slowly.

As you note that Rick Santorum is actively anti-libertarian and Mitt Romney owes a lot of his success to

organization to the fact that he was doing it four years ago and that he was essentially the guy who came in second last time.

But for Santoram, it seems as if he's the consensus alternative to Mitt Romney, which I think should be pretty troubling.

Well, I think he has become the consensus alternative. It's not clear that how much of a role

...