This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 4, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

Rick Santorum surged at just the right moment to make himself the anti-Romney of choice for social conservatives, though his rise does call

attention to the uncomfortable relationship between social conservatives and the rest of the

GOP.

John Samples, director of the Caden Institute's Center for Representative

Government, assesses the GOP after Iowa.

Coming out of Iowa, there has been a search for some time to figure out who is going to be the anti-Romney from the Social

Conservative Direction and they had three or four candidates and Centaurum

has now gone last as it were and is going to be the one. So I think this is pretty

predictable given that social conservatives since the early 1990s have become a large part of Republican identifiers.

They were highly organized in Iowa and will be in a few other states.

So this is, in a a sense a predictable outcome. The problem with it is

from a libertarian point of view is that those are positions that are decidedly not

libertarian and Santorium himself is very self-consciously

anti-libertarian. It's not just that he ignores these questions of human liberty, but he is arguing that that's a bad idea.

When you talk about the two sides of the Republican Party I assume you're talking about

the social conservatives and people who are more

libertarian, more fiscally conservative, people who put particular issues at

their top. That is for social conservatives it is a lot of culture warrior type

stuff for libertarians it's fiscal issues and personal liberty.

How does that shake out as you see it given what's occurred in Iowa?

Well, on the one hand, Santoram is now set really, and I think we'll be able to raise enough

...