The problem, in shorthand: To many conservative elites, Rick Perry is a dope, Michele Bachmann is a joke, and Mitt Romney is a fraud…

“All this comes back to the failure of Mitch Daniels to get into the race – he was the guy who had the potential to unite the conservative intelligentsia and the quirky, eclectic types like me,” said New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, the co-author of the manifesto that aimed to launch a populist “Sam’s Club Conservatism.”…

“I would hope that whoever the Republican candidate is, he or she will not tell us that creationism or intelligent design is the equivalent of evolution – just another theory about the origins of the biological man,” said the syndicated Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who declined to weigh in on specific candidates, though Perry was recently recorded telling a young boy on a rope line that Texas schools teach both theories. “To put intelligent design on that level is like offering grade school children a choice between astronomy and astrology,” he said.