1) What if Tim Pawlenty had not staked everything on the Iowa Straw Poll? The most important asset held by TimPaw’s low-energy campaign was potential. He was more than acceptable to every single element of the GOP, and he positioned himself almost ideally to benefit from the inevitable demise of other candidates. But he wasn’t around to reap the harvest when nearly all of them imploded, because he threw all his money into Ames and lost. What if he had kept his powder a bit dryer?

2) What if Mike Huckabee or [fill in the blank] had run? When Huck pulled back from a 2012 campaign in May, he was running first in the most recent national poll of Republicans that included his name, and also had the best favorable/unfavorable ratio in the field. Had he run, he would have been the instant and perhaps overwhelming front-runner in Iowa, where he beat Mitt Romney handily despite a vast financial disadvantage. Considering the heights deeply flawed candidates like Bachmann, Cain and Gingrich reached before their inevitable crashes, how high might Huckabee have flown, with his powerful appeal to evangelical Christians and his knack for gaining favorable “earned media,” even from liberals? And is there any chance Romney would have risked a second loss to Huck in Iowa? No, not one…

4) What if anti-Romney conservatives had united behind anyone? The most abiding question is what might have happened if the conservatives who kept saying they wanted anybody other than Romney had figured out a way to identify that “anybody” and gotten behind that candidacy. Perhaps they thought Romney couldn’t win and they were free to back their personal favorites. Maybe they figured somebody else would take the risk of going medieval on him and taking him down. But in the end, even the famously disciplined shock troops of the Christian Right couldn’t make up their minds, and unless a final Iowa surge by Rick Santorum provides a lightning rod, they will go to the caucuses fatally divided when they might have been united.