They're hoping you don't. And acting like it never happened (even though most of their words are just clicks away online.)

One by one — with the exception of holdout Ron Paul — the GOP also-rans have coughed up endorsements of their onetime rival. And as they do, they're pulling rhetorical backflips to distance themselves from their former harsh assessments of Romney.

Don't try this at home, folks. It takes a professional politician to pull it off with a straight face.

A sampling of the also-rans' anti-Romney rhetoric when they were candidates and their obligatory niceness after endorsing Romney.

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RICK SANTORUM

The former Pennsylvania senator still doesn't have trouble curbing his enthusiasm for Romney. He waited a month after dropping out of the race to endorse Romney, then emailed his tepid endorsement in the dead of night. He finally got out the E-word in the 13th paragraph of his 16-paragraph statement.

THEN:

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An interesting question, for sure, but, as anyone who works with data knows, the first challenge is to get your hands on the numbers. Fortunately, there’s one source of data that politicians are eager to provide in limitless quantities: their words.

In order to make sense of a mountain of words, I created a tool that analyzes the frequency of word and phrase usage in a body of text. The texts in this case were the transcripts of candidates’ speeches and interviews culled from Project Vote Smart between January and early April, creating a corpus of over 80,000 words (roughly the number of words in a 320-page novel). The tool then identifies phrases of one to six words in length that have been used with a non-trivial frequency. So what does it tell us?

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The most important lesson of terrible premature presidential-campaign speculation is that nearly everyone who engages in it will be terribly, hilariously wrong. It doesn't matter if you're a complete buffoon, like Dick Morris, author of the 2007 classic "Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race," or someone fairly serious and "savvy," like New York Times politics reporter Matt Bai, who posited current nobody Mark Warner as the future of the party in a 2006 Times magazine cover story now best (if barely) remembered for its altered and unflattering photo of the subject.

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You want to know what's profound? How scientifically inaccurate that statement is.

Pornography surely changes the brain in some ways -- but so does everything. "Watching the NCAA playoffs is going to change your brain, eating chocolate -- any time you have any kind of experience, it's going to change your brain," says Rory C. Reid, a research psychologist at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA. "The real question is, 'Are those changes substantial enough that there's going to be some observable effect?'"

As to Santorum's claim that such damning research exists, Reid says: "Well, if there is, I'd sure like to see it!" He continues, "There's not a single study to my knowledge that has even demonstrated half of that [claim]." Allow me to put into perspective Reid's expertise: He not only specializes in neuropsychology but he's also one of the world's top experts on hypersexual behavior. If any such evidence existed, let alone "a wealth of research," he would have seen it.

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On CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday, he said, "Under the Bush administration, pornographers were prosecuted much more rigorously than they are ... under the Obama administration." He added, "My conclusion is they have not put a priority on prosecuting these cases, and in doing so, they are exposing children to a tremendous amount of harm. And that to me says they're putting the unenforcement of this law and putting children at risk as a result of that."

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Brian Herman, who attended Santorum's alma mater, Mundelein’s Carmel Catholic High School in suburban Lake County, IL, makes the latter case. Writing in the Arlington Heights Trib Local, Herman notes that while Santorum boasts support from some Carmel Catholic friends, he's refrained from hosting events there, despite Mundelein's large Catholic population. While his buddy from Carmel Catholic, former GOP state representative Al Salvi, is on Santorum's Illinois political team, the school's famous alum hasn't even bothered to visit the Salvi Athletic Center at Carmel Catholic, named for his friend's family, during his Illinois campaign swings. Instead he held a Friday night campaign stop at Christian Liberty Academy in nearby suburban Cook County.

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While the practice of home schooling is new to many people, my own interest in it was sparked nearly 20 years ago. I was a socially awkward adolescent with a chaotic family life, and became close to a conservative Christian home-schooling family that seemed perfect in every way. Through my connection to this family, I was introduced to a whole world of conservative Christian home-schoolers, some of whom we would now consider “Quiverfull” families: home-schooling conservatives who eschew any form of family planning and choose instead to “trust God” with matters related to procreation.

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That’s saying something when you consider that Santorum came to this race from a state of voter-imposed political exile, the loser – the 18-point loser – of a 2006 Senate race in Pennsylvania. Abject boredom, it appeared, was the motivating factor for his national campaign, and the stench of failure clung to him as he labored fruitlessly day after day last year. For the longest time, it seemed he was destined to be the only 2012 GOP candidate not to enjoy a surge in the polls, even a fleeting one.

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Unfortunately for Mitt, as Steve writes, the immediate future will present more awful headlines and the race can't be wrapped up any time soon.

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Every time the smart people try to tell us the race is about over and Romney's finally going to close the deal, he doesn't. Super Tuesday was arguably Romney's worst night yet. When the race began in January, he was given the Iowa caucus win (though it later turned out he lost to Santorum.) No one expected him to win South Carolina. The night Santorum swept Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado wasn't a good one for Romney, but Santorum ran hard in those states and he mostly didn't.

Super Tuesday represented a late chance for Romney to restore his supposed invincibility – and he failed. As I write, NBC is calling Ohio for Mitt Romney, after Santorum spent the whole night ahead. Romney lost Tennessee, Oklahoma and North Dakota to Santorum, even after his advisors were suggesting a Tennessee win was possible, and would prove their man could carry the South.

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Millionaire blue-blood George W. Bush pretended to be a down-home cowboy. Two-time divorcee and longtime Washington influence peddler Newt Gingrich struts around preaching about traditional family values and insisting he’s a D.C. outsider. Now, topping them all is Rick Santorum, who last week declared that only "snobs" support efforts to make a college education more accessible to all Americans.

Santorum, of course, has not one, not two, but a whopping three separate degrees, two of which come from public universities – that is, two that were taxpayer-subsidized, courtesy of the “Big Government” Santorum now claims to loathe.

Hypocritical -- and dare I say, snobbish -- as it is for someone with such a pedigree to attack President Obama’s college affordability initiatives, Santorum did inadvertently stumble into a significant question: Is higher education for everyone? The answer today is not necessarily, but that's precisely because of the affordability problem Obama aims to solve.

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Will Bunch highlighted the... slightly dubious claim, as reported by a Detroit CBS affiliate (emphasis Bunch's):

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Santorum needn’t worry. America is already making it harder for young people of modest means to attend college. Public higher education is being starved, and the middle class will shrink even more as a result.

Over just the last year 41 states have cut spending for public higher education. That’s on top of deep cuts in 2009 and 2010. Some, such as the University of New Hampshire, have lost over 40 percent of their state funding; the University of Washington, 26 percent; Florida’s public university system, 25 percent.

Rising tuition and fees are making up the shortfall. This year, the average hike is 8.3 percent. New York’s state university system is increasing tuition 14 percent; Arizona, 17 percent; Washington state, 16 percent. Students in California’s public universities and colleges are facing an average increase of 21 percent, the highest in the nation.

The children of middle and lower-income families are hardest hit. Remember: The median wage has been dropping since 2000, adjusted for inflation.

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In the end, it's amazing he won Michigan at all. In fact, I'd have advised him to renounce Michigan as his home state. He's got too many home states – he played that card (vacation home anyway) in New Hampshire and will again in Massachusetts. More important, Romney didn't seem as though Michigan was his home state in December 2008, when he wrote a scorching New York Times Op-Ed opposing the Bush and Obama administration plans to keep the big three automakers alive, headlined "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt." Nobody talks like that about their home state.

Imagine, seriously for a moment, if he'd gotten together his Bain Capital colleagues as well as some other wealthy friends – maybe the guys who own NASCAR teams -- to invest in his hometown industry, on his own. Of course, he couldn't. The man President Obama appointed to oversee the auto bailout, Steve Rattner, is no slouch at raising money. But this week Rattner said there was no capital to be found in the economically dark days when the companies were going under – and he challenged Romney and other bailout foes to suggest where they might have rustled up money.

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The separation of church and state is not some abstract notion, nor is it a means of oppressing people. It very reasonably keeps people from imposing their religious beliefs on other people. These are not beliefs that can be objectively measured or empirically tested — like, say, the hypothesis that public spending can affect employment levels. Religious beliefs may be comforting or helpful to some people, but no matter how deeply felt, they can have no place in a rational, shared system of managing outcomes for all Americans.

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