If Santorum fades, Romney will garner the support (albeit unenthusiastic) of the Christian Right. What he really needs is some of Ron Paul's supporters. It would be much too dangerous to put Ron on the ticket or even to promise him a cabinet position, but he can hijack some of his anti-government and foreign policy agenda, the way Richard Nixon hijacked George Wallace's populist agenda.
No, he should not come out as an anti-war peacenik libertarian or hire my friend Justin Raimondo (of Antiwar.com) as his speechwriter. And, no, he should not call for the abolition of the Federal Reserve or the elimination of all welfare programs. What he can do is to advocate severe fiscal restraint and a pragmatic foreign policy of national interest.
In domestic policy, all he needs to do is to ramp up a little his already well-defined opposition to deficit spending. He can throw a few bones to the libertarians--references to the Constition, though it is an entirely irrelevant document, and America's tradition of rugged individualism.
Fiscal restraint is the easy part, but he needs to back off from the GOP's warmongering rhetoric. Romney can praise Dr. Paul's single-minded devotion to peace, while reciting the Latin wheeze, "Si vis pacem, bellum para." He can praise George W. Bush as a patriotic statesman, but hint at criticisms of the bellicose neconservatives who have cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars in what now appear to be less than perfectly successful crusades.
You ask: "Would such a nuanced foreign policy conflict with Gov. Romney's principles?" You are obviously forgetting that Romney is a politician, and politicians don't have principles, only positions and sound-bytes designed to win elections.
