'Not Mitt Romney' Web Site is a Misguided Strategy

"You might as well call yourselves the 'Let's Re-Elect Obama Committee,'" one commenter, Jeff Spaulding, wrote in response to a press release on NotMittRomney.com. "Anybody but Romney guarantees Obama's re-election. If you are not smart enough to realize that then I have no use for you."

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"Sorry, but the 'you are giving Obama the election' is a bunch of poppycock. Any candidate can beat Obama, even [Jon] Huntsman or [Buddy] Roemer, so why settle for someone we cannot trust to keep his campaign promises?" David West responded.

Obama Remains Tough Competitor

But polls show that, while Obama's approval rating remains low, many of the Republican candidates would actually have a hard time beating him. And, in a sign of the weak primary field, the leaders of the "Not Mitt Romney" campaign have chosen not to back any alternative candidate yet.

"We're treading water until this viable candidate presents him- or herself," Akbar told The Hill last Thursday.

The problem with that strategy, critics say, is that time is rapidly running out for a viable candidate to present him- or herself and for conservative voters to rally around him or her. By not choosing an alternative now, the anti-Romney activists are leaving the fate of their campaign to defeat Mitt Romney in the hands of, well, Mitt Romney.

If an alternative candidate wins in Iowa and/or South Carolina, the two early voting states in which social conservatives have traditionally played the largest role, the coalition might then be able to mobilize in support of that candidate and, with some luck, push him or her past Romney.

But Romney is polling strongly in both Iowa and South Carolina even without campaigning heavily there, and his main challenger, Herman Cain, has lost a significant amount of support in the wake of the sexual harassment allegations against him. Romney has at least a fighting chance of winning one or both of those states, and if he does, that coupled with expected wins in New Hampshire and Nevada could seal the nomination for him before the anti-Romney coalition's "viable candidate" even has a chance to emerge.

Will Iowa Generate a Romney Rising Tide?

The coalition's leaders admitted as much in their Des Moines Register column, writing, "His inability to break the standard frontrunner's 30 percent shows that there is a growing national consensus: we don't have an inevitable nominee. However, if Mitt Romney wins Iowa, he may become the inevitable nominee overnight."