Given Rick Santorum’s recent, come-from-behind primary wins, and the fact that Super Tuesday is just a few short weeks away, the February 28 primary in Michigan is shaping up to be more important than anyone could have predicted. According to the most optimistic polling that I’ve seen, Romney, the son of former Michigan Governor George Romney, is expected to finish 6-points behind Santorum. (Other polls have him lagging by more than 10%.) FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who appeared on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown last night, believes, for a number of reasons, that Michigan could be Romney’s, “last chance to win the race cleanly.” And, as a result, advertising dollars are being pumped into the mitten state by both campaigns. The question is… How dirty will things get, if Santorum doesn’t implode, like all of those that have come before him, and Romney can’t find a way to chip away at his lead?

[There are only three primaries left between now and Super Tuesday (March 6). They are to take place in Arizona (February 28), Michigan (February 28), and Washington (March 3).]

Nate Silver, in his New York Times column today, elaborated on the advertising war shaping up in Michigan. Here’s a clip:

…Mr. Santorum has a larger lead, 15 points, in another poll of Michigan from Public Policy Polling. That firm projects Michigan’s electorate to be decidedly more conservative than it was in 2008. For instance, it projects 48 percent of the voters to be evangelical Christians, up from 39 percent in 2008, and 38 percent of voters to be “very conservative,” up from 24 percent…

So far, Mr. Romney’s campaign has relied more on the “air war” — television advertising. In Florida, where he came from behind to beat Newt Gingrich, he ran far more advertisements than the other candidates.

Almost all of these ads were negative, however, and almost all of them targeted Mr. Gingrich. There are two risks to Mr. Romney if he adopts a similar strategy in Michigan.

First, Mr. Santorum might prove more resilient to the attacks. Mr. Romney will need to develop a more creative line than the one he has used so far, calling Mr. Santorum a “career politician.” That line may produce diminishing returns, since Mr. Romney has leveled a similar charge against opponents like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry in the past, and since it is slightly discordant coming from someone who has spent most of the past six years running for president.

The bigger problem, however, is that negative ads are no way to increase your base; instead, they may alienate key constituencies within the party.

That could be especially important to Mr. Romney because the window of voting through Super Tuesday might represent the last chance for him to win the nomination by consensus, with voters coalescing around him. To date, they have rejected several opportunities to do so, and the evidence probably weighs against their doing so now, but a decisive set of victories in different parts of the country would allow Mr. Romney to make a credible pitch to voters and party elites.

If, however, Mr. Romney gets only narrow wins in states like Michigan and Arizona after a negatively charged campaign, he would probably be the favorite to win the nomination, but a lot of those winning scenarios would be ugly ones, including an outside chance at a deadlocked convention…

And, not having the Republican base behind him could doom Romney when it comes time for the general election, assuming he wins the primary, as Obama’s approval numbers continue to climb with every positive report on job creation. So, most poll watchers, from what I can tell, seem to think that Romney will run a positive campaign in Michigan, forgoing the negative tactics that have gotten him this far, and try to pick up some momentum with rank and file Republicans, who have, until now, been filling the coffers of Gingrich, Santorum and the other perceived “culture warriors”. Romney’s first television ad for the Michigan market, which was released today, would appear to confirm this non-attack, let’s-look-Presidential strategy. Here it is:

Not a bad ad… if you can get beyond the fact that the car that he’s driving, or pretending to drive, was made in Canada.

And, here, for comparative purposes, is Santorum’s first ad for the Michigan market, which, on the surface, attacks Romney for having a history of running attack ads. Ironic, right? It’s a great strategy for Santorum, in that it allows him to attack, and poke fun of Romney, who is portrayed by a bumbling look-alike in the ad, while still maintaining the perception that he alone has attained the moral high ground. One might question his use of imagery, though, as the mud being slung throughout the ad brings small-s santorum to mind.

But, thanks to Super PAC spending, that’s not all. There’s also this anti-Santorum ad, released on behalf of the Romney campaign. While it’s not terribly aggressive, it raises a few points that may resonate with the Tea Party set, like the fact that Santorum once voted with Hillary Clinton to extend voting rights to felons.

Romney’s got a hell of a way to go. Michigan should have been an easy win for him, given his ties to the state, and his corporate war chest, but people still can’t seem to muster the enthusiasm for him. And it doesn’t help that he penned that 2008 op-ed in the New York Times advocating against the auto company bailout. Word is Michigan Governor Rick Snyder will be endorsing Romney shortly, but I’m not sure that will carry much weight with the Tea Party types that are rallying around Santorum, in hopes that he might be able to roll back modernity, and restore some illusive sense of American religiosity and pride. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out.

Oh, it’s also worth mentioning that Romney is trying as best as he can to spin that New York Times editorial in which he said that we should let the GM and Chrysler fail. Here’s a clip from his op-ed in today’s Detroit News.

I am a son of Detroit. I was born in Harper Hospital and lived in the city until my family moved to Oakland County.

I grew up drinking Vernors and watching ballgames at Michigan & Trumbull. Cars got in my bones early. And not just any cars, American cars.

When the president of American Motors died suddenly in 1954, my dad, George Romney, was asked to take his place. I was 7 and got my love of cars and chrome and fins and roaring motors from him. I grew up around the industry and watched it flourish. Years later, I watched with sadness as it floundered.

Three years ago, in the midst of an economic crisis, a newly elected President Barack Obama stepped in with a bailout for the auto industry. The indisputable good news is that Chrysler and General Motors are still in business. The equally indisputable bad news is that all the defects in President Obama’s management of the American economy are evident in what he did.

Instead of doing the right thing and standing up to union bosses, Obama rewarded them.

A labor union that had contributed millions to Democrats and his election campaign was granted an ownership share of Chrysler and a major stake in GM, two flagships of the industry.The U.S. Department of Treasury — American taxpayers — was asked to become a majority stockholder of GM. And a politically connected and ethically challenged Obama-campaign contributor, the financier Steven Rattner, was asked to preside over all this as auto czar.

This was crony capitalism on a grand scale. The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.

My view at the time — and I set it out plainly in an op-ed in the New York Times — was that “the American auto industry is vital to our national interest as an employer and as a hub for manufacturing.” Instead of a bailout, I favored “managed bankruptcy” as the way forward.

Managed bankruptcy may sound like a death knell. But in fact, it is a way for a troubled company to restructure itself rapidly, entering and leaving the courtroom sometimes in weeks or months instead of years, and then returning to profitable operation.

In the case of Chrysler and GM, that was precisely what the companies needed. Both were saddled with an accumulation of labor, pension, and real estate costs that made them unsustainable. Health and retirement benefits alone amounted to an extra $2,000 baked into the price of every car they produced.

Shorn of those excess costs, and shorn of the bungling management that had driven them into a deep rut, they could re-emerge as vibrant and competitive companies. Ultimately, that is what happened. The course I recommended was eventually followed. GM entered managed bankruptcy in June 2009 and exited it a month later in July…

So, he would have saved the auto companies, but done it in such a way that they could have killed the unions, and driven labor costs down even further. Sounds great, right? Of course, people familiar with the situation at the time, don’t think that Romney’s plan would have worked, as no private firms would have given either GM or Chrysler the money they needed to reorganize after bankruptcy. Here, with more on that, is a clip from today’s New York Times.

…Officials in Mr. Obama’s administration, and many economists in both parties, scoff at Mr. Romney’s suggestion that a managed bankruptcy was possible without the billions of dollars in government aid to the car companies. They say Wall Street and private equity firms in early 2009 were in no position to lend the kind of money that the companies needed to manage the bankruptcy process in an orderly fashion.

They also point out a fact that Mr. Romney neglects to mention in Tuesday’s opinion article: that it was the Bush administration that made the initial loans to General Motors and Chrysler, starting the “bailouts” that Mr. Romney derides…

All I can say with any certainty is that the next few weeks are going to be interesting ones for Michigan, with the candidates moving among us, desperately spinning the truth in order to stay alive and throwing mud (or that delightful mixture of fecal matter and lube shown in the ad above) as they accelerate toward the 28th. That is, if Santorum doesn’t implode before the primary, like Herman, Newt, and Rick did earlier in the season. (Romney’s clear hope is that people will see Santorum as a religious nut, who wants to make birth control illegal, but he’s afraid to say so himself, as it may turn off some of the backward Republican base, who long for the good old days when women had no control over their own fertility.)

So, with all of that said, I’m curious to know which of the ads resonated with you? Do you buy Romney’s explanation as to why he suggested that we let GM and Chrysler go bankrupt? Do you accept Romney’s “I’m a regular Michigander” narrative? If you’re a Democrat, will you be crossing party lines to vote in the Republican primary, in hopes of keeping the crazy train rolling? And, regardless of party affiliation, who will you be voting for come the 28th?