Okay, maybe not quite head to head, but we were in the same room for an hour, said room being the capacious Curb Event Center at Belmont, where Santorum spoke last night to a crowd of maybe 700 or so jammed into a space configured to hold around 4000. And of course by "head to head" I mean he was onstage with a mic and I was half a football field away in the cheap seats. But even still, you could tell throughout his hour-long remarks that he was utterly distracted by the searing reality that there were radical campus indoctrination specialists in the house, waiting for an opening to intellectually assault those innocent Belmont kids with toxic, free-thinking leftist ideology. Or maybe just hand out condoms.

Be that as it may, for Pith readers who have always wanted to know, "so what's a Rick Santorum for President rally like, anyway?," here's my dispatch from the trenches.

7:52. I arrive for the 8 p.m. rally, but there are few if any trappings of one. Sure, there are hundreds of people in there waiting, but no preliminary speeches, a PowerPoint slide with the word "family" on it but no banners, and no upbeat motivational or inspirational music. It occurs to me: Maybe this is just a speaking gig for the college kids, not a true campaign rally, because if it is a rally it's an exceptionally lame one. But the Santorum website does bill it as a "Rally for Rick," so I guess we'll have to chalk it up to the non-trappings of an underfunded, understaffed campaign now hard-pressed, with Super Tuesday imminent, to be in too many places at one time.

7:57. A musical duo shows up onstage to kill a few minutes playing a tune. Nothing wrong with that, although exhorting a crowd to sing along with Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" is a losing proposition, and the crowd's having none of it. Who thought that would be a good choice for a sing-along, anyway?

8:08. The duo having given up and vacated, background music wafts from the sound system of the arena ... Sinatra doing "The Way You Look Tonight." It's a Santorum event, so I assume "You" is code for fertilized embryos.

8:19. Four guys show up with Romney signs, which now outnumber Santorum signs four to zero, and grab some strategic seats for taunting the Rickster later.

8:21. Now it's a mellow Norah Jones vibe on the sound system, putting much of the crowd into snoozeland with "The Long Way Home." Intriguingly downbeat choice for a campaign rally.

8:29. Santorum's daugher Elizabeth comes onstage to inform the crowd that Dad is late because he's backstage doing Hannity, so cool your heels for a few more minutes. I spend the next several minutes trying to decide if she actually said "doing Hannity" (and conjuring up accompanying images), though I'm pretty sure she didn't say "cool your heels."

8:35. More Norah Jones, for crying out loud. Where are the cocktails? Growing impatient, I take a field trip over to the soundboard and learn that the campaign is not programming the audio; we are hearing the Curb Event Center's stock pre-event mix. This makes sense, since even Santorum's handlers are surely not dense enough to warm up a rally with music by a known Barack Obama supporter and campaign contributor.

8:43. The great man takes the stage after a one-sentence introduction by said daughter Elizabeth. Isn't she great?, Santorum asks, trying hard to rile up the semi-sedated crowd. Yeah we guess so ... she can spit out a one-sentence intro with the best of them.

8:48. Moving his remarks into second gear, Santorum mentions home schooling. Biggest applause so far. To his credit, Santorum does these gigs with just a hand-held mic, no podium, no teleprompter, no notes. Just Rick, his thoughts, his god, his paranoia, and a sound system. To his detriment, this makes for a rambling hour-long monologue that is a mile wide and an inch deep.

8:50. He's reminding us that in Obamaland, the elite are best able to make decisions for us, and that's not how America works. The lukewarm reaction to this from the Belmont crowd tells me a lot of people actually think it's not such a bad thing when we let smart people tackle hard problems.

8:55. The crowd is friendly and polite, and occasionally shows some enthusiasm, but this is hardly a festival of adoration or rhetorical intensity. So he plays the God card. Big applause for the big guy.

8:59. Santorum trots out the French Revolution — liberty, equality, fraternity. His take: liberty, fine; equality, sure you betcha; but fraternity, well that one is "problematic." While most people see the fraternity part of that motto as a marker of common cause, moral obligation, the importance of community, for Santorum it's big government, and that of course is really really not good at all. No, not one little bit.

9:01. He's on an American exceptionalism riff. I think I space out part of the argument, but he seems to be saying that because average life expectancy increased from the 30s or 40s in the 17th century to the 80s now, and because that happens to correspond with the historical arc of the American republic, it proves QED that America is the best fucking country ever. (I may have added a word to that last sentence.)

9:03. And what do you follow an American exceptionalism riff with? Well, of course it's the Obama's-re-election-will-threaten-the-continuation-of-society riff. He actually said that.

9:05. A kid in plaid shorts is being shooed out of the building by arena staff, with police looking on with interest. His crime unknown. Collectively we envy him his rapid departure.

9:06. The speech takes a curious turn when Santorum tries to interest the crowd in hating Obamacare, but it turns out there's a sizable contingent on hand who make it vocally clear they rather like Obamacare. You can almost see Santorum making a mental note to scold campaign advance man Skippy afterwards for leading him to believe that he would be speaking at a conservative Christian campus.

9:08. Efforts to critique Obamacare are dubiously compelling and less than coherent. Do Republicans really think they are going to take down Obama in the general election by defending the moral authority of insurance companies and asking audiences to sympathize with their plight? This audience wasn't buying it. So what do you do when it's not going so well? Why of course you play ...

9:10. The Reagan card. Mention the Gipper; audience reflexively applauds. Bank on it.

9:11. Santorum veers into the reproductive-health-slash-birth-control business, albeit without actually using the word "contraception" or the phrase "birth control." He is heckled a bit, and quickly moves on.

9:12. Sticking with health care generally, and trying to focus on the college-kid segment of the audience (which is substantial but not a big part of the more enthusiastic troops down front), Santorum declares that health savings accounts are, and I'm going to quote him exactly here, "the coolest thing ever for young people." Yes, he really said that: coolest thing ever. Health savings accounts. He was trying to make the point that Obamacare and Romneycare suck because they force healthy young people to subsidize care for less healthy old people. This went nowhere — you could tell that most people in the room don't really have a problem with this. It's called "society."

9:18. Blah blah blah. He's talking about something. It probably involves God, the Declaration of Independence, and the abject evil which is everything Barack Obama has ever thought, said or done.

9:20. Santorum pivots to energy. On cue a staffer brings him his energy prop — a fist-sized piece of North Dakota shale he likes to wave around while he talks about drilling and fracking everything, everywhere. The faithful down front quite like this gambit; others not so much. This really isn't a hugely enthusiastic audience on the whole.

9:25. He finally hits Obama on the economy, ultimately arriving at the conclusion that if Obama is re-elected the world will end immediately. Santorum didn't say exactly that, but what he said wasn't that far off.

9:29. He commences his now stock peroration on the founding fathers, redcoats in prim outfits (a gay thing?), America as a beacon of freedom providing hope for the world ... and we can't help but think with joy and relief, "He's wrapping up." But alas, it turns out to be a 14 minute wrap-up. The dude does like to hear himself talk.

9:31. Something about the glory of planting seeds in a new nation during and after the American revolution. I will assume that by "planting seeds" he means "unconstrained premarital sexual activity."

9:33. "We are the greatest country in the history of the world." Do you think candidates for president of, say, Lithuania say that?

9:34. "Thank God for men and women in uniform." This yields the only standing O of the night, predictably. Interesting, through, that he thanks God for men and women in uniform, but doesn't bother to thank the actual men and women in uniform. Seems like a nontrivial oversight.

9:38. Returning to the horror that is everything Obama, he asks the kids: As young people, why would you settle for a system that doesn't believe in you? I'm not sure how Repubs think they are going to try to win back young voters in this and future election cycles, but arguing that the party inclined to make it easier to get students loans and health insurance doesn't believe in them is probably not going to do the trick.

9:40. You know you should be wrapping it up when, right near the finish, you deviate into a riff on how income inequality not only doesn't matter, but is actually a good thing. "I don't worry about income inequality." He didn't say that rising inequality is the "coolest thing ever" but given a few more minutes he surely would have gotten there.

9:42. Really close to the end now — he's hitting up the audience for concrete support, financial and otherwise, in the coming week leading to Super Tuesday. He asks if we're up to the challenge. The challenge, we think, is getting him to stop talking so we can get the hell out of here.

9:43. The finish, met with moderately enthusiastic cheers and a brief but nontrivial chorus of boos mixed in. Skippy's really going to hear about this. Cue the Norah Jones mix ... and there it is!

There is something to like about the laid-back vibe of the event; after all, who really needs a parade of trite overly loud warm-up speeches laced with hefty doses of forced campaign jingoism. The candidate came out, spoke for a while, and we went home. Nothing wrong with that, right? But between the organizational minimalism of the thing and the candidate's wandering soliloquy of oversimplification and paranoia, this felt like the performance of a frothy ideologue trying out his schtick for a forthcoming lucrative campus speaking tour, not like a serious campaign going serious places.