GOP strategist in Iowa: Media will ‘stomp over there and eat Rick Santorum: How ridiculous - the media will not stomp anywhere! They will take a plane and a bus! And only Maureen Dowd is catty carnivorous enough to go all canaballistic on Rick Sancuaryorum - they don't call her man-eater for nuttin' -- Besides, Rickiey boy's anti-abortion massage will play well in I-O-Way

The rapidly-rising Rick Santorum, to date largely ignored by rivals and reporters, will face new scrutiny, a national GOP strategist predicted this morning in Iowa. And it has already started. “The media works like Jurassic Park dinosaurs – 30 feet tall, huge teeth, not always the biggest brain, and it follows movement,” strategist Mike Murphy said on “Meet the Press” Sunday morning, which aired the Iowa Public Television studios in Johnston. Santorum is moving, so the press will “stomp over there and eat Rick Santorum.” The Des Moines Register’s new Iowa Poll shows that likely GOP caucusgoers are suddenly lining up behind the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. He earned 10 percent support on Tuesday, the first night of polling, but galloped to 22 percent on Friday, the final day. The caucuses, the first-in-the-nation vote in the GOP presidential nominating process, are just two days away. Earlier in the show, moderator David Gregory asked Santorum if anything less than a win in Iowa won’t measure up to expectations. “That’s really pretty funny actually,” Santorum said. “Ten days ago, I was at 5 percent and every question I got was, why don’t you pack it up, why don’t you endorse another candidate and now 10 days later now you’re saying, ‘Oh, you’ve got to win!” Asked to defend his endorsement of Mitt Romney in 2008 as “the clear conservative candidate, Santorum said: “What changed was who he’s running against.” Romney was a better candidate “relative to John McCain,” he said. And Santorum was asked about his change of mind on abortion. In 2006, he said he supported exceptions in the cases of rape, incest and the life of the mother. Now he says he opposes all abortions. Was that a flip-flop? “Today I would support laws that would provide for those exceptions but I’m not for them,” Santorum answered. Murphy, in a separate segment, predicted Santorum will be “the happiest guy in the world I think Tuesday night.” “Wednesday he’s got to stand on his head, drink from a firehose without drowning and learn Chinese in one week to roll this out nationally. Not impossible, going to be hard.” Romney, the poll frontrunner, would love to beat Santorum in Iowa Tuesday, but “there’s no way Romney comes out of here a loser if he’s in the top two,” Murphy said. Time magazine’s Mark Halperin predicted that the caucuses will either be great for Romney or really good for Romney. “They would love to leave here in the top three in whatever order, being (Ron) Paul, Santorum and Romney because they believe they will never lose in the long run or maybe even the medium run to Santorum or Paul. “(Newt) Gingrich and (Rick) Perry represent bigger threats for them. The worse case for Romney is if one of those guys surges in the last few days. No indication that will happen, but they’re out there working hard,” Halperin said. Every time a GOP rival has become a poll-topping threat to Romney, “his well very skilled opposition research team has killed the person whose challenged him,” Halperin said. “They killed Rick Perry. They killed Newt Gingrich. They haven’t lifted a finger to kill Rick Santorum.” But if Santorum emerges strong from Iowa, the Romney team will tactically kill Santorum with a thick opposition research file, Halperin said.