The Washington Post did a little summaries of the GOP candidates here. I've copied/pasted out the descriptors, quotes and tidbits that seemed helpful to me. Hopefully they are the same for you. The biggest writeups were on Perry, Bachmann and Romney as they were getting the attention early December when this was written. I left out Perry and Bachmann as they are now irrelevent.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...1/gIQAkSGXlO_story_3.html
Mitt Romney, the problem solver
Arguments are compiled and advanced on the basis of analytics, not emotion. he is most fervent and animated in his pitch to be president when he talks about how he has fixed stuff before and he can fix stuff again. Romney ticks off what he says people in business understand, about the economy and job creation and making the nation hum again, that people in government do not. It’s a seven-point pitch, eminently sensible, and after each point, like the experienced corporate team-builder he is, Romney affirms the good sense of his audience: “And you understand that in the private sector.” “Incentives,” Romney exclaims, “have impact.” ...credits Romney for not cutting the budget for the homeless and for forming public-private partnerships that made headway on an intractable decades-old problem. is what used to be called — before the politics of personal confession — an upstanding citizen. acts generously, earns the loyalty of his staff and drives himself relentlessly to get the job done, whatever it is. obeisance to ideology would impose a rigidity that would inhibit Romney’s real talent, which is forging new ways to fix old problems. It’s as though he doesn’t understand what people don’t understand about him. He isn’t going to talk about feeling their pain. It seems he just wants to get to work relieving it. Dudley Do-Right in a Kim Kardashian world, a man temperamentally disinclined to revel in the disorder and lack of rules in modern campaigns. He’s a man forced to submit to a chaotic process he can’t remake or control. Its demands that he summon fiery rhetoric or offer up a personal tidbit are at odds with his public comportment. He is “a man who displays a nimble mind capable of both subtle nuance and broad understanding, combined with a principled degree of restraint in words and deeds.” Some who worked with Romney in business and in government found him imperious and condescending, and once in a while, his discipline falters and a phrase comes out that appears dismissive. Romney is not unaware of his flaws as a candidate and clearly has improved his performance since 2008. It’s just how we were raised,” Scott Romney said, “to have the capacity to do things.” Romney asks for data, and then more data. “There are answers in numbers — gold in numbers, Pile the budgets on my desk and let me wallow.” A passionate, emotional argument is not going to have much influence on the supremely rational mind of Mitt Romney.
Newt Gingrich: The GOP’s eccentric big thinker and bomb-thrower
upheaval agent. disrupter. smartest guy in the room. contemplative historian or combustible politician. combinatyion of intelligence, ambition, drive and ego.interest in everything. "At 19, just weeks after graduating from high school, he asked Jackie Battley, his 26-year-old geometry teacher, to marry him. (She said yes.) One year after getting his first faculty job at West Georgia, he applied to be chairman of the entire history department. (They said no.)"
"Gingrich lost two campaigns for Congress running as a moderate, environmentalist Republican. Then, in 1978, he ran for a third time as a full-throated movement conservative, attacking his Democratic opponent as a big-government liberal and railing against welfare.
He won and moved his family to Washington. " willing to shake things up. “I disagree with everything he said,” said Harvard Law graduate student Jennifer Devlin. “But he handles himself brilliantly. He’s clearly very intelligent.”
Ron Paul: The Alternative Candidate is a force to be reckoned with
...doesn't have 'positioins' on 'issues'. He has a philosophy. Government tramples liberty. boil the federal government down to a few, skeletal functions. end welfare state, cut foreign aid, halt overseas military action, abolish the Federal Reserve. distinct libertarian message. alternative candidate. believes that powerful and secretive forces have manipulated human events and bankroled wars. fears nation is turning into an Orwellian police state. He’s a stalwart opponent of the USA Patriot Act and regularly condemns post-Sept. 11 security measures, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. delivered about 4,000 babies. “Doesn’t sit there and pat himself on the back. He’s a humble person. There’s no pride, none of this ‘I’m so great.’ ” likes to ride his bike and garden buit doesn't wear a helmet. “Seventy years of Keynesian economics have taught us to live like drug addicts.” Paul is not someone who is terribly politic. He’s not a dealmaker and is not interested in forging bipartisan compromises. Paul has been rooted in place, philosophically. The world of late has been bending his direction. He’s not to be underestimated. He says what he believes, believes what he says.
Jon Huntsman is study in understatement
“If people, enough of them, hear our message, they will coalesce around it, and we will do fine,” former Utah governor Jon Huntsman Jr. said. “It may take a little longer than those who are willing to light their hair on fire onstage,or engage in crazy political theatrics, but that’s okay. We’ll get there eventually.” arguably the most well rounded of any GOP contender. popular governor of one of the reddest states in the country; Mandarin-speaking diplomat who served as ambassador to China and Singapore; executive in a successful family business. only varsity player among all the Republicans. “I crossed a partisan line when I went to serve this administration, which was an outgrowth of my personal belief that you always put country first." “Jon Huntsman inexplicably chose to debut as the Republican for people who rather dislike Republicans, but his program is the most conservative.” If Huntsman is to have any path from the back of the pack, it is with independents.
Rick Santorum is long on substance, short on support
he’s still less harshly judgmental than advertised. “I call him a chocolate-covered strawberry, because he’s hard on the outside and soft on the inside,’’ his former aide says. “He’s combative, and can speak before he thinks, but once he figures out he’s hurt someone’s feelings, he apologizes,’’ genuinely feels bad and sometimes goes overboard trying to make amends. The candidate is long on substance, but not always the smoothest on the stump;
When it looked like he was going to lose his first Senate race, in 1994, Brabender remembers him worrying that he might have blown it for his campaign workers. Trailing badly in his last race, against Robert P. Casey Jr. in 2006, “everyone was telling him to move to the middle or throw [George W.] Bush under the bus, but he looked at the polls and said, ‘I don’t see how I can win this, but I do have a microphone, so I’m going to use it to talk about Iran’ — then spent the next three weeks talking almost exclusively’’ about the threat posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “No one could understand it.’’
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