Perhaps destiny brought these GOP candidates to Dartmouth. After the debate, Gov. Perry attended a Dartmouth frat party. A Dartmouth fraternity was of course the inspiration for “Animal House,” an apt metaphor for the GOP nomination process.

Newt Gingrich’s variation on cheeseburger is to repeatedly attack Ben Bernanke. This is slightly weird, but the former House Speaker apparently has decided that if he talks too much about Washington, he’ll be fingered as one of them. So his strategy is attacking the Fed.

Associated PressPolling in the low 20s, Mr. Romney gives new meaning to front-runner.

Incredible to behold, the Federal Reserve offered the evening’s one, genuine comic highlight. After Julianna Goldman elicited from Herman Cain his view that the best Fed chairman in the past 40 years was Alan Greenspan, all the synapses in Ron Paul’s brain fired in a straight line to assert: “Alan Greenspan was a disaster! Everybody in Washington—liberals and conservatives—said he kept interest rates too low, too long . . . and ushered in the biggest [housing] bubble.”

We all know the meaning of the saying, It isn’t over until the fat lady sings. A few hours before the Dartmouth debate, Chris Christie endorsed Mitt Romney. Gov. Christie’s sudden and awkwardly timed endorsement may only reflect his belief that the process is over, we have a candidate and it’s time to get on with the campaign to defeat Barack Obama.

We see his point, but what’s the rush? The election is 13 months away. No voters in any primary have had a chance to provide a verdict on the candidates more real than these hapless debates or another opinion poll.

By this early, imperfect measure, Mitt Romney’s status is weak. Despite running against this field, he never rises above 25% in GOP preferences. At best, Mr. Romney is running as the party’s Unsinkable Molly Brown.

A week ago, Mr. Christie seemed to understand that the reason so many wanted him to run wasn’t merely dissatisfaction with Mr. Romney. It had to do as well with the clear sense that the 2012 election is historic, a moment for the American people to choose decisively between Barack Obama’s Americanized version of a flatlined European social democracy or the steady upward path of the nation’s past two centuries.

The enthusiasm flowing to Mr. Christie came from the same people who had hoped to see Congressman Paul Ryan in the race, or Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush. All of them made clear they understood we had arrived at a big moment for the nation. Mr. Romney, by contrast, leaves the impression that the country has arrived at his big moment.

Before any primary vote, Mr. Christie and others are falling in behind a former Massachusetts governor whose message is both very good and very bad. It would help the Romney candidacy a lot—or a Romney presidency—if he were under more pressure now from his peers in the party.

Mr. Romney was at his best in the debate when pressed to bow to the conventional Beltway wisdom that any deficit compromise demands tax increases. He ran his questioner through total government spending’s rising share of the economy, heading toward 40%, and said merely matching revenue to that share would mean “we cease at some point to be a free economy.”

This candidate will have to be pushed a lot harder to make him a good president.

That’s true and well said. But Mr. Romney also said: “You have to stand by your principles.” Doubts about that statement are the main reason Mr. Romney, in the current RealClearPolitics average, is polling at 21.7%, a level that gives new meaning to front-runner.

The health-care problem has been widely discussed. There are two other troubling policy areas, both on display in the debate: taxes and China.

Newt Gingrich rightly asked Mr. Romney why his capital gains cut stops at incomes above $200,000—a total economic absurdity, especially for anyone who purports to know “how the economy works.”

Mr. Romney’s standard reply is that the “rich can take care of themselves” and he’s all about “the middle class.” But that’s Barack Obama’s divisive view. And despite two bipartisan commissions explicitly calling for lower individual rates, Mr. Romney’s tax reforms are “in the future.” So he sits below 22% support.

China is hacking into the Pentagon’s computers, grabbing the South China Sea, offering little help on nuclear proliferation, and Mr. Romney’s big proposal is “on day one” to file a complaint against China with the World Trade Organization for currency manipulation. But that’s proto-Democrat Chuck Schumer’s issue. If one can glean a commonality in the Schumer-Romney complaint, it would be campaign contributions.

Mitt Romney has undoubted gifts. He could be president. But in the current Obama morass, so could 100 other people. What voters, including Republican voters, want for the United States now is the best president possible. Mr. Romney isn’t there yet. Only more competition or criticism will get him there.

Write to henninger@wsj.com