It's Christmas Eve, so let's treat ourselves to something conservative political junkies enjoy: handicapping the 2012 Republican field.  

On the Fox News Special Report this evening, panelists Stephen Hayes and Charles Krauthammer both singled out Mitch Daniels as a man to watch.  Hayes identifed  the Indiana gov as perhaps the true Tea Party candidate—someone willing to speak the hard truths about the need for entitlement reform.  Krauthammer counter-intuitively found Daniels' lack of charisma appealing—as an antidote to our overdose of hope-and-change.

View video after the jump.

Watch Stephen and Charles make the case for Mitch.
 

Other panel observations:

A.B. Stoddard: "the people who really know how these primaries work and really understand [Palin] better than we might at his table are starting to convince me that she's not going to run."

Juan Williams: "If I was picking the field right now, the person that I would watch is former Governor Mike Huckabee."

Note: no one expressed enthusiasm for Mitt Romney, though Hayes sized up the field as "Mitt Romney and then everybody else."