This is all very logical, but the point the anti-Romney crowd would make is that there IS no choice, or what there is what is sometimes called "Hobson's choice", i.e. your choice is purely hypothetical as both alternatives lead to the same thing. To use your analogy, amputation may very well be worse than having your leg broken, but whichever one you choose, you still can't walk.
The counter-argument to your very pragmatic approach is that the USA is slowly and surely becoming more and more socialist every year, and has been for decades. The trend of history is, currently, against us. There is no use denying this, it is true. The evidence is all about you. If nothing else you can tell by the way that the progressives push for legislation and actions today that would have been unthinkable, even to themselves, a decade ago. Now, Romney is quite palpably NOT the man who is going to reverse those trends. He may slow them down. He might even, under pressure from folk like Paul Ryan, arrest some of them. For a while. But he is not a true conservative, and a true constitutionalist conservative is what the country desperately needs if there is going to be even the remotest chance of stopping the country's slide into economic, social and political ruin.
On a tactical level voting for Romney may make a lot of sense, as you say. After all, no matter how flabby he is on certain issues he isn't Barack Obama! However, strategically it might be a very bad move. By voting for him you send a clear message that you approve of, or at least are prepared to put up with, his RINO type stances. That will make it more unlikely that a true conservative candidate will manage to get on the ticket in the next four, eight or twelve years (beyond that it will probably be too late to matter). If Romney fails to get in regardless, it will only further demoralise the GOP. If Romney does win, his non-conservative policies will fail (naturally) but conservatives will still be tarred with that failure (bizarrely), which will make it even harder next time round.
I frankly don't know what the answer to this is, but I do know that we all of us have to make a stand sometime, some place.
I disagree. Sort of.
Let's assume we, by some fluke, were to elect the most constitutionalist conservative imaginable as President.
Would that save the country?
Nope. The country is in the mess it's in not because of the politicians. They have just been giving the people what they want.
A politician who actually ran on the platform of doing what needs to be done would never even make it thru a single primary, much less get elected.
The problem is extremely simple, and equally intractable.
It is, pretty clearly, the expansion of government and the associated spending this requires.
Most Americans, probably, would like to see government reduced in scope and spendingg.
But that is a generalized POV. Meanwhile, special interest groups feeding off the government have very specialized and intense desire for continuation and expansion of their own special programs.
So whenever a politician faces the specifics of cutting spending, he has a vague generalized desire for reduced spending by the public on one side, and intense focused opposition to any specific cut on the other side.
Intense focus will always beat vague generalizations. Nobody is intensely desirous that any particular program be cut, while every such program has its intense partisans.
Result: lots of talk about cutting, no cutting in practice.
I think a case could be made that this is the result of too much democracy, of the politicians paying too much heed to what the people tell them they want. Arguably, what we need is politicians who can do what needs to be done whether the people want it at the time or not. IOW, less "democracy," not more.
BTW, if you break a leg, you can't walk for a while. If your leg is amputated, you'll never walk again. On a real leg, anyway.
It seems that everyone who preemptively tries to equate the two candidates' performance in office makes this gigantic mistake.