Posted on 04/12/2012 10:57:27 AM PDT by Brown Deer
Two days after leaving the Republican presidential-nomination race, Rick Santorum said on Thursday that the main reason he dropped out was that the campaign simply ran out of money.
“We were just burning through cash at a rate we couldn't maintain,” the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania said on Tony Perkins’s Today's Issues radio show, noting that the campaign for the first time started to go into debt. “Super PAC money didn't pay the bills on the campaign.”
Santorum suspended his campaign one day after his 3-year-old daughter, Bella, who suffers from a rare chromosomal disorder, was released from the hospital. On Thursday, he did not mention his daughter or her health issues as a factor in his decision.
Santorum said the decision to suspend his campaign came after the primary loss in Wisconsin, which he and his team felt they had to win.
“In the week after Wisconsin, we basically raised no money,” he said, noting that the campaign had sent out requests for donations. “People were e-mailing back saying the race was over.”
In Pennsylvania, Santorum said, he would have had no money to spend on advertising against front-runner Mitt Romney’s millions.
“We were probably looking at not being able to spend a penny on advertising,” he said. “You want to compete, but we felt we couldn’t.”
The campaign also looked ahead to what was deemed as a favorable calendar for Romney. “It seemed unlikely — reaching the point of impossible — to stop Romney,” he said. “We thought, ‘Maybe it’s time to stand down.’”
That said, Santorum said he did credit his rival with shaping the media narrative.
“I give Romney a lot of credit in that he was able to more effectively spin the media,” he said.
His internals said he was going to lose PA, no doubt.
Money is part of that. PA is a huge media market and without money he really couldn’t compete. So I take him at his word.
No point in risking the humiliation of a big defeat in your home state when you don’t have the money to do anything to mitigate that risk.
It was near impossible to match Milt this election cycle with cash. He could write checks all day long to fund himself. Rick did do a fantastic job with the limited funds he had. 11 wins against Milt is nothing to dismiss when he was outspent 10 to 1 in some contests. Some of these upcoming states are pretty expensive to run in too. PA and NY are not cheap.
I sure wish folks would step back and think about the implications of continuing to feed a political process that is all about money and media.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
He was not going to be able to win Pennsylvania by a large enough margin to offset the media meme about the other three Romney wins that day. The schedule was set up to offset any losses in Conservative/Moderate states with more wins in Liberal states. Everything was stacked to help Romney this time.
The Philthy media market alone is huge and expensive. Add having to do Pittsburgh and all the small markets in between, it is very expensive. The money spent in the Toomey/Sestak race were mind blowing for a US Senate race compared to other states.
The only reason anyone ever drops out of this race...
Agreed! Santorum gave Romney a good scare and probably made the wisest decision he could under the circumstances. It also makes abundantly clear that Romney and his flying monkeys have bought the nomination, which speaks volumes about the corruption within the GOP.
Not as much of a degenerate chump as you, Rome.
Rotten to the core, you Santorum haters.
Certainly doesn’t sound like he’s throwing his support to Mittens...
There is no state that Romney won that was not a result of his money advantage.
It does make one wonder who the candidate would be if none of them had any money and just had to go on the basis of public broadcast of debates or discussions.
You need to factor in state-controlled media's crusade against all things conservative.
Money can't buy that. It's already been bought and paid for.
Exactly! But they did get what they wanted in the end. Unfortunately, that’s a Romney nomination. Now the rest of us have to suffer with 4 more years of Obama.
Romney’s losing in OH, and in CO, and in NC - it’s over.
I figured that was the case. That was probably the most I’ve given to a single candidate. The upside is I’ll be saving money from this point on since I won’t be donating to Romney, the RNC, RNSC, or RNCC despite their 10 - 20 calls per day.
You got it but Santorum and Romney probably took a joint decision after determining together that Gingrich was no longer a threat to Romney.
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