April 12, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Rick Santorum has pointed to a serious lack of funding as one of the major reasons for wrapping up his presidential campaign this week.
Santorum told Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council Thursday that, although he had originally cited the health of his 3-year-old daughter Bella as a major reason for leaving the trail, his campaign had brought in practically no new funding since early this month.
“For the first time the campaign had a debt, the debt was from my perspective a little bit more substantial than I was comfortable with,” Santorum told Perkins in a radio interview. “And I’ll be honest with you, Tony, in the last week after Wisconsin we basically raised almost no money.
“We had solicitations going out and people were just emailing back saying the race is over and you gotta join the crew, and there were others who would say not, but it was a very, very small trickle of funds that were coming in.”
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Santorum had been routinely outspent by Mitt Romney by excessive margins: Romney ran laps around Santorum’s spending 55/1 in the latest contest in Wisconsin. As of the end of February, Santorum’s campaign had spent $19.6 million, while Romney’s had spent at least $103 million.
The former senator from Pennsylvania also said that the media played a powerful role in drying up his support. Santorum had grown increasingly critical of the conservative news giant Drudge Report for consistently framing Romney as the presumptive nominee.
“The media does drive this a lot more than people realize, they do in fact have the ability to drive a narrative beyond the campaign’s ability to really to do much about it,” he said. “In that respect I give Governor Romney a lot of credit in that he was more able to effectively spin the media effectively to drive his narrative than we were, and that’s, that was just the reality of the situation.”
However, he admitted that it “seemed unlikely, not even unlikely but reaching to the point of impossible” to stop Romney, who has more delegates than all his competitors combined, from reaching the 1,144 delegates needed to net the nomination.
Perkins, appearing on CNN, had said earlier in the week he was a “little surprised” at Santorum’s bowing out, and said that Romney would need to embrace his former rival’s message if he hoped to unify conservative Americans behind him.
“I think Rick would admit this himself — this was not about Rick Santorum,” Perkins said the day after Santorum bowed out of the race. “I mean Rick would say he probably was not the best messenger to articulate the message that he had. But that emphasizes the power of the message that he had.
“That’s what energized and enthused people, so I think, first off, if Mitt Romney wants to capture some of that support that Rick Santorum gained with very little money based solely upon his message, then Mitt Romney needs to pick up that message.”