Rick Santorum has announced tonight that he is suspending his campaign for president and endorsing Marco Rubio.
"We are suspending our campaign," he said on Fox News on Wednesday night.
"We decided that we want to find a candidate that really espoused the values that he we believed in," he said, saying that he wanted someone who cared about the middle class and family values. "That's why we decided to support Marco Rubio," he said.
The failed two-time presidential candidate’s announcement comes after he finished in 11th place with 1 percent of the vote in Monday’s Iowa caucuses.
It was a far cry from 2012 when he delivered a surprise upset in the Iowa caucuses, defeating the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney. Hoping for a repeat of that come-from-behind win in the Hawkeye State, this year Santorum visited all of Iowa’s 99 counties.
"He's a tremendously gifted young man," he said of the Florida senator. "I just feel a lot of confidence that he is the new generation and someone that can bring this country together."
This tells me that Santorum was/is a lightweight conservative. I dislike Santorum for this and think Rubio is shaping up to be the willing establishment alternative to Jeb Bush. TM
******* The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil ... but by those who watch them and do nothing. -- Albert Einstein
Santorum to ‘reassess’ presidential campaign - as any sub-Carson candidate should
According to the Des Moines Register, Rick Santorum is doing something he should have done before announcing his candidacy. That is, rethink his candidacy. I’m honestly not sure who convinced Rick Santorum that he should mount a presidential bid in the first place but, clearly, it was not the best idea.
Santorum had a disastrous showing in Iowa, receiving only about 1% of the vote. That was enough to edge out “other” at 0.1% and Jim Gilmore who received an almost-impossible total of 12 votes. That’s 0.01% - probably because nobody knows he’s actually running.
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Frankly, it’s time for anyone who couldn’t top Ben Carson’s 9.3% to get out of the real candidates’ way.
That’s particularly true of Jeb Bush who burned through $15 million dollars in Iowa alone, and only managed to corral a meager 2.8% of the vote. Supposedly, his ability to raise cash is one of Jeb’s strongest selling points. But how he can possibly go to donors and ask for more cash after spending $15 million to get roughly half the votes that ex-candidate Rand Paul got?
It’s time to acknowledge that Cruz, Trump and Rubio are the 2016 leaders. Dr. Carson is this cycle’s longshot. If you can’t top him, it’s only going to get worse from here on out. Pack it up, and call it a day.
Asked repeatedly to name a single one of Sen. Marco Rubio’s accomplishments while serving five years as a U.S. senator representing Florida, Rick Santorum – who just endorsed the GOP lawmaker after bowing out of the presidential race himself on Wednesday – struggled to come up with any during an appearance Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Santorum floundered right off the bat when asked to list Rubio’s “top accomplishment” while in office. “Well, I mean, I would just say that this is a guy who’s been able to, No. 1, win a tough election in Florida and pull people together from a variety of different spots. This is a guy that I think can work together with people,” he said. “That’s the thing I like about him the most.”
Yet host Joe Scarborough didn’t ask which personal quality of Rubio’s Santorum liked the most. He asked for just one standout accomplishment – so he pressed the former Pennsylvania senator again: “So he can win, but he’s been in the Senate for four years. Can you name his top accomplishment in the Senate, actually working in the Senate doing something that tilted your decision to Marco Rubio?”
Santorum danced around the question for a second time, concluding that “I guess it’s hard to say there are accomplishments” when a junior senator is working in a government “where nothing gets done.”
“Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski called the exchange with Santorum “disturbing.”
Meanwhile, Scarborough brought up the fact that Republicans have been in the Senate majority for the past two years, and asked for a third time: “Can you name one thing that he’s passed in the last two years?” eventually pleading with Santorum to “like one accomplishment – just one, just one – that Marco achieved.”
Santorum then blamed President Obama for Rubio’s lack of accomplishments in the Senate, saying “he spent four years in the United States Senate being frustrated like everybody else that nothing got done, and then you can’t point to him and say nothing got done and therefore he has no accomplishments. The problem is we have a president who doesn’t work with people.”
Eventually, however, Santorum did offer an example of a Rubio achievement, albeit a vague one.
“Well, I know he included something that went after the insurance companies in the most recent omnibus. He fought for that, to stop bailing out insurance companies. That’s one thing I’m familiar that I just saw recently, ” he said. “But – and again, he was on the campaign trail and accomplished that. The bottom line is there isn’t a lot of accomplishments, Joe, and I just don’t think it’s a fair question to say.”
I wonder why those who drop out feel the need to answer the inevitable question "who will you now support?" Especially when we are not even to the general election yet. (A good answer, when asked that question would be "I will support the eventual nominee of the party.")
Say what you want about Rand Paul, but he did it right:
ZitatWhile Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has dropped out of the Republican presidential race, he will not be endorsing any other particular candidate as the primaries crawl on, said Paul's campaign strategist Doug Stafford in a telephone press conference with Paul's top campaign staff this morning.
Paul does, though, intend to endorse whoever the Republican Party eventually settles on.