Thank you very much. It's always an honor to be here in this
beautiful town of Gettysburg. It's such a historic town.
First and foremost I just want to thank everybody for the outpouring
of prayers over the past weekend. We had a, a difficult weekend. We—
Good Friday was a little bit of a passion for us with, a passion
play for us with our daughter Bella, who is the joy of our lives,
being unfortunately very sick and we ended up in the hospital all
weekend, but I'm here just to report to start out things that she is
a fighter and she is doing exceptionally well and is back with us in
the family and we are looking forward to spending a lot of great
time with her.
But it did cause us to think, and as the role that we have as
parents in her life and with the rest of our family, this was a time
for prayer and thought this past weekend and just like it was
frankly when we decided to get into this race. Karen and I and the
kids sat at the kitchen table and talked about our hopes and fears
and our concerns. And we were very concerned about our role as being
the best parents we possibly could to our children in making sure
that they had a country that was well where the American Dream was
still possible.
And I think that a lot of concerns that we had—Karen and I had
particularly for our family—was that with what was going on in
Washington, DC and all of the problems that you've heard me talk
about on the campaign trail that the American Dream was slipping not
just from the hands of average Americans, but for all Americans;
that that dream was slipping away and that we had to as good parents
to go out and do what we could to take on that responsibility for
children across this country.
And so we started out, almost a year ago now in Somerset,
Pennsylvania, and I told well my story, our story of our family and
my grandfather who came to this country and worked in the coal mines
and my father who served our country in World War II and as you have
throughout the course of this campaign talked about my stories and
stories of our families. But after a while it became less about my
story and more about what kept us going were your stories, stories
of people across America that we had the privilege of getting the
chance to know and interact with.
You know when you travel around— one such story was a guy named
Chuck who had a pickup truck and joined our team and drove us around
in his Dodge RAM pickup truck for months on end and did so as a
volunteer because he believed, he believed that we provided the best
opportunity to turn this country around.
And I met a lot of folks in Iowa that I'll never forget, folks like
Sam Clovis, who's a talk show host, and I'll never forget this
fighter pilot, man of very strong convictions, welling up tearing up
about what was going on with our country, and particularly with our
national security, and laying out not a three-legged stool of Ronald
Reagan, but a four-legged stool with the Constitution being one of
those vitally important legs that we have forgotten about.
People like Wendy Jensen who was our best volunteer. Five thousand
phone calls, and just a few days before the primary, because she was
someone who was dealing with a disability, with an illness, she
passed away shortly before the caucus, but was someone that I
remember, her passion for the least of us, those who are on the
margins of society as many would have looked at her.
Folks even today as because of our daughter Bella, who come to, came
to our rallies one after another in wheelchairs, bringing their
special needs children and holding signs up of children saying I'm
for Bella's dad. Just a beautiful idea of, again not my story, but
their stories was what really fueled our campaign and gave us the
energy at a time when over and over again we were told forget it,
you can't win. We were winning. We were winning in a very different
way. We were touching hearts; we were raising issues that well
frankly a lot of people didn't want to have raised.
Our best phone caller after Iowa was a young man who came to our
first event in Oklahoma in a wheelchair, named Nathaniel, who had
spina bifida, and wanted someone who spoke about people again that
are overlooked by society or don't seem to be as valuable as others
in society.
Folks like the Duggars, the Duggar family, who travelled around with
us in their bus and gave their time and energy because again they
believed in the basic importance of having strong families as part
of a strong country; that we can't have a strong economy as you've
heard me say over and over again, without strong families and a
strong moral fiber that makes us the moral enterprise that is
America.
Even fun things like the sweater vest, amazing thing that sweater
vest. It happened on a night I was doing an event for Mike Huckabee
in Des Moines and showed up and everybody was in suits and ties and
I showed up in a sweater vest, and turned out I gave a pretty good
speech that night and all of the sudden the Twitterverse went wild
saying it must be the sweater vest and from that point on the
sweater vest became the official wardrobe of the Santorum campaign.
And the cool thing was we, obviously we have a big part of our
campaign is the manufacturing base of the economy, and so we of
course sourced that sweater vest in a company that was making them
here in the United States, and so we ended up going to that little
company up in Bemidji, MN in the middle of winter. It was a
beautiful day, and got a chance to see that little plant that had
been around for almost a hundred years, and turned out we're the
best customer that Bemidji Woolen Mills has ever had in their entire
history.
So it's been a wonderful story after story of people who have come
forward. Two girls who put together a song in Tulsa, Oklahoma called
"Game On," who have traveled and followed us around and over a
million hits on YouTube of that catchy little tune that they were
inspired to give.
And even today we have folks working for us in Texas to make it a
winner-take-all primary because they want to make sure that we have
the best opportunity to, for Texas and for conservatives to have a
voice throughout the course of this primary. It has been inspiring
to me the story after stories that we've been engaged with.
It turns out that it really wasn't my voice that I was out
communicating; it was your voice. The voice that you gave me from
the stories and experience I had. And that's what people say, how
did this happen? How were we able to come to from nowhere? It's
because I was smart enough to figure out that if I understood and
felt at a very deep level what you were experiencing across America
and tried to be a witness to that, tried to be in a sense an
interpreter of that, that your voice could be heard and miracles
could happen and so it did.
Miracle after miracle, this race was as improbable as any race that
you will ever see for president.
I want to thank God for that and I want to thank all of you, thank
all of you across this country for what you have given, well,
hopefully not just me and our family, but, what you’ve given which
is a voice to those who are in many cases voiceless. And we have
tried to be a witness not just for your stories and your voice, but
to provide a positive and hopeful vision, not a negative campaign.
We traveled around and did 385 town hall meetings in Iowa. We
weren’t out there trashing anybody. We went out in our campaigns
from that point on and painted a hopeful and positive vision for our
country. One that was based on how we could get this country turned
around not just economically, not just economically but reflecting
the hopes of Americans, not just the fears of Americans—the hopes of
Americans. What we could do to confront the violent radical Islam
and particularly the scourge of Iran. And what we could do to take
on the problems of a sluggish economy and a Washington that's grown
so big.
We put forth concrete solid plans that many of which came from the
people that I had an opportunity to interact with throughout the
course and time of this campaign. We did focus a lot, yes on the
families, on the dignity of human life, and on the moral enterprise
that is America. And I know Joe Klein will be upset about this, but
one of my favorite articles was the one that he wrote, where his
headline was “Rick Santorum’s Inconvenient Truths,” and talked about
things that maybe we should talk about a little more, but somehow
get shoved aside in the public discourse.
We talked about how we were going to build a great country from the
bottom up and we carried around our copy of the Constitution. Of
course it was that Constitution that got the Tea Party folks
excited, legitimately so, about the operator’s manual of America
being discarded by those in Washington, and I think what I tried to
bring to the battle was what Abraham Lincoln brought to this
battlefield back in 1863 on November 19th, when he talked about this
country being conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal. He was quoting of course the
Declaration of Independence, conceived in that Declaration. We
talked about that Declaration as the heart of American
exceptionalism as to who we are.
Because we will never be a country that can go forward as a great
and powerful country again unless we remember who we are, and what
makes us Americans.
That’s what our campaign was about. About what made us Americans.
How we built this country from the bottom up and how if we are going
to be successful in the future, how we must believe in ourselves and
believe in that ability to go forward and do the same thing.
Against all odds we won eleven states, millions of voters, millions
of votes. We won more counties than all the other people in this
race combined. We were able to spread that message far and wide
across this country, and what we found is that, well we found that
support, I found a deeper love for this country. Every state I went
to, and those of you that followed me around, I would say I really
love this state. It was a love affair for me, going from state to
state and seeing the differences, but seeing the wonderful,
wonderful people of this country, who care deeply about where this
country is going in the future, who care deeply about those who out
there paddling alone, who are feeling left behind and in some
respects feeling hopeless, and want to do something.
Well, ladies and gentleman we made the decision to get in to this
race at our kitchen table against all the odds and we made a
decision over the weekend, that while this Presidential race for us
is over, for me and we will suspend our campaign effective today, we
are not done fighting. We are going to continue to fight for those
voices, we are going to continue to fight for those that stood up
and gave us that, that air under our wings that allowed us to
accomplish things that no political expert would have ever expected.
There’s a lot of greatness, a lot of greatness in this country and
we just need leaders that believe in that., who are willing to give
voice to that, who are willing to raise us up instead of trying to
provide for us, do for us what we can better do for ourselves.
That’s the message that came to me and it’s one that I feel very
good about continuing to talk to Americans about.
You know I walked out after the Iowa Caucus victory and said “game
on.” I know a lot of folks are going to write, maybe those even at
the White House, game over. But this game is a long, long, long way
from over. We are going to continue to go out there to fight to make
sure that we defeat President Barack Obama, that we win the House
back, and that we take the United States Senate and that we stand
for the values that make us Americans, that make us the greatest
country in the history of the world, that shining city on the hill,
to be a beacon for everybody for freedom around the world.
Thank you all very much. God Bless you.
© Mike Dec, 4President Corporation and Eric Appleman, Democracy in Action