Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday with a speech in which he thanked God for the “miracle” of his unlikely rise.
Rick Santorum announced Tuesday that he is suspending his presidential campaign, all but bringing to a close the 2012 GOP presidential contest and effectively handing the nomination to Mitt Romney.
(AP)
“Good Friday was a Passion play for us with daughter Bella,” who was hospitalized last week with complications from Trisomy 18, a genetic disorder.
“She is a fighter and is doing exceptionally well,” Santorum added, noting that her condition “did cause us to think [about] 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 over this past weekend just like it was, frankly, when we decided to get into this race.”
“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,” the former senator said. “We were winning in a very different way because we were touching hearts, we were raising issues that frankly people didn’t want to be raised.”
Calling his campaign “a voice for those who in many cases are voiceless,” Santorum thanked his supporters, including the Duggar family of reality TV fame, who he said “gave their time and energy because they believed in the basic importance of having strong families as part of a strong country. We can’t have a strong economy without strong families and a strong moral fiber that makes us the moral enterprise that is America.”
Santorum’s surge injected social issues into a race framed earlier as a largely economic one--including reiteration of his previous statements calling contraception “harmful to women” and contending that JFK’s landmark 1960 speech on the separation of church and state made him want to “throw up.”
Santorum is a conservative Catholic who performed well among evangelical voters during Republican primaries, representing what some analysts saw as a new era in Catholic-Protestant politics in America.
The fact that Santorum easily won the support of evangelical voters demonstrated a significant evolution from the previous anti-Catholic sentiment among some Christian voters, wrote First Amendment scholar Charles C. Haynes in a February On Faith post. That was a contrast to Kennedy’s experience, as the first Catholic president. “By allaying long-standing Protestant fears about the prospect of a Roman Catholic in the White House, Kennedy paved the way for future Catholic candidates like, well, Rick Santorum, to run for national office,” Haynes wrote.
Digging into the new alliance, a recent New York Times story on Santorum’s evangelical appeal reported:
“Santorum represents a game-changer,” said D. Michael Lindsay, the president of Gordon College, a Christian school near Boston, and an expert in evangelical voting patterns. “His candidacy has the potential to reshape conservative political alignment, securing once and for all evangelical support for a conservative Catholic in public life.”
In his closing remarks Tuesday, Santorum cited the “city set on a hill” from Matthew’s Gospel, made famous in American history by 17th century Puritan preacher John Winthrop and frequently cited by politicians: “We stand for the values that make us Americans. That make us the greatest country in this history of the world--that shining city on a hill that made us a beacon around the world.”
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