I posted the audio clip of this earlier but the message was squashed by something else he said, I wanted to separate it in order to highlight it. Earlier today, Santorum made the exact opposite argument of what is considered conventional wisdom, stated recently by Dick Morris, that suggests a brokered convention and a short general would give the election to Obama. Santorum says the opposite is true, that the general should be short because we want the campaign to be about Obama and it’s better if the Obama campaign has less time to attack our nominee. He says putting up the wrong candidate just because it makes the primaries shorter is actually worse for Republicans, that must put up the right candidate to take it down the stretch and he believes a brokered convention would result in a conservative nominee:
With all due respect to Dick Morris, putting up a bad candidate just because it’s sooner is not the answer. We need to put up the best candidate and I would make the argument that just the opposite of Dick Morris, that the longer this campaign is the worse it is for Republicans.
We want [the general] to be a short campaign. We want it to be about Barack Obama. We don’t want the media and him to be able to beat up on our nominee, which they will do for the next six months if we have a nominee. The fact is, the longer this race goes on the better we are. And having to go to the convention, if that’s where it goes, I don’t think is a bad thing at all because I think we’ll come out of that convention with a conservative nominee and that’s our best chance to win.
If Santorum is willing to take it all the way to the convention, then there’s no reason for Gingrich or Paul to get out.