Thank you, 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 difficult weekend.
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,
getting unfortunately very sick,
and we ended up in a hospital all weekend,
but I'm here just to report, to start out things,
that she's a fighter and she's 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 pause us to think 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 over this past weekend,
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.
We were very concerned about our role as
being the best parents we possibly could to our children,
and 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,
that Karen and I had in particular for our family was that
with was going on in Washington DC,
and all of the problems that you heard me talk about
on the campaign trail,
that that 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, as good parents,
to go out and do what we could
to take on that responsibility for our children
and for children across this country.
And so we started out almost a year ago now
in Somerset, Pennsylvania,
and I told my story, our story, of our family.
My grandfather, who came to this country
and worked in the coalmines,
and my father, who served our country in World Ward II.
As you heard throughout the course of this campaign,
I talked about my stories and stories of our families.
But after a while, it became less about my stories
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 to 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,
a 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, she -
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 are 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, Minnesota, 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 company - 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 travelled 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-it-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 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 the experience I had.
And that's what people say, how did this happen?
How were we able to come 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 we painted a hopeful 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 growing 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 that 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
the country is going in the future,
who care deeply about those who are 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 the Americans
who 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.
A lot of greatness in this country,
and we just need leaders who 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, and 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 and 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 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.