Santorum strategist: ‘We’ll rally behind Romney’ if he’s nominee

Rick Santorum has a litany of reasons Republicans shouldn’t elect Mitt Romney as their nominee. But if it came down to it, Santorum would support him.

At least that’s what Santorum’s top strategist, John Brabender, said Tuesday during a phone interview about Republican fracturing ahead of the Deep South dual primaries. At the end of the day, Brabender said, “they’ll rally behind us and we’ll rally behind them” to beat President Obama.

“No one can unify [Republicans] anywhere near as well as Barack Obama,” Brabender said.

We ran that one by Kevin Madden, a Washington-based Republican consultant who is a friend of Romney’s and also his former spokesman.

“There is one animating and unifying principle and that is the prospect of defeating President Obama,” Madden said. As for Romney supporting Santorum and vice versa, he said, “I think that is a sentiment that is coursing throughout the Republican Party.”

But this agreement that any Republican would be better than Obama does not mean the Santorum and Romney campaigns are ready to link arms and join together in a chorus of Kumbaya.

Brabender remarked that Romney is underperforming, and even with the help of the establishment and a massive war chest has only narrowly beaten Santorum in states like Ohio and Michigan. He urged Gingrich to step aside, so that moderates don’t end up choosing the nominee.

And in an interview on Fox News, Romney scoffed at choosing Santorum as his vice president when asked if he’d need a running mate to the right of him.

“Rick Santorum is not a person who is an economic conservative to my right,” Romney said. “I am saying I am a conservative. I give him credit for being conservative, but not a fiscal conservative. His record doesn’t suggest he has got the fiscal conservative chops that I have.”