A day after Rick Santorum’s late-night email-endorsement of Mitt Romney, the former Pennsylvania senator was making more after-hours news on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, arguing that he would be the “better person” to make the case on health care. He also defended his stances on same-sex marriage, contraception and pornography.
When Leno asked him about the manner of his endorsement and its “tepid” nature, Santorum said that he chose to put it out late at night so that “it would be, sort of, the first thing people would see in the morning.”
He added of his long wait prior to endorsement: “I think we just needed some time. It was a rough-and-tumble campaign. I can't say that it would have been an easy thing the next day to turn around and say, ‘Let's just go forward.’ It was tough, and so I wanted an opportunity to, sort of, think about it a little bit and the family to think about it.”
Santorum said that he wanted his concerns about Romney addressed and he wanted Romney to “take the cudgel and run with it.” After the two men met last week, Santorum said he felt “comfortable” with the former Massachusetts governor. But some of the language of the campaign seeped into his conversation with Leno.
“I think, unfortunately, with RomneyCare, that he was the author of that, and that was clearly a predecessor to ObamaCare, that it's going to be harder for him to make that case,” he said. “Certainly, I would have been a better person to make the case.”
He reiterated his stance against civil unions and gay marriage and said that same-sex parents should not be allowed to adopt children.
As far as contraception, Leno seemed flabbergasted that Santorum was personally against it, but Santorum noted: “My religious belief is contraception is wrong, and, therefore, my wife and I don't believe in that. But I would never impose that on anybody else.”
On pornography, he argued that “culture matters” perhaps more than the economy, and that “every great civilization” was “failing as a culture” before they fell to a foreign power.
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