Romney Needs Santorum as a Good Soldier

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Though he's left the race, it may be best for Rick Santorum to become more like Mitt Romney.

Not that Santorum should set aside his conservative social positions and embrace the moderate, vacillating politics of Romney, but the former Pennsylvania senator should take a short period of time to recuperate and then jump right back in as a dedicated supporter of the presumed Republican nominee.

Rick Santorum would be wise to show genuine support for Mitt Romney.

"Santorum ought to look at what Romney did in 2008 as a model," said Fergus Cullen, a Republican political consultant in New Hampshire. "Romney was a very good soldier to John McCain that year, and he wasn't one of those guys who seemed to be hoping that the nominee was going to run a good race but come up just short."

In 2008, Romney went so far as to open his donor network to McCain as the then-Republican nominee scraped for cash against the well-funded Barack Obama campaign.

Santorum can't offer Romney a fundraiser base capable of raising tens of millions of dollars for the former Massachusetts governor, but he can give him a voice that legitimizes candidate Romney in the eyes of conservative voters.

"Well obviously we've got a fractured base -- not unusual -- but he will give some legitimacy to Romney's pronouncements," said Patrick McSweeney, a former Virginia GOP chairman. "It wouldn't hurt at all to have someone who's galvanized social conservatives to be out there strongly pitching for Romney."

Romney failed to win a single primary in the Deep South -- a bastion of social conservatives and evangelical Christians -- as voters doubted the candidate's true conservative values and ability to create a distinction between himself and Obama.

This isn't to say that conservative Republican voters in typically red states won't vote for Romney in November, but the ability to motivate conservatives to vote in swing states will be critical to his chances to unseat the incumbent president.