nominee. i think long before rick came to congress i was busy being a rebel. those are just historic facts even if they re inconvenient for rick s campaign. reporter: but soon they stopped snipping at each other and started sniping at romney. before long, both men had dealt serious blows to the front-runner. santorum with the surprise squeaker in iowa followed by a gingrich win in south carolina. suddenly, mitt romney was on the ropes. a gingrich adviser went to the santorum camp. would the senator join the speaker on one ticket? no. santorum was surging and wanted his own shot but they still became strange bed fellows. i agree with rick s point. i would urge the states then to return most of the power back to the local communities. and the third thing we bought, which rick alluded to which is really important. as newt said the real fundamental issue here is government coercion. reporter: then the tables turned.
santorum s top aide went to gingrich s henchmen with a proposal. join their team to topple the tycoon. santorum and gingrich started conspiring by phone. they even huddled in person. but they couldn t resolve the biggest issue of all. who would lead the ticket? and for the two big egos vying for their piece of history, the rest is, well, history. but wait, wait. there is more. some gingrich advisers today are taking issue with the back story the way the santorum campaign is talking about it. adviser kevin kellums gave cnn this statement. the idea a week later it was speaker gingrich who wouldn t consider creative options to stop governor romney doesn t square with history in the same manner that victory has a thousand fathers defeat has legions of weak memories. and, jake, i talked to another gingrich adviser today who said that one of the meetings between gingrich and santorum was, quote, awkward. i could imagine it being awkward. i thank you very much, erin mcpike.
santorum versus romney. i ve known a lot of these gingrich people for years. they re friends of mine. we started to have a discussion of what if we could get a unified, conservative ticket? and the ticket wasn t necessarily santorum and gingrich. it was santorum and getting everybody from michele bachmann and perry and gingrich and even sarah palin to start coalescing behind rick santorum and starting to campaign with him. and then the gingrich people said very clearly, look, newt still has hopes of winning either alabama and mississippi. they re desperate states for him. he has to win them. santorum won both those states as you probably remember. yes i do. and the discussions intensified where there was some very serious talk about newt getting out, supporting rick santorum, and doing this sort of conservative unit campaign. in the end, you know, i got called and said that newt thought it over and decided that he wanted to concentrate on the states he thought he could win and let