GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich says he will support front-runner Mitt Romney if he garners the delegates needed for the nomination.
"I think you have to be realistic, given the size of his organization, given the number of primaries he's won, he is far and away the most likely Republican nominee," Gingrich said on "Fox News Sunday."
"If he does get to 1,144 delegates, I'll support him and I'll do everything I can this fall to help him defeat Obama because the primary goal of the entire Republican Party has to be to defeat Barack Obama," he said.
"This makes this maybe the most important election of our lifetime."
Gingrich said he would return to a "post-political career" if he doesn't garner the nomination. The former House Speaker stands in a distant third to Romney and Rick Santorum.
In the meantime, as the Republican nominating process shakes out, Gingrich is spending most of his time influencing the GOP platform.
The Georgia Republican is urging adoption of an American independent energy policy that makes "sure that no future president bows to a ‘Saudi king.’ " He pledged to bring home "several million jobs by producing 4 million barrels of oil in the United States."
Any proceeds from the energy policy should go into a debt repayment fund, Gingrich said.
"So you need to get to a balanced budget, which [Wisconsin Republican Rep.] Paul Ryan has started down the road towards, and you need to be able to pay down debt," he added.
He is also pressing for creation of a personal Social Security savings account, an idea previously suggested by Republicans. He said under a Chilean model, Americans would have tucked away $16 trillion in savings.
The final prong of the platform, at this point, is the need to stand up "very firmly" for religious liberty because, Gingrich says, the "assault on the Catholic Church is very real."
When asked how that would be incorporated into a platform, Gingrich said "you have a plank that says the government should not force its values on any religious institution."
"I think that's a very key part of this," Gingrich added
Gingrich conceded that he and Romney haven't discussed the details of his plan.
"I suspect he will accept a solid conservative platform," he said.
"Let's have a very solid, aggressive platform which he can campaign on which can also appeal to a majority."
Gingrich went on to call President Obama "a radical" and said "who knows what he would do in a second term."
On the campaign front, Gingrich said he owes slightly less than the $4.5 million that has been talked about but he owes "much more than we wanted to."
"Unfortunately our guys tried to match Romney and we didn't have anything like that capacity," he said.
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