As the race for the Republican presidential nomination has reached a point where opposition research has hit a fever pitch, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is discovering that even he isn’t immune from vicious political attacks.
A Washington Examiner piece by Joel Gehrke reported Friday that Santorum supported individual health mandates, citing a 1994 The Morning Call (Pa.) story. But as The Right Scoop blog pointed out on Friday, the article “doesn’t even quote Santorum as supporting the individual mandate.”
Running for the U.S. Senate in 1994, however, Santorum actually said just the opposite of that, as a video from CSPAN shows. The Oct. 31, 1994 video has Santorum saying government shouldn’t “dictate” anything on health care.
“I think what the role of the federal government is to provide opportunity for everyone to get what they want, to live their dreams and not to dictate what everybody should have,” he said.
And he explained why, which is even when certain things are mandated by the federal government, they often don’t work and added it simply is “not the American way of doing things.”
“You can’t force every American to do something they don’t want to do,” Santorum explained. “You can force people to be in Social Security, yet I think it’s only about 96 percent of Americans that are in Social Security. There are lots of mandates we put on people and they don’t obey. That’s wrong. That’s not the American way of doing things. The American way of doing things is getting people to live their dreams to make their choices.”
(h/t The Right Scoop)