After an embarrassing Monday in front of the Virginia State Board of Elections, it would appear as if Corey Stewart’s brain trust is wasting no time doubling down.
This morning’s hit piece? Stewart alleges that Gillespie advocated for Obamacare-style mandates in his 2006 book Winning Right.
Two problems with that:
(1) No, he didn’t.
(2) Stewart picks up the old DSCC line of attack that the Democrats used against Gillespie only once — in January 2014. National Review completely destroyed the DSCC for their outright falsification of the record:
Gillespie’s book, which articulated his detailed health-care vision, did not embrace an individual mandate, despite the idea’s still being considered at the time by conservative policy thinkers. The DSCC says he was paid $300,000 to lobby for the individual mandate – in truth, he was paid an amount far, far smaller to set up a coalition for a CEO to advance his health-care policy vision, which at the outset included a vague embrace of a mandate. Gillespie’s brief association with the group aside, he’s never articulated any kind of personal embrace of an individual mandate and at times has argued forcefully against mandates.
Of course, seeing as Stewart’s campaign staff cited Winning Right, one would think that they might actually cite their sources a bit. So we did the work for ’em via Google Books and searched for the word mandate in Gillespie’s Winning Right.
Two citations, the first one hilariously entitled given yesterday’s hullabaloo over Stewart’s forcing his staff to sit in the cold because he couldn’t read the Code of Virginia:
Looks like Gillespie helped fight a federal mandate there (in his own words, of course) on page 48.
So the only other mention of a federal mandate comes on page 96. Spoiler alert: Gillespie looks like a champ:
Read that again — “job-killing aspect of the employer mandate” but then went the extra mile and asked for the now-infamous graphic of how Hillarycare actually worked in practice.
The result was this:
…and it was Gillespie’s chart that killed Hillarycare the first time.
Now perhaps Stewart’s campaign staff intended this line to be the kicker:
“Make no mistake: In his own words, Ed’s proposal pushes for mandatory participation in the health care marketplace,” Stewart said.
There are no mentions of “mandatory participation” in Winning Right. As a matter of fact, Gillespie argues quite forcefully for Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), specifically on page 246:
You know who else has a plan right now to propose HSAs while repealing Obamacare entirely? Senator Rand Paul.
In fact, Gillespie’s proposal has a bill number — S.222 and it’s precisely four pages long. Paul was absolutely right to borrow the idea, too — as HSAs (preferably attached to a high deductible insurance plan or HDIP) really is the market-oriented grand solution not only for health care in America but for covering the working poor… that is, if the Democrats actually pretended to care about the working poor rather than viewing them as a voting constituency.
…but I digress.
Someone at the Stewart campaign policy shop needs to screw their head on straight. The record is brutally clear. Gillespie not only opposed the federal mandate, but built a 25-year public advocacy career against it.