[symple_heading style=”” title=”By Ken Stone” type=”h1″ font_size=”” text_align=”left” margin_top=”20″ margin_bottom=”20″ color=”undefined” icon_left=”” icon_right=””]
Two new commercials accuse Rep. Darrell Issa of voting against construction of the new Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton in his own congressional district.
The YouTube videos are aimed at weakening the Republican in his tight 49th District re-election battle with Democrat Doug Applegate, a retired Marine colonel.
First elected in 2000, Issa is “tone-deaf and out of touch with his district,” said John Mattes of San Diego, who made the short videos with fellow Progressive Caucus member Mike Thaller via the Much Better Choices PAC.
“Congress voted to build a state-of-the-art hospital for Marines at Camp Pendleton,” says one video, written and narrated by Mattes. “Sadly … the $500 million hospital almost didn’t get built. That’s because Darrell Issa and other Republicans voted to block it, voting against the hospital. Why doesn’t Darrell Issa want to care for our wounded Marines?”
The hospital — and a child-care center also noted in a Mattes video — were funded by the February 2009 economic stimulus package. It was passed by a 244-188 party line vote with no GOP support.
“It wasn’t until March (2009), well after the bill had been signed and became law, that the administration then said they would use some of the funding for the new naval hospital,” said Calvin Moore, chief spokesman for Issa’s campaign.
Moore said Issa voted against the stimulus bill because it “amounted to a blank check for the administration to spend the taxpayers’ money however they wanted with very little oversight.”
Building a new Camp Pendleton hospital had long been a priority for Issa, who attended its January 2014 opening, Moore said Wednesday.
“To say that the congressman voted against funding a hospital — citing a bill that makes no mention of the facility and offered no guarantee that even a single penny of the $839 billion in the stimulus would ever make it to Pendleton — is completely disingenuous,” he said.
But Mattes, who helped lead Bernie Sanders’ state campaign, argues that Issa should have known the hospital would be in the stimulus bill.
“Had he been in San Diego County, he would have known the Marines were desperate to get a new hospital built,” said Mattes, 66. “Our troops were being strained. For someone who claims to have been so close to our troops, how could he have missed it?”
Mattes recalled the Republicans’ concern that projects had to be shovel-ready.
“It was physically in their back yard — 30 miles from his office,” Mattes said. “This hospital was on the drawing boards for years.”
Why hadn’t Mattes raised the issue earlier?
Mattes said he’d been focused on defeating Rep. Brian Bilbray in his 2012 San Diego battle with Democrat Scott Peters. (He depicted Bilbray as a slumlord.)
“We have only recently looked at Issa,” said Mattes, who plans to distribute the videos to local Democratic clubs and veterans groups. He’s also using a Facebook page to press the case.
Meanwhile, Issa on Wednesday issued an “open letter” to his constituents in south Orange County and north San Diego County. He responds to a widely aired Applegate TV spot linking Issa to his pick for president, Donald Trump.
“Just like Trump, Issa gamed the system to line his own pockets, steering millions in taxpayer money to help properties he owned,” the Applegate ad says.
Moore, the Issa campaign spokesman, said via email: “The attack is patently false. Not only do they deliberately invent quotes that do not appear anywhere in The New York Times, but they also rely on a widely discredited [August 2011] story that the paper was forced to correct on four separate occasions.”
In his 390-word letter, Issa called the profiting allegations “outrageous, offensive and a lie. … My opponent Doug Applegate uses this discredited article to deceive you.”
Mattes said his two anti-Issa spots wouldn’t air on commercial TV, saying they’re more effective on social media and “we don’t have rich corporate donors.”
Never a member of the Bernie-or-Bust contingent, Mattes said he would “of course” vote for Hillary Clinton, given the “stark choices.”
But he said: “Bernie didn’t go away. There’s no bust to Bernie. He moves on,” and even is working to pass ballot measures in California, such as Proposition 61, which aims to regulate drug prices of what Mattes calls “Big Pharma.”
“We’ll continue to support [Sanders],” Mattes said. “We will feel vindicated that the Bernie platform held up.”