Rick Santorum Compares Nelson Mandela's Fight Against Apartheid To His Fight Against Obamacare

Just one day after the death of former South African president and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum publicly compared Mandela’s crusade against South Africa’s brutally repressive apartheid policy to his own fight against the Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare.

Appearing on a segment of conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly’s show “The O’Reilly Factor,” Santorum argued that South Africa’s apartheid regime, which denied the country’s majority black population citizenship and basic human rights in favor of a ruling white minority, was directly comparable to President Barack Obama’s effort to extend health care coverage to more Americans.

“[Mandela] was fighting against some great injustice, and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives -- and Obamacare is front and center in that,” Santorum said on the “O’Reilly Factor.”

In the same segment, O’Reilly declared multiple times that Mandela was a Communist.

“He was a Communist, this man. He was a Communist, all right? But he was a great man! What he did for his people was stunning!… He was a great man! But he was a Communist,” O’Reilly said of Mandela, who denied ever having been a member of the party, though admitted he was in part inspired by Marx’s writings and his African National Congress was, and still is, allied with the South African Communist Party.

For his own part, Santorum agreed with O’Reilly’s assertions that Mandela was a Communist.

"Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that, and that's the reason he's mourned today," Santorum said. "But you're right, what he was advocating for wasn't necessarily the right answer."

O'Reilly didn't point out to Santorum that his Italian immigrant grandfather, whom he often invoked in his 2012 presidential campaign, actually was a Communist, according to his cousins in Italy.

Watch a video of O’Reilly and Santorum discussing Nelson Mandela below.