6:30 PM PT: Bachmann says Newt Gingrich has been advocating for the individual mandate "longer than Barack Obama" and that she's the only true consistent constitutional conservative on the stage. She then coins a new phrase: "Newt Romney" and proceeds to basically accuse "Newt Romney" of socialism.
6:32 PM PT: Gingrich's response to Bachmann focuses on his personal business history, which is a mistake, because it leaves Romney out of the equation. George Stephanopoulos asks him to chime in, however. pulling him back into the debate.
6:34 PM PT: Mitt Romney says he wishes President Obama had called to ask him for advice about health care reform ... but (a) doesn't that imply that Romney believes there should have been health care reform of some sort and (b) Romney actually saluted President Obama for "copying" some of his ideas from Massachusetts.
6:35 PM PT: Rick Perry slams Newt Romney over mandate, focusing mostly on Mitt. He didn't remember to use that phrase—Newt Romney—but I kind of like it. Mitt Romney responds, denying he ever supported mandates at the federal level. Ahem: "We'll end up with a nation that's taken a mandate approach," he said in 2007.
6:38 PM PT: Newt Gingrich blames Hillary Clinton for his support for the mandates. (He means he supported mandates to try to beat HillaryCare.)
6:40 PM PT: Perry accuses Romney of supporting mandates in his book "No Apologies." Romney denies Perry's accusation, and offers Perry at $10,000 bet (ooh rich man!) that he never supported it in the book. Perry says he's not a betting man. The fact is that Romney did say something like "we can do the same for the nation" in his book. He was talking about MassCare. And he removed that line from the second edition. So while Perry may have pushed the envelope with the way he phrased his critique, he was basically right.
6:43 PM PT: Rick Santorum joins the parade of Newt Romney bashing over the health care mandate. Somehow it descends into a spat between him and Michele Bachmann over which one of them is more effective. (Hint, guys: You're both wildly ineffective.)
We're heading to the first commercial break. Diane Sawyer seems oddly subdued...almost like she's taking whatever Rick Perry took for his back pain after his surgery. Family values will be among the issues when we come back. Oh and this is awesome: one of the commercials is Fred Thompson selling Government-insured reverse mortgages. Socialist!
6:45 PM PT (Kaili Joy Gray): The liveblogging continues in the next thread.