While all this focus on the constitutionality of the individual health care mandate might be an annoying political distraction for the White House, for Mitt Romney it's an absolute f^$#!ng disaster because now, every time the subject of health care reform comes up, the first thing Mitt has to do is explain why it was okay for him to sign the individual health care mandate into law, but it was really horrible for Barack Obama to do the same thing. Case in point:
Mitt Romney: No Apology for Individual Health Care Mandate
On the kick off to his "No Apology" book tour Mitt Romney is on message – refusing to apologize for the Massachusetts health care law that, like President Obama’s federal legislation, requires citizens to buy health insurance.
“I’m not apologizing for it, I’m indicating that we went in one direction and there are other possible directions. I’d like to see states pursue their own ideas, see which ideas work best,” Romney told me.
That stand seems to reject the advice of Karl Rove and others who say that Romney can’t get the GOP nomination in 2012 unless he finds a way to distance himself from "Romneycare", but Romney did concede that his Massachusetts plan is imperfect.
So, basically, Mitt's answer now boils down to this: my individual health care mandate was okay because I was a governor. Barack Obama's wasn't okay because he was president. In other words, it's a state's rights issue.
But that's not what he said back in 2008 when he defended the individual mandate as an essential component of health care reform because it forced people to take responsibility for the cost of their own health care (his 2008 comments start at the 0:45 mark):
MR. GIBSON: You've backed away from mandates on a national basis.
MR. ROMNEY: No, no, I like mandates.
Today, Mitt has not only forgotten everything he said in 2008 when he supported the individual mandate on a national level, he's also forgotten what he said in 2009 when he urged President Obama to use RomneyCare as a national model. To borrow another line from the 2008 campaign, there literally isn't anything Mitt Romney wouldn't say or do if he thought it would help his political career. He's got all the spine of a jellyfish.