People have accused President Obama of flip-flopping on issues like gay marriage (his stance is "evolving") and keeping the prison at Guantanamo Bay open (he tried, but ran into opposition in Congress). But the really fundamental flop for him is on the individual mandate, the subject of tomorrow's oral arguments before the Supreme Court.
American Crossroads is out with a video highlighting that today, showing Barack Obama in his own words arguing with himself before the Supreme Court.
When Obama was running for president, he spent months campaigning against Hillary Clinton with the biggest distinction between them (besides Iraq) being the mandate. Clinton's team argued fiercely that the only way to cover everyone and control costs was with the mandate. Obama, however, likely realizing the general-election politics of requiring people to buy health insurance, disagreed and said it was possible to cover everyone without it.
Crossroads' tag line in the video is "Obama was right on the individual mandate...before he was wrong."
Of course, then by that standard, Mitt Romney is still wrong, because he defends the mandate for Massachusetts (though he now argues it is OK for states to make those decisions at a local level and not federally). And wrong, too, would be the Heritage Foundation, which first floated the idea of a mandate and became the conservative alternative to the plan then-First Lady Hillary Clinton put forward in the early 1990s.
