Leading up to the decision on ObamaCare, I gave the Republicans a hard time for not having their act together and being unprepared to handle whatever news came their way from the Supreme Court decision.  Then the decision was handed down and the Republicans were tossed a giant hunk of red PR meat: The Supreme Court had ruled that ObamaCare is a tax and a big, fat tax at that, and the only reason ObamaCare was upheld and remains as the law is because it is a tax. Even the ObamaMedia glommed on to that line: ObamaCare is a tax.  From a political standpoint, the Republicans should have been ecstatic.  It was a ready-made campaign issue.  Obama promised no tax increases on the middle class, and then passed the largest tax increase on the middle class in the history of our Republic. The Democrats, of course, were desperate.  Obama sent out his surrogates to the Sunday morning news shows to adamantly proclaim that the tax was a penalty and that’s that.  People weren’t buying it.  It sounded of desperation.  The only reason their precious ObamaCare was still the law was because the Supreme Court said the mandate was a tax.

So .. who was going to come to Obama’s rescue?  Who would save the day?  Who would come galloping in on a white steed to slay the tax monster?  Why … it would be none other than one Erin Fehrnstrom, a top-level advisor to Mitt Romney.  This character steps forward to say that Obama is right and the Supreme Court was wrong .. the mandate tax is actually a penalty.  Can you believe this? Here’s a little bit of that interview:

CHUCK TODD, NBC NEWS: I think we're talking around each other. The governor does not believe the mandate is a tax, that’s what you’re saying?

ERIN FEHRNSTROM, ROMNEY CAMPAIGN: The governor believes that what we put in place in Massachusetts was a penalty and he disagrees with the Court’s ruling that the mandate was a tax.

TODD: But he agrees with the president that it is not -- and he believes that you should not call the tax penalty a tax, you should call it a penalty or a fee or a fine?

FEHRNSTROM: That’s correct. But the president also needs to be held accountable for his hypocritical and contradictory statements because he's described it variously as a penalty and as a tax. So he needs to reconcile those two very different statements.

Let’s just make this simple.  If this is the way Romney is going to campaign, Obama has nothing to worry about.