TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Obama posed the mandate during the campaign, and described it as a “philosophical” disagreement between Clinton and himself:

So we’ve got a lot of similarities in our plan. We’ve got a philosophical difference, which we’ve debated repeatedly, and that is that Senator Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it.

And my belief is, the reason that people don’t have it is not because they don’t want it but because they can’t afford it.

It seems, though, that for Obama, principles are to be discarded when they become inconvenient.