That message, delivered first by a top aide to Mr. Romney on television and later by the campaign, contradicts top Republican Party officials and leaders in Congress, who have spent the last several days eagerly accusing the president of levying a new tax. By straying from the party message, Mr. Romney’s campaign offered a fresh example of his difficulty in carrying the conservative mantle on health care — a problem that his Republican rivals predicted during the primaries because he championed universal health coverage while he was the governor of Massachusetts. Attacks by Mr. Romney on the president’s health care plan inevitably lead to comparisons with the Massachusetts law. And while Mr. Romney has pledged to repeal what conservatives call Obamacare, he had largely avoided calling the mandate a tax on Americans, perhaps because his plan included a similar mandate. On Monday, Eric Fehrnstrom, Mr. Romney’s senior adviser, said the Massachusetts mandate was a penalty and that Mr. Romney agrees with Democrats that Mr. Obama’s health care mandate is not a tax, either. “The governor disagreed with the ruling of the court,” Mr. Fehrnstrom said on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown.” “He agreed with the dissent written by Justice Scalia, which very clearly stated that the mandate was not a tax.” Democrats seized on Mr. Fehrnstrom’s comment. David Axelrod, Mr. Obama senior campaign adviser, said in an e-mail that Mr. Romney cannot agree with his fellow Republicans because to do so is “to condemn himself.” For much of Monday, Republicans sought to minimize the differences between themselves and Mr. Romney by trying to focus on Mr. Obama’s own shifting characterization of the health care mandate. In 2010, Mr. Obama said the mandate should not be called a tax. “The federal individual mandate in Obamacare is either a constitutional tax or an unconstitutional penalty,” Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Mr. Romney, said. “Governor Romney thinks it is an unconstitutional penalty. What is President Obama’s position?” But by insisting on calling the mandate a penalty, Ms. Saul effectively endorsed the weekend’s Democratic talking points and added to the clash with the Republicans’ line. Republicans had seized on the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday that the mandate, which will compel people to obtain health insurance, is valid as an exercise of the government’s taxing power. Republicans disagreed with the ruling, but saw the tax language as politically damaging to Mr. Obama. Since becoming the presumptive Republican nominee, Mr. Romney has largely been in sync with other Republicans as they coalesced around his candidacy. But aides to the Republican leaders on Capitol Hill said the lawmakers have no intention of backing away from their tax message against Mr. Obama despite the disagreement. Don Stewart, an aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said the issue puts the White House and Democrats “in a box: They either believe the mandate is an unconstitutional ‘penalty,’ or they believe it is a constitutional tax as the court ruled. It’s either unconstitutional, or it is a tax.” Democrats fought back against that characterization on Sunday. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the health care mandate includes a “penalty” for a small number of “free riders” who choose not to buy insurance. But as Mr. Romney pursues the presidency for a second time, some of his past statements characterizing the mandate match up more closely with the Democrats than they do with the Republicans. The argument made by Ms. Pelosi on Sunday was the same one that Mr. Romney made in 2006 when he was fighting for his state’s health care plan. He repeated that argument during a debate in the 2008 presidential campaign. In an opinion article in USA Today in 2009, Mr. Romney again used the term “free riders,” writing that a penalty like that in his health care plan “encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical cost on to others.” Those kinds of statements were the source of numerous attacks by Mr. Romney’s Republican rivals during the primaries. Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota and a leading vice-presidential prospect, last year called Mr. Romney a “co-conspirator” in the passage of national health care, using the phrase “Obamneycare” to mock the health care plans. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas predicted that health care would be a “major anchor” around Mr. Romney’s neck. Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, called Mr. Romney “the weakest candidate” to prosecute the case against Mr. Obama’s health care plan.
