Romney in U-turn on Obamacare definition "Romney has called the individual mandate he implemented in Massachusetts a tax many times before," said Danny Kaner, an Obama campaign spokesman, supplying a list of quotations going back to 2006. When the Supreme Court upheld the healthcare law as constitutional, it also declared that the fee charged to most Americans who refuse to buy health insurance amounted to a tax - and not a penalty, as Obama has called it. On the campaign trail, this was red meat to Republicans who accuse Obama of imposing the biggest tax in US history through his insurance mandate. They maintain it disproves the president's stance that he has not raised taxes on the middle class. Romney's campaign, however, on Monday in effect undercut his party's assault on the president over healthcare. A campaign spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, said Romney did not see the mandate as a tax but as a penalty, just as Obama had said. The campaign took this line because it was worried that Romney would be accused of hypocrisy as he implemented a very similar healthcare insurance mandate when governor of Massachusetts. Romney insisted his mandate was a penalty and not a tax on constitutional grounds, a distinction likely to be lost on many voters. The Wall Street Journal. America's leading Right-wing daily, published a stinging editorial on Thursday morning, saying "the campaign looks confused in addition to being politically dumb." If Mitt Romney loses his run for the White House, a turning point will have been his decision Monday to absolve President Obama of raising taxes on the middle class. "He is managing to turn the only possible silver lining in Chief Justice John Roberts's ObamaCare salvage operation - that the mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty is really a tax - into a second political defeat," it said.