Mitt Romney's problem on the health-care mandate question For a politician on vacation, Mitt Romney has managed to make a lot of news this week - in all the wrong ways. He might have been better off just competing in the Romney Olympics with his family rather than getting into the verbal gymnastics event against his chief spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom. The presumptive Republican nominee's interview Wednesday with Jan Crawford of CBS News was a remarkable retraction from what Fehrnstrom had said just two days earlier about whether the individual mandate in President Obama's health-care program amounts to a penalty or a tax. The Romney camp showed there is no simple answer for a candidate who backed just such a mandate as governor of Massachusetts. The unfolding of events this week underscores the complexity of Romney's problem, one that has shadowed his candidacy for more than a year and that, based on the past few days, may trail him for the rest of the campaign. Though his and Obama's health-care mandates bear a striking resemblance, Romney has spent the entire campaign trying to persuade voters that they're not at all the same. One could argue that both Fehrnstrom and Romney outlined politically understandable positions when posed the question of whether they disagreed with Chief Justice John Roberts, who upheld the constitutionality of the health-care law by calling the mandate a tax, not a penalty. Fehrnstrom said penalty. Romney said tax. Fehrnstrom said it's a penalty presumably because that would insulate Romney from the charge that his mandate was also a tax, which would undermine his long-standing claim that, unlike Obama, he didn't raise taxes when he passed health-care reform in Massachusetts. Romney said it's a tax presumably because his entire party has seized on Roberts's language to brand Obama a tax raiser. Their contradiction showed there is no totally safe ground for Romney on the issue. When the candidate disagrees with his chief spokesman, it's clear who will prevail. And maybe Romney believes he has moved the debate to the place it should be, however contorted it all looked. But the sausage-making by the Romney campaign on an issue of such fundamental importance brought unwelcome attention, including a savage editorial in Thursday's Wall Street Journal. The editorial used the episode to launch a broadside at the entire Romney campaign, calling his team insular and in danger of "squandering a historic opportunity" to defeat an incumbent president. Romney has tried to talk his way past his health-care dilemma for more than a year. Faced with the choice between calling his support for an Obama-like health-care plan in Massachusetts a mistake or sticking with it while trying to draw distinctions between the two, Romney chose the second option. Calling it a mistake would have opened him up to a new charge of flip-flopping for political convenience. But neither course was ideal. The Romney camp's calculation was that, in the end, his hopes of winning the nomination would not rise or fall on health care. Despite efforts by his opponents to call him out on health care, that calculation proved correct. Then-primary challenger Rick Santorum tried repeatedly to undermine Romney's candidacy by arguing that Romney would give away one of the most important issues of the fall election, but Santorum couldn't muster enough support to make it stick.