No, he is not for Obamacare.
The problem is in trying to indentify what is he for, and why his choice of words describing Ryan’s Medicare reform plan were so incendiary.
You’re getting the issue of the personal mandate to purchase health insurance mixed up with the entire Obamacare plan which was thousands of pages and gave Sebilius power to write millions of pages of regulations.
Newt denies he is for Obama’s brand of mandate. There’s controversy over that because he seems to be for some version of a mandate which is yet to be well defined. So by default, many people just assumed he’s for the Obama mandate.
There is no evidence that he’s for Obamacare in general, and considerable evidence that he is not.
I did hear Bennett’s interview with Newt. He took him to the woodshed like the parent of a wayward kid.
Newt said he had a call into Paul Ryan and hoped to resolve the matter.
A party that cannot even unite on issues as fundamental as the sanctity of life is virtually monolithic on these two points, and Newt Gingrich has broken party unity on the question of mandate! Think about how staggering a betrayal that is: the essence of our Constitutional challenge concerns the mandate, and Newt has undermined those efforts. Whether he is for 0bamacare, per se is immaterial. A belief in the authority of the Federal government to coerce private individuals to engage is economic activity is NOT conservative, it is NOT Republican, and as a matter of fact, before 1937, it was NOT even considered American.
No conservative who actually believes in a Constitution which creates a limited government with specifically enumerated powers can possibly believe the mandate is Constitutional. The fact that Newt does, is disqualifying.
Period.