An effective talking point, but I wish he’d waited a bit. It’s silly to roll this out before we know what the actual decision is; why not sit tight instead of offering the other side a soundbite with which they might be able to do something? The quote:

“As you know, the Supreme Court is gonna be dealing with whether or not Obamacare’s constitutional,” said Romney, previewing the court’s decision that is expected to be announced on Thursday.

“If it’s not, if Obamacare is not deemed constitutional, then the first three and a half years of this president’s term will have been wasted on something that has not helped the American people,” said Romney, offering his most scathing review to date of Obama’s tenure should the plan be struck down.

“If it’s not,” Romney went on, “If it is deemed to stand, then I’ll tell you one thing. Then we’ll have to have a president, and I’m that one, that’s gonna get rid of Obamacare.”

If the law is torpedoed, O will have spent valuable time on an unconstitutional project when he could have used it to work on, oh, say, the economy. I like that spin; as BuzzFeed notes, you’re bound to hear lots more of it from Mitt in the weeks ahead if Roberts and Kennedy come through on Thursday. He’s taking Obama’s two biggest liabilities, the anemic economy and the chronic unpopularity of his big legislative “achievement,” and using the Court’s ruling on the latter as an indictment about the former. Well done. My only quibble is that, the first time I watched this, it sounded like he was suggesting that if O-Care is upheld then O did help the American people. Of course he doesn’t mean to; he’s telling you flat out that he’ll repeal the statute if the Court doesn’t do it for him, but in that case, Obama wasted his term no matter what, right? Either we end up with the status quo ante if the law is struck down or we end up with a gigantic boondoggle and a still-stagnant economy if the law is upheld. Curious to see if the DNC will pull that bit about “waste” from this clip if the statute survives on Thursday and stick it in an ad crowing about the Court’s ruling and the “benefits” of the new health-care law.

Anyway. Anyone read or heard about any SCOTUS tea leaves today? We haven’t done nearly enough obsessive over-analysis of Court minutiae as possible “tells” on the biggest decision in decades.