What a difference seven months — and an election — makes! Joe Manchin told Chris Wallace on yesterday’s Fox News Sunday that he would have voted against ObamaCare if he had taken the time to read the bill before casting a vote. A year ago, though, Manchin was cheerleading its passage, telling people that no bill is ever perfect but that the time had come to pass this particular government grab of authority. Did he bother to read the bill first before giving that advice, or was Manchin just acting as a rhetorical rubber stamp for Obama? The Daily Caller reports on the flip-flop:

In the final days before the midterm elections, Democratic Senate candidate and West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin doubled down on his opposition to parts of the health care law, legislation he supported when it was being debated in Congress last spring.

Manchin said on “Fox News Sunday” that he would not have supported the bill if he had been made aware of everything that was in it at the time. While he still fully supports “the concept” of the health care overhaul, he called the final product “overreaching,” citing the new tax mandate on businesses and the lack of protection against government-subsidized abortions.

“Knowing that, I would not have supported that or voted for that at that time,” he said.

Manchin added that he still supports parts of the bill that halt insurance companies from discriminating against customers with pre-existing conditions and the ability for young people to stay on their parents’ health care plan until they are 26-years-old.

“There’s a lot of good parts to it,” he added. “Why don’t we fix what’s wrong with it and make it better?”

Here’s Manchin a year ago, giving the argument that we needed to pass a bill that he apparently never bothered to read:

Put aside for the moment Manchin’s desire to leave the bill in place and nibble around its edges. Before he ran for the Senate, Manchin campaigned for ObamaCare’s package — and now he claims not to have read the bill or known about its taxes and mandates. That’s not the actions of an independent thinker, but of a mindless partisan. Those taxes and mandates were hardly hidden in the bill; anyone at all informed of the bill’s components knew them well. All Manchin had to do was pick up a newspaper and find out, for instance, that a significant group of Democrats had held up the bill over the federal funding of abortion coverage.

Either Manchin is lying, or he’s nothing but a tool for Democrats. West Virginians should avoid putting Manchin in the Senate and finding out the hard way which is true.