How bad has the ObamaCare debacle gotten for the White House, and the media that failed to report the obvious flaws until it was too late?  NBC’s Meet the Press brought back Mitt Romney to grill Mitt Romney over it, trying to get the former Republican presidential nominee to support Barack Obama in a strange segment that needs to be seen to be believed.  David Gregory plays the role of Obama in this weird recreation of a 2012 presidential debate, while Romney rips Obama for his dishonest sales job all along:

“The president failed to learn the lessons that came from the experience in Massachusetts,” Romney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” saying a state-by-state approach is better than a “one-size-fits-all” plan.

“Perhaps the most important lesson the president, I think, failed to learn was, you have to tell the American people the truth. And when he told the American people that you could keep your health insurance if you wanted to keep that plan, period, he said that time and again, he wasn’t telling the truth. And I think that fundamental dishonesty has really put in peril the whole foundation of his second term.”

Appearing almost exactly a year after the 2012 election, the former Republican presidential nominee said regardless of how you evaluate Obamacare, the fact that it was based on a lie shows the president can no longer lead.

“The fact that the president sold it on a basis that was not true has undermined the foundation of his second term. I think it’s rotting it away,” Romney said. “We’ve got to have a president that can lead, and right now he’s not able to do so.”

If the president had been honest from the get-go, Romney suggested the Affordable Care Act wouldn’t have passed.

“Obamacare barely made it through Washington, as you know. And there is no question in my mind but had the president been truthful and told the American people that millions would lose their insurance and millions more would see their premiums skyrocket, had he told them that at the time it was going through Washington, there would have been such a huge cry against it, it would not have passed,” Romney said.

Will that fundamental dishonesty undermine Obama’s second term? Take a look at the Gallup daily presidential approval rolling averages for the last three months.  Obama just hit 40/53 — with a big drop coming after the cancellation notices started hitting the national news:

A week ago, Obama was at 44/49.  He’s tailing off significantly in the week that followed.  That may not worry Obama — after all, he’s not running for office again after 2017 — but it’s going to panic his fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill if it continues.  And as long as the stories of skyrocketing premiums, bad websites, and reduced access to physicians continues to lead the news, that trend will most certainly progress.

Update: Ron Fournier agrees with Romney:

The Obama White House has a credibility problem, one that could infect his entire agenda. It started when the White House refused to release data on the number of people who enrolled in the online marketplace, an important metric for determining the effectiveness of the $400 million-plus site. Administration officials say they don’t have the data, which is either a mark of extraordinary incompetence, or a lie.

The problem was compounded when millions of self-insured Americans received notices that their health-care policies were being cancelled. For years, Obama pledged that “if you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.”  According to The Wall Street Journal, Obama’s advisers knew the president was making a promise he couldn’t keep, and debated whether to have the president “explain the nuances of the succinct line in his stump speeches.” In other words, they debated whether to tell the full truth and decided against it. They knowingly told a falsehood, which is by definition a lie.

Rather than acknowledge the deception, the White House has launched a public relations effort to mitigate it. The most brazen example is the White House’s use of Twitter in an attempt to discredit an NBC story that accurately described the White House’s deception. “NBC ‘scoop’ cites normal turnover in the indiv insurance market,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest tweeted to his 9,500 followers on Twitter, according to a Reuters story on the operation.