The concept that people should be required to buy health coverage was fleshed out more than two decades ago by a number of conservative economists, embraced by scholars at conservative research groups, including the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, and championed, for a time, by Republicans in the Senate. The individual mandate, as it is known, was seen then as a conservative alternative to some of the health care approaches favored by liberals — like creating a national health service or requiring employers to provide health coverage. “In 1993, in fighting ‘Hillarycare,’ virtually every conservative saw the mandate as a less dangerous future than what Hillary was trying to do,” Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, said at a debate in December, casting his past support of a mandate as an antidote to the health care overhaul proposed by Hillary Rodham Clinton during her husband’s administration. Since then the politics of health care have grown more twisted and tangled than the two snakes entwined around the staff in a caduceus, which is sometimes used as a symbol of medicine. It is now Republicans and conservatives who oppose the individual mandate, arguing that it is unconstitutional, while Democrats, who were long resistant to it, are its biggest defenders. Democratic health care analysts have been taken aback by the speed with which Republicans have made the individual mandate a symbol of socialist totalitarianism to much of their base. “I noted the irony of a Republican idea being the source of Republican opposition,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group, who served in the Obama administration and as the policy director for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008. And longtime supporters of the mandate, who for years had believed the biggest obstacle to enacting it was attracting Democratic support, saw Democrats become its last supporters. “It totally flipped,” said Peter Harbage, a health care analyst who has advised Democratic and Republican supporters of individual mandates. These shifting political winds have become a major factor in the presidential campaign. Mitt Romney is often challenged by Republican rivals about the health care law he signed as the governor of Massachusetts, which also contains an individual mandate. Mr. Gingrich is often asked about his years of support for the idea. And Mr. Obama — who opposed the individual mandate four years ago as a candidate, but came to accept it as president — is now waiting to see whether the Supreme Court upholds the idea or strikes it down. Some conservatives originally saw the individual mandate as a way to make certain that uninsured people who became ill or were injured — but were still entitled by law to medical treatment — did not push the cost of their care onto others. “If a young man wrecks his Porsche and has not had the foresight to obtain insurance, we may commiserate, but society feels no obligation to repair his car,” Stuart Butler, a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said in a 1989 lecture on how to ensure affordable health care for all Americans. “But health care is different. If a man is struck down by a heart attack in the street, Americans will care for him whether or not he has insurance.” Part of Mr. Butler’s solution back then? “Mandate all households to obtain adequate insurance.” But Democrats were leery of the idea. In 1993, when President Bill Clinton put forward the broad outlines of his health care proposal in a speech to the National Governors Association in Tulsa, Okla., he called for requiring employers to buy coverage for their workers. The idea of an individual mandate, he noted in the speech, “has found some favor in the United States Congress, primarily among Republicans, but not exclusively, because it has the appeal of not imposing a business mandate, which has a bad sound to it.” To combat President Clinton’s proposal, a large group of Republican senators, including the minority leader at the time, Bob Dole, and several who are still in office, proposed a bill that would have required individuals, and not employers, to buy insurance. After Mr. Clinton’s health care proposal died, Democrats began searching for more politically palatable solutions. But there was still little Democratic support for an individual mandate, as Senator John Breaux of Louisiana found when he proposed one several years later. But officials, centrist policy groups and even liberal research organizations slowly warmed to the idea. When Senator John Edwards sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, he proposed an insurance mandate for children, but not adults. The politics of the mandate really began to change when Massachusetts enacted its health care law. That effort united Mr. Romney, a Republican, with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a liberal stalwart who got involved in part to protect the state’s share of federal Medicaid money, and Democratic lawmakers on Beacon Hill. All wound up supporting a plan with an individual mandate. “Democrats, based on the Massachusetts experience, became much more comfortable with the idea of an individual mandate,” said John McDonough, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health who was a health care advocate in the state at the time. When Mr. Edwards ran for president again in 2008, his health plan called for an individual mandate for all. Mrs. Clinton followed suit. But Mr. Obama resisted the idea as a candidate, calling for a mandate for children only. But as president, Mr. Obama changed his mind. Many conservatives changed their minds too, however. Some of the Republican senators who once supported versions of the individual mandate railed against Mr. Obama’s plan. Mr. Romney, despite signing a similar plan into law in Massachusetts, has made a pledge to try to “repeal Obamacare” central to his presidential campaign. Mr. Butler, of the Heritage Foundation, said in an interview that his views had evolved over the years. He said that he now believed that near-universal coverage could be achieved without a mandate, and added that the mandate he once supported was for basic catastrophic coverage, not comprehensive insurance. The Heritage Foundation has taken pains to distance itself from its past support of an individual mandate: it wrote a court amicus brief noting its change of heart, and Mr. Butler wrote an op-ed article in USA Today this month headlined “Don’t blame Heritage for ‘ObamaCare’ mandate.” But not all of the early conservative proponents have changed their minds. Mark V. Pauly, a professor of health care management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who was a co-author of an influential 1991 paper that called for an individual mandate, said that he was discouraged to see so many Republicans shunning an idea they had once supported. “My view was, I still agree with myself,” he said in an interview. “And I was pleased that this thought was getting bipartisan appeal where the whole thing was declared dead on arrival by Democrats 18 years before.”
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President Obama sang a few lines of “Sweet Home Chicago” during a tribute to the blues at the White House on Tuesday night. 
President Obama sang again on Tuesday night, letting loose a few lines of “Sweet Home Chicago” in the finale of a tribute to the blues at the White House. It was the encore to his Apollo Theater snippet of Al Green at a fund-raiser on Jan. 19, and while no one will be suggesting he give up his day job for a pop career, he did fairly well. 
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President Harry S. Truman playing the piano in 1945, with Lauren Bacall in attendance. 
President Richard M. Nixon performing in 1969 for Mr. Truman and their wives. 
Gov. Bill Clinton playing on “The Arsenio Hall Show” in 1992. 
Mitt Romney singing “America the Beautiful” on a January visit to Florida. Blues singing is part oratory, and after a faltering start on Tuesday, Mr. Obama declaimed his lines with adequate warmth and gusto. He also knew enough not to start into an additional verse. Still, he was better at the Apollo, where he sang the opening of “Let’s Stay Together” in the same key, and on the same notes, as Al Green’s original recording. Did Mr. Obama get lucky, or is he secretly harboring perfect pitch? With his few phrases of song, Mr. Obama joins the list of presidents who have gone public as musicians, from Harry S. Truman’s love of classical piano through Bill Clinton’s tenor saxophone. But there’s risk and reward in any presidential display of musicianship. If every presidential act is symbolic, then showing an interest in music humanizes the chief executive, claiming a connection to culture and emotion. But performing in public — especially in the YouTube era — means that an amateur faces comparison to professionals, while the choice of repertory also gets scrutinized. And should the head of state be taking time away from the job to practice? The repertory for political figures has changed radically over the decades, moving from Eurocentric high culture to American popular culture — or, perhaps, from elitism to the vernacular, as presidents have been demystified, and pollsters ask voters about which candidate they’d prefer to share a beer with. Both Truman and Richard M. Nixon studied classical piano; according to the Truman Library, that president’s favorite composers were Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin, every last one of them a dead European (though he also liked Gershwin). When Nixon sat down to a piano on “The Jack Paar Show” in 1963, he was backed by a small orchestra in a “concerto” based on a tune of his own; he grimaced when he fumbled a few notes. Compare that to a defining moment in Mr. Clinton’s 1992 campaign: when he put on sunglasses, picked up his saxophone and played “Heartbreak Hotel” on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” at once aligning himself with an African-American talk-show host, an Elvis Presley hit, the rock ’n’ roll generation and the retro 1950s cool of shades and yakety sax. (Luckily he got some down-home tone out of the instrument and showed some improvisation too.) Mr. Obama’s very brief forays as a singer have made comfortable choices. He has sung blues and soul standards, vintage and widely beloved music; sales of “Let’s Stay Together” spiked immediately after he sang it. The songs have not only suited his vocal range but also tacitly affirmed his African-American identity in an election year, when every politician seeks to rally his base. In “Dreams From My Father” Mr. Obama wrote, “Pop culture was color-coded, after all, an arcade of images from which you could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style. I couldn’t croon like Marvin Gaye, but I could learn to dance all the ‘Soul Train’ steps.” But while the president and his wife, Michelle, have broadly embraced American popular culture by presenting a series of musical events at the White House — including tributes to country, Latin music, civil-rights songs and now the blues — Mr. Obama isn’t remaking himself as entertainer in chief. He hasn’t let loose with a full song — only sound bites. That’s sensible; the longer the performance, the more chance there is to veer off-key, as both Hillary Clinton (who made a campaign joke of a video that caught her badly singing along with “The Star-Spangled Banner”)and recently Mitt Romney, who was more earnest than melodious singing “America the Beautiful” in Florida, have discovered on the campaign trail. “Pitchy” is the word used on “American Idol” for performances like those. But the votes Mr. Obama wants to get aren’t going to be counted on “American Idol.” They’re cast on Election Day. 