"If You Are Embarrassed By Your Healthcare Architect..."
...You can throw your healthcare architect under the bus.

President Obama, reports Josh Gerstein at Politico, claims Obamacare wasn't deceptively sold to via the "stupidity" of American voters, to borrow Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber's word:

"The fact that an adviser who was never on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms of the voters is not a reflection on the actual process that was run," Obama declared at a press conference here, speaking for the first time about the comments by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.

When the president was asked whether he had intentionally misled the public in order to get the law passed, he replied: "No. I did not."

Do you think there's a staffer on hand to sand the President's nose down after statements like this?

While Gruber was not a staffer, he was a paid consultant whose models were used to help assess the impact of various policy changes being considered as part of health care legislation. Official logs show he visited the White House about a dozen times between 2009 and this year.

Despite Obama's dismissive tone toward Gruber, the president has acknowledged that some of his own statements about the law were ill-advised, in particular his repeated promises that if Americans liked their health care plans they could keep them. In fact, many plans were deemed inadequate under the law, leading people to get notices that their plans were being canceled.

The question about Gruber was just a taste of the challenges Obama faces back home from newly ascendant Republicans, as they consider how to use control of both chambers of Congress to try to frustrate the president's agenda on issues ranging from health care to climate change to immigration.

Frustrate away! Please!