I don’t think this is entirely correct:

It’s been said that Obama might somehow be better off politically if the Court were to strike down the unpopular parts of the law (or even all of it). According to this reasoning, he could then avoid the problem of defending the law on the campaign trail and concentrate instead on issues on which the Democratic view is more popular.

This is nonsense. In the first place, in politics and the rest of life, it’s always better to win than lose. Winners win, and losers lose. Moreover, the invalidation of such a central achievement of his Administration would taint Obama’s Presidency forever. To casual followers of politics (and the Supreme Court), which is to say most people, it would look like Obama overreached in the way that the stereotype suggests that liberals often do–in expanding the size of government. In the event of a loss, Obama would blame the Court, perhaps for good reason, but for better or worse the Justices will have the last word… A loss in the Supreme Court would send the Democratic Party back to square one on the issue.

Sure, if the entire ACA goes down, it’s awfully hard to see how Democrats recover. A full-on attack on the Court would be required, and could have some success, but Obama isn’t in the position that FDR was in 1936. He  just doesn’t have the kind of political capital to wage this war during an election, considering the economy and public opinion.

Personally, though, I’m not sure that eliminating just the mandate would be that awful. Republicans rather cynically focused on that part of the law–which they came up with–because it was the least popular. Without the mandate, the law loses its most unpopular component. Really, after that the ACA would look a lot more like what Candidate Obama campaigned on in 2008, which would make the mandate pretty easy to retcon as something forced on him by insurers. Now the ACA is what he originally wanted it to be! It’s spin, but not bad spin. Such a ruling wouldn’t be a good thing to have happen (and it would have some damaging effects on the law’s effectiveness as a whole, not to mention that it’s junk law), but I don’t think it would be catastrophic.