Who knew that cancer would emerge as a leitmotif of the Obama campaign? First Lady Michelle Obama is the latest to invoke cancer on the campaign trail, but she did so to tout Obamacare rather than attack Mitt Romney directly.

“But this election is also a choice about the health of our families,” Mrs. Obama said at a fundraiser this evening. “We all know these stories — the grandparents who couldn’t afford their medications; the families going broke because a child got sick; the woman dying of cancer whose insurance company wouldn’t cover her care.  And let me tell you something, that’s what kept Barack going day after day.”

Moments later, she asked (without naming Romney), “Do we want these reforms to be repealed?  Because there are those who do. Or do we want the people we love to have the care they need?  That’s the choice we face.”

The first lady has touted Obamacare for covering cancer screenings in several speeches, and did so today, but it’s hard not to think  — when she makes that stark allusion to “the woman dying of cancer” — of the Priorities USA Action video suggesting that Romney caused a woman to die of cancer. (You can read about CNN’s take-down of the ad — and the Obama campaign’s absurd attempt to avoid responsibility for the ad while refusing to repudiate it — here.)

Earlier today, former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Paul Ryan’s Medicare reforms would be bad for his 83-year-old father, a cancer survivor. Gibbs based that claim on the false statement that Ryan wanted to change his father’s Medicare plan, even though MSNBC’s Chuck Todd reminded him that Ryan’s plan does not change Medicare for anyone over the age of 54.