So Romney Bet $10,00 That Perry Had Misquoted Him. Romney was right but loses bet.
Bettors at Intrade, the political futures market, are betting against Mr. Romney. Read more by Nate Silver
Meantime, from ABC Factchecking:
Rick Perry: “I’m listenin’ to you, Mitt, and I’m hearin’ you say all the right things. But I read your first book and it said in there that your mandate in Massachusetts which should be the model for the country. And I know it came out of the reprint of the book. But, you know, I’m just sayin’, you were for individual mandates, my friend.”
Romney: “You know what? You’ve raised that before, Rick. And you’re simply wrong.”
Perry: “It was true then. It’s true now.”
Romney: “I have not said, in that book, first edition or the latest edition, anything about our plan being a national model imposed on the nation.”
This is when Romney offered to make a $10,000 bet and Perry declined to take it. Smart man, because he would have lost the money.
We explored this issue before when Perry made this claim in a television ad, giving Perry Three Pinocchios. And here is a PDF of the paperback edition showing the pages in question.
Perry is making a phony claim.
It is clear that the hardcover edition was written when Obama’s health-care plan was still a work in progress. For instance, Romney spends some time denouncing the idea of a public option as “government-supplied insurance.” The paperback was published after the health-care law was passed, so the paragraphs on the public option — which had been abandoned by Obama — are dropped.
Romney also must have sensed that GOP anger at Obama’s health-care law might make his own signature legislative achievement less attractive to Republican voters, so he added a few paragraphs emphasizing how the Democratic governor who followed him made changes in the law that he did not approve of. But otherwise the changes are minimal — the standard updating that takes place in paperback nonfiction books.