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Romney Bets, Was Right, 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.


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