Tim Dalrymple at Patheos has a very good post up arguing (quite rightly) that the frufarol over Romney's $10,000 wager with Rick Perry is silly on multiple fronts. But what caught my attention was Tim's claim that it was a bet Romney would have won. Tim writes:
Perry was claiming that Romney wrote, in the first edition of his 2010 book, No Apology, and then cut from the paperback version, that his Massachusetts health-care program should be a “model” for the federal plan. Romney offered to bet Perry $10,000 that Perry was wrong. Perry demurred, saying that he was “not a betting man.” Romney clearly believed that he had won the point. One debate post-mortem gave Perry credit for having “successfully goaded Mitt Romney into one of the worst moments he’s had in a debate so far.” Apparently one gets credit for telling a lie long enough that the opponent gets frustrated and asks you to put your money where your mouth is.
What are the facts? As usual, Perry is confused on the details. In his hardcover version of the book, Romney wrote: “We can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country, and it can be done without letting government take over health care.” In the paperback version, the portion written in italics above is deleted. Romney has the facts on his side. He did not delete from the second version a claim that the Massachusetts plan should be a model for the nation. In fact, his statement explicitly opposed a government takeover.
On the contrary, as I wrote in Tim's comment section, Romney would have lost that $10,000. In a general sense, he said on multiple occasions that he thought that the Massachusetts plan could serve as a national template.
For example:
But in the specific case of the phrase from the book, everything rides on what “the same thing” is supposed to mean. I think there’s every good reason to interpret “the same thing” to mean utilizing the MA health reform plan as the model for the entire country, particularly in light of the quotes taken from the video above.
As a side note, I love what Romney said when confronted with the quote from his book:
“Please don’t try and make me retreat from the words that I wrote in my book. I stand by what I wrote. I believe in what I did. And I believe that the people of this country can read my book and see exactly what it is.”
To which it seems Perry would have been well justified in replying: "You stand by what you wrote, except for what you deleted, and the American people could read it, if you hadn't expurgated it in a politically convenient way." And Romney's aides don't help on this score, replying when asked that "the book was merely updated to reflect the “climate” of politics in early 2011"
On another note, the subordinate clause about “government takeover of health-care” is not a refutation of Romney's claim that “the same thing” didn't refer to the individual mandate, precisely because neither the Massachusetts plan, the Affordable Care Act, nor the particular issue of the individual mandate constitute a “government takeover of health-care.” It’s simply a misstatement of fact to suggest that it is.
I think the more relevant issue has to do not with whether Romney thought that the Massachusetts plan should be a national model (he clearly did), but how it should be a national model, and I think its completely fair for him to say that as a model it would work well on the state level by having individual states impose an individual mandate, but that this is not something the federal government should be in control of. He’s said as much at various times, and while I disagree with him on that, it’s an honorable federalist position to hold. Its the wholesale dodge that he’s engaged in now that feeds into the (in my opinion accurate) narrative that he’ll say anything to be President.
On the substance then, I think Tim has it wrong: Romney would lose that bet, and now Gingrich, Perry, and others are tarring him with the fact that he can easily afford to lose it. It reinforces both of the dominant narratives about Romney: That he's an out of touch member of the super-rich, and that he has absolutely no set of core convictions that motivate his politics.
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