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Perry, Romney both altered past stances in debate

Posted Sep 26, 2011 by William March

Updated Sep 26, 2011 at 05:31 PM

Rick Perry and Mitt Romney both altered their most controversial past stances on entitlement programs in Friday night’s candidates’ debate.

Perry denied he had ever suggested that states should take over Social Security, when he has in fact advocated that – or come very close to doing so.

Romney denied he ever suggested his Massachusetts health care plan should be a national model, and denied he has changed his position on that issue, when in fact he appears to have done both.

In the debate, Perry said of Social Security, “We never said that we were going to move this back to the states.” He said he advocated only allowing states to opt out of Social Security and set up their retirement for their own state employees.

In a November, 2010 appearance on Joe Scarborough’s MSNBC talk show “Morning Joe,” describing his book, “Fed Up,” Perry said it’s about “getting away from the Constitution” and “a federal government that has grown monstrously big and taken those rights and privileges away from the people, away from the states, and consolidated them in Washington, D.C.”

He mentioned Social Security and Medicare as examples.

In 1981, he noted, new laws allowed local governments to opt out of Social Security and set up their own plans for their own employees, and said, “I would suggest to you, let’s have that conversation. Is that one of the fixes? Get it back to the states. Why is the federal government even in the pension program or the health care delivery program? Let the states do it.”

He also added, “I wouldn’t have written that book if I wanted to run for the presidency of the United States.”

Romney, meanwhile, said in the debate that he never considered his health plan a national model—“Absolutely not. This is a state plan for a state, it is not a national plan.”

He then said to Perry, “It’s fine for to you retreat from your own words in your own book, but please don’t try and make me retreat from the words that I wrote in my book. I stand by what I wrote.”

But what Romney wrote changed between the hard cover version of his book, published in 2010, and the paperback in February.

In a paragraph describing expanded access to health insurance for the uninsured in the plan, he wrote, “It’s portable, affordable health insurance – something people have been talking about for decades. We can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country, and it can be done without letting government take over health care.”

The paperback omits the words, “We can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country.”

In a Fox News interview, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul noted that it’s common to do revisions in books between editions.

“When Gov. Romney wrote his book in early 2009, the stimulus hadn’t passed, Obamacare hadn’t passed, so updates of course are going to be made to reflect changes in the climate,” she said.