Rick Perry has taken a lot of flak over his possibly bid-killing book, “Fed Up.” Now the Texas governor is taking a leaf out of Mitt Romney’s playbook, and trying to put the focus on Romney’s own tome, “No Apologies.” Perry’s camp accuses the former Massachusetts governor of altering passages in later editions of his book to remove some kind words for the 2009 stimulus package.
In the 2010 version of “No Apology: The Case For American Greatness,” Romney offered up some faint praise for the stimulus, writing that “The “all-Democrat” stimulus that was passed in early 2009 will accelerate the timing of the start of the recovery.” In the 2011 paperback edition, however, Romney writes that it was “failure.” The Perry campaign, which has been trying hard this week to revive the vintage “flip-flopper” label that dogged Romney in 2008, highlighted the changes in a web video.
The video marks the second time the Perry campaign has accused Romney of swinging to the right in his book’s later edition, which was marketed as “updated and revised” by the publisher. Earlier in a debate, he accused Romney of editing one passage to to remove a sentence suggesting he would apply his Massachusetts health care to the rest of the country, an attack that doesn’t stand up too well under scrutiny.
This one may be a bit more of a direct hit — there’s no denying that the language on the stimulus is tougher in the paperback. However, Romney was clever enough to hedge his bets pretty hard in the original hardcover edition, making it less clear a flip flop than it may seem from the two quotes the Perry campaign emphasizes. While Romney wrote that the stimulus “included genuine tax-and-job generating incentives,” he went on to criticize it overall in pretty strong terms. “Not only has the 2009 package already been far less than successful, it will impose a heavy burden on the economy in the intermediate and long term,” he wrote. Another sentence excoriates Congress for funding “unnecessary pet projects, long-term programs, and delayed employment initiatives.” Ultimately, he writes, the law was a “disheartening diversion of resources that could have instead powered a meaningful set of investments, protected our troops in combat, and created new jobs.”
Expect the book to come up in other Perry attacks as well. The Boston Phoenix flagged a number of changes at the time of the paperback edition’s publication to make it more palatable to the Republican base. “The book was originally written in the months immediately following President Obama’s inauguration,” Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom said at the time. “A lot has occurred over the last two years, and these updates reflect those happenings.”
