The Hill News

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's offer to bet rival Rick Perry $10,000 shows that the former Massachusetts governor lost his cool in Saturday's debate, an expert on gambling addiction said.

"The thing that really troubles me is really the timing of it all, the framing of it all, again in this very troubled economic time and he's randomly tossing it out there like it's a gentleman's bet," Timothy Fong, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and Hospital, told The Hill on Monday.

On during the weekend's Republican presidential debate in Iowa, Romney offered Perry a $10,000 bet over whether he had called for a so-called national individual mandate in his 2010 book, No Apology. The bet sparked! strong criticism from the Democratic National Committee and Romney's opponents for the Republican nomination.

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