Did Mitt Romney make a $10,000 mistake?

 Did Mitt Romney make a $10,000 mistake?

Yahoo! readers rate the debate: ‘$10,000 is more than some people make in a year’

For the Republican candidates' debate in Iowa on Saturday night, Yahoo News posed real-time questions to those watching the event live stream to gauge their feelings about candidates' responses to moderators (and each other), and solicited comments on a live blog of the event. Here are the key takeaways from our audience feedback, along with other nuggets from the social sphere:

Romney's $10,000 bet was a mistake

Yahoo! readers watching the debate were not impressed by Mitt Romney's suggestion that Rick Perry take a $10,000 bet on whether the former Massachusetts governor was really for individual health care mandates. Viewers expressed strong disapproval in the comments of our live blog: "$10,000 is more than some people make in a year," wrote one commenter. When we asked viewers, "Did you like seeing Mitt Romney ask Rick Perry to accept a $10,000 wager?," just 33 percent of the first 1,200 people who responded answered "yes." By the time the question closed at 11 p.m. with just over 25,000 votes, 70 percent of Yahoo! watchers said "no," they did not like the wager. You can watch a clip of the moment above.

NPR politics editor Neal Carruth commented on Twitter: "Suspect the $10,000 bet will remind people of this photo." The picture, from the Romney's days at Bain Capital, shows the candidate and his colleagues gleefully posing with money. Jonah Goldberg of the National Review Online tweeted, "Memo to Romney: Please don't now say that proceeds from $10,000 bet would have gone to charity." Our own Zachary Roth crunched the numbers and calculated that $10,000 is .005 percent of Romney's net worth.

Twitter jumped on the $10,000 figure immediately. It spiked as a topic, with 3,400 real time tweets, according to an analysis by ABC and Blue Fin labs. Minutes after the debate ended, the moment was already on its way to becoming a meme—Reuters social media editor Anthony De Rosa noted that #What10kbuys was trending worldwide.

 Did Mitt Romney make a $10,000 mistake?