Wrong again. Romney's 47% statement could not have been about the whole country simply because if he was talking about the entire country he would have said "100%," which he didn't say since that would have been ridiculous.
My bad for not wording it correctly.
Clinton was sample sizing Trump voters, and Trump voters only, to make her point.
Romney was sample sizing the entire country to which the 47% he's referring to is included in.
Quote:
Moreover, the statement was correct. Romney said 47% of Americans pay no tax. Politifact and CBS News both fact-checked it and found it accurate.
That's not what he said. Just to brush you up, here's his exact quote.
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what...who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims. ...These are people who pay no income tax. ...and so my job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
He called nearly half the country "dependent on government", and implied they don't have "personal responsibility".
A statement like that is only going to play to the far right, and would be disastrous in a national election, as it turned out to be.
I'm familiar with the quote, just as the writers at Politifact and CBS News are. Was Romney factually incorrect on nearly half the country being dependent on government?
And no, Romney did not "play to the far right." Romney has no connection to the Far Right except in your mind. It also wasn't any sort of "play" at all since it came from a private meeting and not from a public forum.
Was it something he shouldn't have said since Left-wingers and the Far Left would take it out of context? Yes. Would he have beat Obama if he didn't say it? Unlikely. The media was giving excess coverage to non-stories and non-events to defeat his campaign, this being one example. If President Obama threw out a statistic about his political opponents back then it would have gotten comparatively little coverage. Oh wait, he did just that in 2008 when he referred to people in small communities in Pennsylvania and the Midwest who cling to guns and are bitter, etc., and when it was reported on it was either downplayed or dismissed. This double-standard in news coverage helps explain why no matter what Romney could have said it would have made no difference in the 2012 election.
