February 22, 2013
President Obama handily defeated Mitt Romney in last November’s presidential election. Jimmy Carter said Romney’s ‘47 percent’ comment about Americans was ‘the major factor’ that sealed his fate.
February 22, 2013
President Obama handily defeated Mitt Romney in last November’s presidential election. Jimmy Carter said Romney’s ‘47 percent’ comment about Americans was ‘the major factor’ that sealed his fate.
In a Piers Morgan interview airing on CNN Thursday, the former President, whose nephew helped unearth the remark during a fundraiser, says Romney’s comment that he will ‘not worry about’ 47 percent of Americans was ‘the major factor’ in the GOP nominee’s defeat.
Mitt Romney's presidential campaign may never have sunk the way it did were it not for the disclosure of his notorious "47 percent" comments — and President Obama is apparently quite grateful for the opposition researcher who helped unearth the video.
Former President Jimmy Carter, whose grandson James helped bring the video to light, says Obama thanks James Carter "profusely" when the two met last week.
"When James went to meet President Obama, President Obama ran across the room, embraced him and thanked him profusely for his time, by the way," Carter told CNN's Piers Morgan in an interview airing Thursday night.
The two met when Obama was in Atlanta last week pitching his job-creation proposals after the State of the Union. James Carter has not said who actually made the tape, but he's credited with persuading the sleuth to hand it over to Mother Jones magazine.
"There are 47 percent of people who are with [OBAMA]," Romney tells donors at a Florida fundraiser in the tape, "who are dependent on government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, you-name-it." Romney said his "job is not to worry about those people."
The comments, which made Democratic attacks that Romney was an out-of-touch plutocrat who cared only for the rich more resonant, dropped like a bomb on Romney's campaign.
"It was something he [ROMNEY]could not deny and it stuck with him for the rest of the election and I think it was a major factor, if not the major factor," Jimmy Carter said.
Courtesy: NYDN
