It seems Mitt Romney only believes poll numbers when they end up in his favor -- Romney On Polls: ‘You Can Ask Questions And Get Any Answer You Want’:
Confronted with polling from New York City showing parents standing with teachers unions at an NBC News education forum Tuesday, Mitt Romney took a swipe at poll results in general. During a question and answer session at the NBC event, a New York public schools parent told Romney that polling showed parents "support the union to protect our kids three to one over the mayor and the chancellor."
Romney, who spent much of the session condemning teachers' unions, said the results were meaningless.
"I don't believe it for a minute," Romney said. "I know something about polls, and you can ask questions and get any answer you want."
Romney didn't only get the polling wrong, he also got a quote wrong while attacking the teacher's union -- Romney Defames Teachers at NBC News Education Event:
During his presentation today at an NBC News Education forum in New York City, Mitt Romney repeatedly declared his belief that teachers' unions do not care about students or education, that those aren't "teachers' interests." In order to "prove" his case, he evoked (and mis-attributed) a right-wing canard about a speech by a senior teachers' union official, further demonstrating his contempt for educators.
In response to a question from a member of a New York City school board, who cited a recent Quinnipiac study showing NYC parents trust the teachers' union nearly twice as much as the mayor to protect their children's interests, Romney expressed disbelief in the poll. He then went on to "quote" the "head of the national teachers' union as having said, 'We don't care about the children. We care about the teachers.' in order to back his anti-union position. Unfortunately for Governor Romney, he got both the speaker and the full quotation wrong.
As Media Matters recently reported, this was actually a 2009 speech by Bob Chanin, former general counsel (not head) of the National Education Association, which was incompletely excerpted by both Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh to try to make the same anti-union point as did Governor Romney today. Media Matters then produced a substantial excerpt from the speech, placing in bold the mid-sentence to mid-sentence portion focused upon by Limbaugh, Hannity and now Romney, but including the rest of the context to demonstrate that Chanin was actually making the opposite point: Read on...
As they noted, given the way he launched his campaign, and I'll add, the amount of lying he's done since, this comes as no big surprise.
