Mitt Romney stuck his big mitten in his mouth this morning in an interview with CNN where he actually said the words “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” Now the full context of his quote is this:
“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair , I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich…. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”
If that’s not bad enough, he makes it worse when he attempts to clarify it:
“I said I’m not concerned about the very poor that have a safety net, but if it has holes in it, I will repair them. We will hear from the Democratic party the plight of the poor, and there’s no question it’s not good being poor, and we have a safety net to help those that are very poor. But my campaign is focused on middle-income Americans. My campaign — you can choose on where to focus. You can focus on the rich — that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus. …We have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether it has holes in it. We have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor…”
This just doesn’t come off very well at all. Even in context it sounds like he’s just dismissing the poor, that they don’t really need any more help because they have food stamps. And he’s going to focus on the ones that are really hurting, and that doesn’t include the poor.
And the fact that he is a very wealthy man just makes this all the worse because the Democrats will make hay with this.
Here’s the full clip:
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