“My job is not to worry about those people,” Mitt Romney said. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” He was talking about forty-seven per cent of the American population. Romney’s views were conveyed in a private fundraiser that was held at the home of Marc Leder, in Boca Raton, according to Mother Jones, which obtained and authenticated a video of the event (parts had been on YouTube for a while, but their provenance was uncertain). Romney confirmed that the video was real—and stood by much of what he said, though he thought that he could have done so more “elegantly.” “By the way, whoever has released the snippets would, I would certainly appreciate if they’d release the whole tape so we could see all of it,” Romney said. We can all agree on that: there was more this morning, in which he dismissed a two-state solution in Israel and, pretty much entirely, the Palestinians. So far, though, the least of the problems with what Romney said is that he seems to be utterly delusional.

Part of Romney’s defense is that he was offering an unvarnished view of the electorate for campaign contributors, so that they would know what they were spending their money on. The suggestion there is that spending your money is an act more worthy of meeting with honesty than spending your vote, but put that aside for a moment. Is the following what anyone deserves?

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

That forty-seven per cent does a lot of work, especially since the root idea—that that number of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes—is deployed so often as a distortion. The majority of them pay other federal taxes, like payroll taxes, which are highly regressive, or pay state taxes, or are retirees—many of whom will be voting for Romney. The perfect concentricity of the income-tax-paying and the Republican-voting circles does not bear scrutiny. But the pliability of that number also says a great deal about Romney’s world view—the transitive property of wealth—and will make it hard for him to say (though he tried) that he was only talking about his lack of concern for votes, not for lives. That forty-seven per cent of Americans, by virtue of their tax treatment, “believe that they are victims”; think they are entitled “to you name it”; and are not even persuadable on the question of voting for anyone with the tax policies Romney offers: they are thinking not about growth or their country but their little check. What they are entitled to, in Romney’s view, is only contempt.

Does Romney think that this is why people will or won’t vote for him? Then he will lose this election. (There are people who have never worried about money who are attached to the idea that no one should starve in America.) It will not be lost on anyone that forty-seven per cent is a very big number. There has been a fair amount of discussion about how high the income level that is considered “middle class” by both candidates has become, to some two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But one thing that is striking about the video is how many people Romney does not consider to be middle class—how many he lumps into the dismissible poor.

And how can they stop being poor? Simply and only by taking “personal responsibility.” And this connects with something else Romney related in the video: the story of his own wealth.

I have inherited nothing. There is a perception, “Oh, we were born with a silver spoon, he never had to earn anything and so forth.” Frankly, I was born with a silver spoon, which is the greatest gift you can have: which is to get born in America.

Romney was the son of a governor and an auto executive who gave him a wealth of connections, a private education, college tuition, a stock portfolio that he lived on while in graduate school, help buying a first house. That he recognizes the value of none of these things is both dismaying and discouraging for anyone who thinks that he will be able to do much to actually encourage opportunity in America. He is clear enough about one difference money can make in life, when he tells those present, “Frankly, what I need you to do is to raise millions of dollars,” and talks about how many foreign customers his campaign consultants have had. But Romney did, in the video, talk about a disadvantage that he feels he has labored under: had his father “been born of Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot of winning this.”