Romney was just sewing up the Republican nomination, with Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul, all bowing out in the first two weeks of May, but the defeat of an old stalwart like Lugar by a Tea Partier like Mourdock was filling conservative commentary about the future of the political party. It would be hard to imagine that Romney hadn't noticed. The night after Herman Cain finally endorsed Romney, with Michele Bachmann by his side, the presumptive nominee was in Boca Raton, Florida, at a fundraiser. That's where he brought out the old saw about the 47 percent, added that they were all Obama voters, and said, "My job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." Even now, conservative blogs are loving the sentiment it. The National Review's Jim Geraghty writes today:

Folks in the media are asking, "how could he say this?" Folks on the Right, who see a growing dependency mentality sucking away the nation’s drive, work ethic and independence, are asking, "how could he say this only behind closed doors?"

Well, because first of all, it's false. The 47 percent are not uniformly Democrats or Obama voters. More important, the 47 percent are not welfare queens -- people "dependent upon government," in Romney's words, "who believe that they are victims." Of the 47 percent who didn't pay income tax in 2009, more than 60 percent of them paid payroll taxes, because they had a job. 22 percent of them were old people. 190,000 of them were soldiers deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq that year. But the clearest fact is that conservatives are watching their candidate get declared unfit for office because of something they've been saying for months.

Apology Tour

Romney has framed his foreign policy critique of Obama around a conservative meme, that Obama went on an "apology tour" around the world, saying he was sorry how much America sucks. This is never happened. But as New York's Jonathan Chait explained last week, it has been a persistent meme in conservative circles, particularly after Karl Rove wrote a Wall Street Journal column headlined "The President's Apology Tour" in April 2009. (Obama had been in office for less than 100 days.) Over three years later, the "apology tour" was the reference point for Romney's quick and widely-criticized response to news that protests outside American embassies had led to the death of a State Department worker, later revealed to be U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens. (The death count eventually hit four.) Romney issued a statement saying:

"I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."

The next day he held a press conference to say he was standing by his remarks. Conservative blogs cheered -- "Romney is right" was the headline at both The Weekly Standard and The National Review. But in the mainstream media, and among some Republican leaders, the comments backfired, making Romney look ill-equipped to act "presidential" during a crisis. More important, they backfired among non-pundits. A Pew Research Center poll found that of those who followed the news, 48 percent disapproved of Romney's comments, and just 26 percent approved. By contrast. 45 percent approved of Obama's handing of the situation, and 36 percent disapproved.