Mitt Romney was caught up in a fresh and damaging secret video controversy on Monday night, only hours after his campaign team tacitly admitted it was struggling and was going to have revise its campaign strategy.

The video, showing Romney at a closed-doors fundraising event, captures him dismissing 47% of the nation as government-dependent. "My job is not to worry about those people," he says.

He adds: "I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

The release of the video, on the liberal Mother Jones website, came at an awkward moment for the Romney campaign amid reports of internal strife and bickering among his campaign managers.

The Republican presidential candidate is also running behind Barack Obama in the polls, albeit only by 3%, after a lacklustre Republican convention in August.

His campaign team announced on Monday morning that it would recalibrate its strategy and that, instead of focusing on criticising Obama, it will begin to set out "specifics" about what policies Romney will pursue if he wins the White House.

But only hours later the new strategy was overtaken by the recording of Romney posted on the Mother Jones site.

It has the potential to alienate a lot of independent voters who will cringe at a potential president being so dismissive of the poor.

The Obama campaign team described it as "shocking".

The Romney campaign did not deny that the video is authentic and insisted only that the candidate cares about all Americans.

"Mitt Romney wants to help all Americans struggling in the Obama economy," said spokeswoman Gail Gitcho.

In the video, Romney said: "There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.

"All right, there are 47% 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 healthcare, to food, to housing, to you-name-it," he said.

He added: "These are people who pay no income tax."

Apart from offending a large part of the population, the comment is also inaccurate. The 47% are not people who pay no income tax and encompasses sections of the population who have earned their entitlements.

Earlier in the day, the Romney campaign said it would attempt to give a clearer, more positive picture of their candidate as it seeks to regain the initiative with just 50 days to go until the election.

The new strategy will not abandon negative campaigning, but will focus on positive ads as well as speeches to spell out the Romney would pursue in office, in particular his five-point economic plan.

The latest polls show Obama's large post-convention poll bounce beginning to narrow. A Gallup poll recorded a drop from 7% last week to 3%, with the president on 48% to Romney's 45%.

But the problem for the Romney campaign is less Obama's post-convention bounce and more the fact that the Republican failed to secure any bounce at all.

Romney began his campaign early in the summer intent on making the election about Obama's economic record and making himself as small a target as possible by disclosing little about his own policies.

But since then there has barely been a clear week in which Romney has been able to get his message across, either because of a barrage of ads on his record as chief executive of Bain Capital and his unwillingness to release more than two years' worth of tax records, or because of gaffes on his own side.

Romney's trip to Britain, Israel and Poland, which was intended to showcase him as a figure of some standing in the international community, quickly went askew.

His position on abortion became a week-long issue after Todd Akin, a Republican congressman in Missouri running for the Senate, talked about "legitimate rape". Hurricane Isaac disrupted the Republican convention.

Then, last week, Romney issued a hasty response to the evolving Middle East crisis, essentially accusing Obama of appeasement.

His rash comment, from which many senior Republicans distanced themselves, dominated the news in the US for days after the killing of US ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, and the spotlight is only now beginning to turn to Obama's policy on the Middle East and North Africa.