Mitt Romney looked a mess Monday night. Standing in front of a group of reporters and cameras gathered on a few minutes’ notice, he was flustered. He spoke quickly, without his usual composure. He looked sad, frustrated—even seemed, once or twice, to be holding back flashes of anger. And worst of all, perhaps, his hair: so famously perfectly coiffed at all times, on Monday night it was, like its owner, out of sorts.

Even the most ardent Democratic partisan couldn’t begrudge Romney his evident distress. When he was twenty years old, he saw his father’s Presidential campaign undone by an ill-considered remark. Now, forty-five years later, his campaign already in disarray, he had to explain to all those gathered reporters what he’d meant when he’d disparaged nearly half the country at a private fundraiser, video of which had been unearthed and published by Mother Jones.

“There are forty-seven per cent of the people who will vote for the President no matter what,” Romney had said at the fundraiser, which was, by itself, basically true, and for a President of either party. But then he continued:

All right, there are forty-seven per cent 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 … These are people who pay no income tax…. 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.

(Amy Davidson has more on the video and what Romney said in it.)

This was, in a certain way, not so remarkable—it is what much of Romney’s activist base firmly believes. But a major-party Presidential candidate cannot be seen expressing these things in public, not this way. (It’s a little bit like a royal sunbathing topless—if you can keep it private, it’s basically O.K., but God help you if anyone gets it on film.)

The question now is whether these comments, and whatever else emerges in the coming days, will be enough to do in Romney for good, the way his father was done in. The answer likely depends on one’s own previously held beliefs.

Conservatives will say—are saying—that this is a boon for Romney, that he can go on the offensive now, that this is a winning issue. “If Romney plays this right, the leaked video could halp [sic] sharpen the ideological debate—which we can win just like we did in 2010,” John Nolte, editor-at-large at Breitbart News, [tweeted](file://localhost/NolteNC/statuses/247838039596994560) Monday. He [added](file://localhost/NolteNC/status/247839464649551872), “Romney should grab this opportunity with both hands—let’s have this denate [sic] about those who take and those who give.”

The danger for the right here is that it’s far too easy to believe your own press releases. The forty-seven per cent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes are not the takers of Randian fantasies. Most pay a significant amount of other taxes, especially federal payroll taxes. Plus, they come from a broad swath of the country. And, perhaps most important, given the context, not all of them are Obama voters. True, in 2008, according to exit polls, Obama won sixty per cent of the voters whose income was less than fifty thousand dollars. But he also won forty-nine per cent—tied with John McCain—of the voters making fifty thousand or more. (That includes his winning forty-nine per cent—again, tied with McCain—of the vote from people making a hundred thousand dollars or more.)

When conservatives aren’t focussed on this takers vs. job-creators dynamic, they know all this: they do, after all, spend plenty of time mocking Obama voters as coddled, élite limousine liberals. But cognitive dissonance is a powerful force in politics.

Meanwhile, liberals are doing a little crowing of their own, proclaiming this “devastating” to Romney, perhaps even the end for his campaign. They’re likely getting ahead of themselves as well. For one thing, we know that gaffe-related flare-ups like this are almost never as significant as we initially think they are. At the very least, none of the others that have happened during this election season have had any clearly visible impact.

And there’s a problem of duelling popular misconceptions at work here. Very few of the people who don’t pay federal income tax know they don’t pay federal income tax—they know they pay taxes to the federal government, and after that, well, who actually checks their returns to see what percentage of what they paid was a result of income taxes and what was due because of payroll taxes? (Let’s try an experiment to illustrate this point: raise your hand if you think you paid federal income tax last year. Done? Hand raised? Good. Statistically speaking, half of you are wrong.)

There is still an opportunity here for Democrats to use another misconception to their advantage, though. True, they’ll have a hard time convincing voters that they don’t pay income tax, and that Romney was talking about them—but they won’t need to do any work at all to convince them they’re part of the middle class, because two-thirds of Americans believe they’re in the middle class, even when they’re quite clearly too rich (or poor) to be categorized that way. Voters are already suspicious of Romney’s attitude towards the middle class; if the Obama campaign can turn these latest comments into an attack on the middle class, rather than some fictional group of lazy, entitled people, they might just have something they can work with, the stuff of Romney’s old nightmares.

Photograph by Charles Dharapak/AP Photo.