American voters have long shown a willingness to elect very wealthy presidents, as long as they demonstrated a real concern about people on the economic rungs far below. Given what the last few weeks have revealed about Mitt Romney’s wealth, and how he made it, you would think he would want to go out of his way to show that concern.

Instead, within hours of winning of the Florida primary, he did precisely the opposite, making a televised statement this morning that was breathtakingly callous even by the modern standards of Republican heartlessness.

He actually said, live on CNN, that “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”



With his interviewer, Soledad O’Brien, looking stunned, Mr. Romney explained that the poor have their government safety net, which he would be willing to repair if broken. But he plans to leave it to the Democrats to care about their needs.

“We will hear from the Democrat party the plight of the poor,” he said. “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 Americans. You can choose 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. My focus is on middle income Americans, retirees living on Social Security, people who can’t find work.”

As it happens, many of the people in the last two categories have become quite poor since the downturn began, relying on the same government safety net in which Mr. Romney seems to have little interest. Last September, the Census Bureau said there were 46.2 million people living in poverty. That’s 15 percent of the American people.

Statistics aside, at a time when voters have expressed a strong concern about economic inequality, it was a remarkably tone-deaf statement for the Republican front-runner to make. He had previously made it quite clear that his proposed budget cuts would destroy or damage many programs for the poor, but that’s still a long way from a man worth $250 million actually saying out loud that he is not interested in the struggles of those with nothing.

Millions of the “middle Americans” that Mr. Romney professes to care about have become very concerned about falling out of the middle, and with good cause: There are 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. If they do slip into poverty, they now know they will also slip right off the radar of the man who promises to be a uniter, not a divider.