Day-in and day-out between mid-September and early October, Mitt Romney swore that voters had gotten the wrong idea from his 47 percent riff. He insisted his campaign was devoted to the “100 percent of America” for whom “life has become harder.” He ran ads about how he was a truly compassionate person who just had a different way of measuring compassion than Barack Obama. His running mate pronounced the comments a “misstep” and chalked them up to an “inarticulate way of describing how we’re worried … more people have become dependent on government.” When none of that worked, Romney took to Fox News and denounced his own comments as “just completely wrong.”

Judging from Romney’s poll numbers during this quasi-apology tour, most voters weren’t really listening. Alas, it became clear on Wednesday that Romney wasn’t listening either. During a conference call with donors, the same demographic that got him in trouble the first time around, Romney chalked up last Tuesday’s loss to “the gifts” the Obama administration handed out to minorities, young voters, and women. “The President’s campaign focused on giving targeted groups a big gift,” Romney lamented, according to The Los Angeles Times. And those gifts proved “highly motivational.”

During the campaign, Romney’s explanation for his ugly comments was that “now and then you’re gonna say something that doesn’t come out right” when you do hundreds of speeches and Q&A’s. And, in fairness, it does look like he’s refined his bitter rich-guy spiel since that notorious Boca Raton fundraiser. Back then, Romney complained that the 47 percent “believe that they are victims” and “that they are entitled” to government goodies like health care and housing. This time, Romney oh-so-deftly expunged any talk of victimhood or entitlement (at least so far as we know). In this new rendition, the people who voted against him just happened to be on the receiving end of a government spending spree worth “trillions of dollars,” through no particular fault of their own. What were they going to do—turn it down? Let it not be said that Romney doesn’t learn from his mistakes.

On the off-chance this nonsense still needs rebutting, let’s be very clear: There are plenty of reliable Republicans who get heaping piles of government goodies, as my colleague Jonathan Cohn has explained: seniors who love their Medicare, veterans who depend on VA benefits, corporations that gorge on lavish subsidies. Believe it or not, there are even wealthy financiers out there who don’t pay income taxes on their loot and who deduct the mortgage interest on their vacation homes. (Not that I have anyone specific in mind.) Cohn points out that Romney himself promised an exceedingly large “gift” to elderly Republican voters: restoring $718 billion worth of savings from Medicare that Obama had achieved through the Affordable Care Act.

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