Video: Mitt Romney... The poor are not my concern

Mitt Romney strode into a top Los Angeles hotel hoping to reboot his faltering presidential campaign. But by the time he’d left, all anyone cared about was a visit he made to another such venue several months ago.

Shortly after lunch yesterday, the liberal Mother Jones website published hidden camera footage of the Republican candidate addressing a dinner for 30 wealthy donors at a big Florida home earlier this year.

"My job," he’d told them, "is not to worry" about people too poor to pay income tax. The five minutes of blurry YouTube video showed Mr Romney dismissing this humble demographic, which includes roughly 47 per cent of all Americans, as idle freeloaders who behave like "victims".

"[They] believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it," he said. "They will vote for this President no matter what. These are people who pay no income tax . .. My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Speaking to an apparently all-white audience, Mr Romney also said the election might be easier to win if he were Hispanic, joked about being born with a "silver spoon", and revealed that his campaign would use wife Ann "sparingly, so people don’t get tired of her".

Little wonder, then, that the taped remarks swiftly went viral. Late last night Mr Romney attempted to stem the bleeding at a short, impromptu press conference outside a fundraiser in Orange County.

The taped comments were "off the cuff" and "not elegantly stated", he admitted — but they were not wrong. Instead, they broadly reflect his pitch for smaller government.

That’s unlikely to be the end of controversy, though. Many of the roughly 150 million Americans who pay no income tax hail from demographics crucial to this election. Some are retired and living on social security; others lower-income workers whose tax is deducted through payrolls. The remarks may also prove toxic to floating voters. Mr Romney is already seen as an ultra-wealthy elitist, who has money in the Cayman Islands, keeps a Swiss bank account, and has trouble relating to the concerns of ordinary Americans. Now he seems to be expressing contempt for the poor.

To social conservatives, it can’t help that Mr Romney’s secretly recorded remarks were made at the home of a hedge fund manager called Mark Leder — the subject of a recent exposé in the New York Post in which he was alleged to hold debauched house parties featuring guests cavorting naked.

But the biggest problem is surely one of momentum.

Mr Romney is already firmly behind in the polls following a lacklustre convention and a series of tactical blunders. There have been recent reports of discord among his senior staffers.