When things inevitably got more heated—Romney did want to win, after all, and he was losing—Romney’s public remarks about Obama got sharper. He decided to say whatever he needed to say to get his fellow Republicans behind him. A trade of sorts: I’ll give lip service to your fixations, you vote for me. Not only was this gambit unsuccessful, it led to one of modern political history’s most disastrous own goals: He told a room full of fat cats that 47 percent of Americans “are dependent upon government” and “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” Those comments got leaked, and the resulting audio of the remarks, complete with the delicate cacophony of clinking cocktail glasses in the background, became an all-time political attack ad—finally landing the out-of-touch aristocrat blow the Obama campaign had hoped for.
In his book, Coppins extracts from this incident some of the most humanizing images of Romeny to date. It’s worth quoting at length.
He could barely eat during the day and struggled to sleep at night, even after popping a Lunesta. He couldn’t even bring himself to listen to music in his hotel room—“just too sick at heart,” he wrote. When he tried to concentrate on briefing materials, his mind would drift toward the self-inflicted damage he had done to his campaign, and to all the people he had failed. To take his mind off it, he rode the elliptical at a punishing pace.
Night after night, Romney castigated himself in his private diary. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he wrote.
What especially stung, Coppins writes, was that the fatal line was prompted when a donor harrumphed about the poor and Romney didn’t push back. The donor “griped that ‘everybody’ in America had been told ‘don’t worry, we’ll take care of you’ [and] had asked Romney how he could ‘convince everybody you’ve got to take care of yourself.’” After the firestorm erupted, “Romney now told himself that this had been a dumb question, and he had been stupid to accept its premise.” He had “merely [been] trying to be polite in answering the query. Besides, he had only made the obvious political point that he needed to focus on a narrow swath of voters to win the election.”