The past few weeks have not been kind to Mitt Romney. For Mitt, April may have been the kindest month; September the cruelest. At the midpoint of the month – the point when four years ago the economy ran aground – a video revealed Mitt Romney at a private fundraiser saying that 47% percent of Americans paid no income tax and depended on government for handouts. While it is unjust to say that he doesn’t care about this near majority, it made it clear that he doesn’t much care for them. Mitt suggested that all these votes were in the pocket of the President leaving a frighteningly narrow path to a potential victory.

As one political commentator suggested, it is bad enough when you don’t like the candidate, but far worse when the candidate does not like you. The comment played into the narrative of Romney the patrician. Of course, Obama at a 2008 San Francisco fundraiser scorned rural white voters who held to their guns and their Bibles. Like so many campaigns before, we are witnessing a race between two ivied titans. Sarah Palin, student at Matanuska-Susitna College and graduate of the University of Idaho, would never have uttered these words or thought these thoughts.

But put aside whether Mitt cares about these 47% dependent, as he asserts, on the corrosive largess of government, and put aside the question of whether these citizens are as economically rational as he suggests. Voters, left and right, routinely do not vote their pocketbook, but their hearts. There is much false consciousness about.

One might ask how insightful is Mitt Romney as his own strategist? I have been waiting – in vain – for a poll that compares the voting preferences of the 47 percent to the 53 percent. My unsurprising guess is that Mitt will do better among the 53 percent electorate as compared to the 47 percent electorate (just as Romney might well carry the majority of the white male electorate), but I also suspect that Romney’s lead among the 53% and gap in the 47% would not be . . .

Read more: 47: A Prime Political Number for Romney and America