Mitt keeps making it obvious that, for him, anyone not a white male worth at least a few million is just an interchangeable cog. A member of “The Help”, as Charlie Pierce puts it. He doesn’t need to understand our quaint little folkways, honor our tiny vanities, even remember our names—we just aren’t important enough to take up that much space in Willard “Mitt” Romney’s beautiful mind. A major facet of the GOP’s appeal to working-class white voters, especially white male voters, since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, has been the unspoken advertisment that voting Republican would set you off as a member of the elite… if not actually rich, or well-educated, or white, or male, at least an aspiring elitist with a clear superiority over the faceless mass of those people (non-whites, immigrants, women, DFHs*, welfare queens, moochers & looters). Romney can’t manage to fake that GOP-standard wink’n’nod “we’re special, not like those horrible Democrats” bonhomie. It infuriates the very people he most needs to support him that he patently can’t tell the difference between Sean Hannity and Wolf Blitzer and the chairman of the tri-county RNC nominating committee and the counter monkey fetching Mitt’s hot chocolate. A not inconsiderable portion of the Republican voting population consists of those who would… “volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”  To those people, it’s a mortal insult that Romney can’t even bring himself to pretend that he would appreciate their sacrifice—that Romney, in fact, may not be able to distinguish between their honorable sacrifice, and the slovenly unblessed non-Republican lifestyle choice of the DFHs* in the next cardboard box over.

— Romney, Avatar of Rich White Male Privilege

*definition