I'm glad he said it
Though not for the reason that it makes him look like a horses ass. I think that with his opposition poised to leap on the slightest faux pas and their nearly unlimited money to repeat what he said, a very important topic has been thrust into the limelight.
Obviously Newt & Co. couldn't care less about the social safety net either, but that is not going to stop them now from making him eat his own words time and again - possibly all the way to the convention (hee hee).
Additionally, later on, President Obama can grab the reigns, no matter who becomes the GOP nominee, and paint the entire party with those words, and if Romney is the one, can appeal to certain segments for whom this kind of stuff matters, that Mitt is simply a bad politician.
But more importantly than mere politics, I think that Romney's unforced error might start a meaningful conversation as to the actual state of this safety net. Of how important it is to prevent a bad turn of events from turning into a tragedy. Of how it elevates people from focusing on mere survival to allow them to aspire to achieve a better state of being, not only for themselves, but their family.
Poverty is virulent. It has a way of spreading beyond a single individual, and creates an emotional and economic drag to all that are exposed to it. It destroys lives and communities, lowers life expectancy and actual quality of life, and attacks what I believe is the fundamentally greatest idea behind the American experiment.
What is that? I believe we are great not so much as for what we have done as a country, but for what we hope to achieve. It is our aspirations that have have driven our past deeds, it is our aspirations that drive us to be better, to do more, to make ours and those around us lives better. More crudely: "yeah, well, that's nice, but what have you done today?" is more fitting than erecting and idolizing monuments of past greatness.
We cannot hope to go forward as a country if we are looking over our shoulder, either from fear of what is catching up, or gloating about past accomplishments. We all do our best, both as individuals and as a society when we collectively look forward, free from fear, full of determination.
There is objective data that proves these safety nets pay for themselves time and again, and where progressives might have failed in terms of messaging of the importance of these, Mitt Romney might have accidentally stumbled upon the key for bringing to the forefront this most crucial, most basic, foundation of our social contract.
The right talks about not only removing the safety net, they are actively trying to remove the bottom rung of the ladder for those trying to climb out of the pit. And they are proud of this.
They laughably paint themselves as being the actual compassionate ones, who think that total debasement is necessary, even preferable for those to change their circumstances. As been said many times before, those who are struggling to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps find that the right has already taken a razorblade to the straps.