Think Progress doesn't offer an awful lot of context for Ann Romney's comment, made on Fox News Monday afternoon, about wealth. But it's hard to imagine what would make these words sound any less entitled and out of touch:
We can be poor in spirit, and I don’t even consider myself wealthy, which is an interesting thing, it can be here today and gone tomorrow.
By comparison with the Koch brothers or the Walton family, Mitt and Ann Romney are not wealthy. But if you have to consult the
Forbes 400 to find people by comparison with whom someone doesn't look wealthy, the person is wealthy. Romney seems to be trying here to say that you shouldn't consider yourself defined by your financial status, or think that wealth automatically makes you a good person. But, as her husband has done so many times in the course of his presidential campaign, Ann manages to draw attention to the Romneys' vast wealth.
Ann Romney has been increasingly visible as a surrogate on her husband's campaign. You'd think that was a strategic decision to have someone warmer and less out of touch speaking for Mitt, to have a Romney speaking who wasn't always trying to make $10,000 bets or talking about his NASCAR team-owning friends. Apparently if that was the strategy, it's failing. Because the Romneys really don't seem to be able to detach themselves from the fact of their hundreds of millions of dollars, even when trying to downplay the importance of wealth in life.
And it takes someone really complacent in her wealth not to understand how ridiculous and offensive it sounds to say "I don't even consider myself wealthy" when you have hundreds of millions of dollars.