Michelle Obama’s speech gets better with age:

Being President reveals who you are

Mind you: this is not like “cling to guns and religion” moment in any way except they were both “gaffes” or inartful. The context of that “guns and religion” statement is that Obama thought these people are worth reaching out to. Obama was clumsily telling wealthy donors to not neglect working class voter outreach:

“But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress, uh, when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in, in, Pennsylvania, a lot, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced ’em. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or … uh, anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

“Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you’ll find is, is that people of every background, um, there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you’ll find Obama enthusiasts. Uh, and you can go into places where you think that I’d be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you’re doing what you’re doing.

Mitt Romney’s context of “The 47%” is that the American people who voted for Obama are lazy lemmings waiting for government handouts and are blind idiots and should be ignored:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” he says. “All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them.” And they’re hopeless. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

“hopeless”. That’s Mitt Romney’s vision for 47% of Americans.