“Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan, and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign,” explained Romney, who described a subsequent campaign parade in which the school band marching with his father knew how to play Wisconsin’s fight song, but not Michigan’s.

“Every time they would start playing ‘On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin,’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin,” said Romney, laughing.

Thus ended an anecdote Mitt Romney shared with supporters in Wisconsin via a campaign conference call in an attempt to demonstrate that he had some sort of connection with their state. Now, this was far from the first time that the former governor of Massachusetts has said things that reinforce the idea that he is a absurdly wealthy hedge fund tycoon who was no compassion whatsoever for any social set lower than his NASCAR- and major league franchise-owning friends. He has previously let us know, for instance, that corporations are people, that he likes to fire people who provide services to him, and that his passion for sports seems to depend entirely on how the owners he knows will be affected. Romney's other gaffes show a certain level of cluelessness about the average voter, or at the very least a total inability to relate to them in a way that they can understand. But this quote, as well as the values that underlie it, are far more dangerous, and emblematic of the conservative movement as a whole.