Though many people wish he would just go away, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is back on the national scene, telling CNN in an interview airing today that his 47 percent comment that doomed his campaign “didn’t come out right,” and that he is “disappointed” in President Obama’s choice of Susan Rice as his national security adviser.
Romney’s comments, recorded at a fundraising event and released by Mother Jones magazine, were that 47 percent of Americans are “dependent on the government” and “believe that they are victims.”
“There were a number of times that I said things like that – that didn’t come out right,” Romney told CNN’s Gloria Borger. “Now and then, things don’t come out exactly the way you want them to come out. They don’t sound the way you thought they sounded.”
Romney who is hosting a bipartisan conference in Utah, called “Experts and Enthusiasts,” which includes potential 2016 presidential contenders, business leaders and political experts, including Democrats such as Obama adviser David Axelrod.
To his credit, Romney didn’t sound overly bitter about the fallout from his 47 percent comment.
“With a good opposition, they grab it, they blow it up, maybe take it a bit out of context,” he said. “But that’s just the nature of politics today. You have to get over it and live with it.”
As for Rice, Romney said he found her elevation to national security adviser a “disappointing appointment.”
“I think what she did was to very seriously mislead the American people about what happened in Benghazi. My greatest concern about the Benghazi events was the fact there was not a rescue effort attempted and that is very troubling to me,” Romney said.
In the days after the attack on the U.S. diplomatic offices in Benghazi, Libya, Rice appeared on five Sunday talk shows and, using talking points provided by the White House and State Department, blamed the incident on protests in the region instead of calling it a terrorist attack.
Romney and his wife Ann gave some insight into their lives since the campaign. He said he now does grocery shopping and pumps his own gas.
“We lived our entire life, if you will, in privacy like most people do. And then there was this extraordinary period of a year or so when we were highly visible and the Secret Service was around you and people are getting everything you want – you’re in your hotel room, you can’t even leave your hotel room. They put exercise equipment in my hotel room so I could exercise because I couldn’t go down to the regular exercise room without being photographed,” Romney told Borger. “So you are in that kind of very public bubble for a while and then when it disappears – and it disappears overnight – when you lose the election. It is just gone. Snap, it is gone. It is back to where you were before. And that feels right.”
