After two weeks of mean-spirited campaigning in Florida, where the Republican contenders jockeyed for the right-most flank of their party, maybe it should not have been shocking when Mitt Romney announced that he is “not concerned about the very poor.”

Speaking on CNN on Wednesday, and in a lame attempt later to spin his remarks, Romney tried to explain that he was focused on middle Americans because the poor — now a full 15 percent of the population — already have a government safety net. He failed to mention, of course, that his policies, and those of his fellow Republicans in Washington, would drive more people into that net — while at the same time shredding it.

The remark was in keeping with the callous tone of the campaign for the Florida primary, in which Romney handily beat Newt Gingrich. Even in his victory speech Tuesday night, Romney hinted darkly at the tone of the campaign to come. He accused President Barack Obama of ordering “religious organizations to violate their conscience” and vowed to defend religious liberty.

It was a reference to the Obama administration’s requirement that large religious institutions, like hospitals and universities, provide insurance coverage for birth control. He was promising to defend the Roman Catholic Church’s “religious liberty” to deprive its tens of thousands of employees and university students of their own liberty.

Tellingly, that was a cheap remark stolen from Gingrich, who had accused Romney of the same thing for a similar action he took while governor of Massachusetts. He even claimed, absurdly, that Romney took kosher food out of the mouths of Holocaust survivors.

Rather than repudiate such tactics, the lesson Romney took is that any line, no matter how brutal, is fair game if it brings a few more angry voters to your side. Of course, that didn’t work too well for Gingrich, whose willingness to say virtually anything — promising Cuban-Americans that he would start a violent uprising to overthrow the Castro regime, for instance — left him without the support of a single demographic group.

When Romney descended into the mud with him, it soured many voters about the entire Republican field, according to several polls. Independents have been particularly turned off by Romney’s hard-right stridency. Romney has spent so much time on the attack against either Gingrich or Obama that his only positive message in Florida was an off-key rendition of “America the Beautiful.” At a time when the country is increasingly concerned about economic inequality, a candidate worth $250 million says he is not concerned about the poor’s welfare because government programs — many of which his budget would gut — will take care of them.

Among the middle Americans that Romney says he is focused on are 51 million people just above the poverty line, according to the Census Bureau. Many of them fear slipping beneath it, and now they know that will mean disappearing from the concerns of the Republican presidential front-runner.

After winning Tuesday, Romney said his campaign was “about saving the soul of America.” If this is the direction he plans to take in the coming months, he will first need to save the soul of his campaign.

— The New York Times