Annette John-Hall: Romney's comments revealed the truth of what he believes

From the beginning, Mitt Romney scared me because of his troubling tendency to lie whenever it suited his political purposes. God forbid that a measly fact would get in the way of his privileged path to the presidency.

But after having a few days to digest the Republican nominee's most recent reprehensible comments, caught on tape at a $50,000-a-plate fund-raiser, I've concluded that it's not Romney's lies that would make him such a terrible president. It's his truths.

Ironically, even his truths are lies. Romney continues to stand by his definition of the 47 percent who pay no federal income tax and receive government benefits as "victims" who "believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, you name it."

Never mind that this is coming from a guy who believes he's entitled to tax havens in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. He's talking about your mother, who's on Social Security; your son, who's getting through college on a Pell Grant; or your nephew's wife, who received a government death benefit because her husband died defending our country in Afghanistan.

They're all riffraff, sucking the government dry.

"I'll never convince them [to] take personal responsibility and care for their lives," Romney says.

I mean, I'm used to politicians blaming the poor. But now they've decided the middle class is too lazy to worry about, too.

Look, we all want to be rich. It's the American way.

But most of us - I would venture to say more than 47 percent of us - weren't born into privilege. We aren't trust-fund babies and didn't inherit businesses. Heck, we'd be lucky to get our parents' house - which, don't forget, we have to pay taxes on.

"When I heard [Romney's] comments, I was thinking about the people we work with," says Carol Goertzel, of Pathways Pennsylvania, a nonprofit that works with low-wage families. "I was thinking about homeless veterans, the people who work full-time but are food-insecure. But I also thought about the people who use the public library, the seasonal construction people. . . . How can you run the country and not be concerned about people who are struggling to pay their college tuition?"

Not all of us can be like Romney, born of privilege, the son of a governor and presidential candidate, who flaunts his $250 million fortune by joking about his wife's Cadillacs and then, a day before his acceptance speech, parties with wealthy donors on a 150-foot yacht called the Cracker Bay, its Caymans flag flying mockingly in the breeze.

Talk about redistribution.

Ordinary folks rely on a break from the government, whose role is to be an agent of equal opportunity.

That's how the Rev. Adan Mairena made it. A Honduran immigrant, Mairena, who pastors West Kensington Ministry in Philly, received government grants to get him through the University of Texas.

Now, Mairena pastors in one of the poorest and hungriest congressional districts in the nation. While plenty of his parishioners receive government assistance, Mairena says plenty others work minimum-income jobs just to live.

They pay no federal income tax - just like Mairena.

"But I don't define myself as a victim, or the 47 percent who doesn't pay taxes," says Mairena, who himself earns only $800 a month. "I never thought I was entitled to government aid. I'm not milking the system."

On the contrary. Mairena, 39, admittedly struggles. "I don't have any dental insurance, and any extra money I get goes to my auto mechanic or to my student loans," he says.

If ever there were evidence of the widening chasm being the rich and the rest of us, it is in the words Romney uttered in his wealthy comfort zone amid bow-tied waiters and clicking champagne flutes in May.

"Who are we [as a country]?" Mairena asks. "What Romney said was divisive and demoralizing and symbolic of how disconnected we are as human beings.

"Everybody who has a conscience would never stand on the side of those comments."