Well, well. This from the Boston Globe.

Mitt Romney had harsh words for welfare recipients in a hidden-camera videotape from a May fundraiser that was leaked this week.

But his own father was once among public aid recipients.

As the Globe has previously reported, George Romney’s family fled from Mexico in 1912 to escape a revolution there, and benefited from a $100,000 fund established by Congress to help refugees who had lost their homes and most of their belongings.

That fund may have been what Lenore Romney, George Romney’s wife and Mitt Romney’s mother, was referring to in a video that was posted online earlier this month but has received renewed attention in the wake of Mitt Romney’s comments.

“[George Romney] was on welfare relief for the first years of his life. But this great country gave him opportunities,” Lenore Romney said in the video, which apparently dates back to George Romney’s 1962 run for governor of Michigan.

Lovely New Yorker piece by John Cassidy about Mittster. Excerpt:

Say what you like about Mitt Romney—I’ve already said a lot—but he rarely fails to come through when his opponents need him. If Jimmy Carter’s grandson, the would-be opposition researcher who evidently helped to dig up the offending video, had written the script himself he could hardly have come up with something more damaging than the videos secretly taped at a Boca Raton fundraiser this spring and published by Mother Jones on Monday. What sort of candidate, speaking in a quasi-public setting—there are potential leakers lurking in all fundraisers—would say almost half of the voters in the election “are dependent on the government,” that they “believe that they are victims,” and then go on to say, “my job is not to worry about these people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”?

The answer proffered by my colleague Amy Davidson and numerous other commentators: a heartless plutocrat who holds the impoverished and the working poor in contempt. Sounding for all the world like Josiah Bounderby, the sneering mill owner in Dickens’s “Hard Times,” Romney went on to say, “I have inherited nothing. Everything that Ann and I have, we earned the old-fashioned way.” Bounderby, it turned out, had exaggerated his humble origins, and so, of course, has Romney—not that anybody could possibly believe him. When your father was the C.E.O. of a big auto company and the governor of Michigan, and you were educated at the three-hundred-acre campus of the Cranbrook School, posing as Horatio Alger is plain silly.

But, then, Romney is a profoundly silly candidate.

He’s always interesting. But the book isn’t out yet. Amazon is quoting October 4 as the publication date.