A new Gallup poll released Monday offered both good news and bad for Mitt Romney. While his favorability jumped 11 points since February to reach a personal best of 50 percent, Romney still badly lags other recent nominees at the same stage in their campaigns.

Despite the improvement, Mitt Romney is still plagued by an "empathy gap," that vast chasm of incomprehension that separates the would-be Republican president from the daily lives of the people he wants to serve. Perhaps making matters worse is the perception that Romney's well-reported acts of kindness and generosity extend only as far as his small circle of family, close friends, church members and business colleagues. And it is precisely that one degree of separation, that myopic empathy that leads even his supporters to lament that Mitt Romney is from "a different world" than the rest of us.
By most accounts, Mitt Romney has been a devoted father, loyal husband, committed church elder and dependable business partner. But among the tales of consideration and charity, only one stands out as showing Mitt's kindness to strangers. In July 2003, the New York Times recalled, "Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and two of his sons helped rescue a New Jersey family from a sinking boat" near his family's home on Lake Winnipesaukee in central New Hampshire:

Mr. Fehrnstrom, who spoke to Governor Romney on Sunday about the incident, said the governor's two sons hopped on a motorized water scooter, while the governor got on another. They went to the sinking boat, and Governor Romney brought people to shore while his sons stood by at the scene. The Romneys also saved the family's dog, he said.

(Given Romney's reputation as an enthusiast of rooftop canine waterboarding, the right-wing stenographer Hot Air called the incident "a game changer.")
But outside of that episode, the Romney camp's brief catalog of Mitt's kindness and displays of humanity does not seem to include the general public.
In March, the Washington Post announced that "in story of missing teen, Romney shows his human side." Showed his human side, that is, to his colleagues at Bain Capital:

As Romney told it, one of his partners, Bob Gay, came to him one day and said that his daughter had gone to a party in New York City, "without permission," and had not returned home to Connecticut.
Immediately, Romney shut down Bain's Boston headquarters and flew with his staff to New York to help find the teenager.

In his profile of Romney as one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World, his mentor Bill Bain recounted:

As founder and CEO, I liked being first in the office when that was practical. On Mitt's first day, he arrived first. I came in earlier the next day, and there he was again. I decided to shake Mitt up a little and have some fun. I walked out of my office, stood in front of his desk and said, "Mitt, you are beginning to piss me off." He said, "What? What?" I asked him, "Why so early?" He said that after helping Ann with the children, he would visit the sick from his church and then come to work. We all looked at one another and applauded him.

To be sure, Mitt Romney's service and largesse to the Church of Latter Day Saints is the stuff of legend. Whether or not the young missionary really was forced to poop in a bucket during his days at a tony church mansion in Paris, Romney has not merely given millions of dollars in required tithes to his church, contributed millions more to affiliated educational institutions and charities as well. (Of course, those figures pale in comparison to the $45 million of his own money Mitt spent trying to buy the White House in 2008.) Nevertheless, that is no basis for the Romney to campaign to claim that his real tax rate isn't 14 percent, but instead almost half:

"Well, actually, I released two years of taxes and I think the average is almost 15 percent. And then also, on top of that, I gave another more 15 percent to charity. When you add it together with all of the taxes and the charity, particularly in the last year, I think it reaches almost 40 percent that I gave back to the community. One of the reasons why we have a lower tax rate on capital gains is because capital gains are also being taxed at the corporate level. So as businesses earn profits, that's taxed at 35 percent, then as they distribute those profits as dividends, that's taxed at 15 percent more. So, all total, the tax rate is really closer to 45 or 50 percent."

(No doubt, Mitt would bet you $10,000 that his friends -- the ones who own NFL and NASCAR teams -- view their tax returns the same way. As for the people in polyester and plastic rain ponchos, they might feel differently.)
Romney, as the New York Times and Washington Post documented, didn't just supply his Mormon church with cash, but with leadership as a bishop of his congregation and then Boston area "stake president." Despite his struggles to win over some of his church's more progressive women and his highly-publicized effort to direct one requiring a medically required abortion not to do so ("Mitt has many, many winning qualities," she is quoted as saying, "but at the time he was blind to me as a human being."), Romney was generally viewed as compassionate and caring by his congregants:

He was highly motivated and "hands-on," said Philip Barlow, a professor at Utah State University, who as a graduate student was one of Mr. Romney's top aides as bishop. If somebody's roof leaked, Mr. Romney would show up with a ladder to fix it. Mr. Barlow remembers Mr. Romney picking butternut squash and yanking weeds on the church's communal farm.

The famously cheap Romney was also hands-on at home, where he insisted he and his sons help with the chores. But while there may have been "no nanny, no maid" at Mitt's Massachusetts houses, his boyhood home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan was another matter. And as The Atlantic recounted:

And the maids weren't unseen servants, The Boston Globe reported June 24, 2007 that "Mitt's primary exposure to black people had been his family's beloved housekeeper, Birdie Nailing, and an acquaintance named Sid Barthwell who was the lone black in his Cranbrook senior class." And when Romney went on his mission to Paris in the 1960s, he had maids there, too. "In their mission-home living quarters, Romney and McKinnon considered their new responsibilities. The mission home was a four-story mansion, tended to by cooks and housekeepers who needed to be paid," The Washington Post reported December 10, 2007.

No doubt, Romney's outsized wealth explains GOP ally Scott Brown's observation that Mitt is "in a category...that we don't really understand." Combined with his privileged past, that might also account for Romney's telling declaration that:

"I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it."

Unfortunately, his policies suggest otherwise. And sadly for those outside the zone of compassion that is Mitt Romney's immediate orbit, so, too, does his rhetoric.
It's no surprise Mitt Romney believes income inequality should only be discussed in "quiet rooms." But it certainly doesn't help matters when his wife Ann joked "Mitt doesn't even know the answer to that" when asked how many dressage horses she owns even as he slanders Democrats as "the party of monarchists." His campaign has repeatedly tried - and failed - to present him as a "man of the people," in no small part because Mitt boasts that "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me." And while Mitt Romney certainly never had to worry about "getting a pink slip," he still gets a chuckle thinking about those who did when his father moved AMC jobs from Michigan to Wisconsin.
Mitt's message to those beyond that one degree of separation only gets worse from there. Romney, who explained that over the last decade "my income comes overwhelmingly from some investments made in the past," joked with jobless voters that "I'm also unemployed." The $250 million man similarly declared himself "part of the 80 to 90 percent of us" who are middle class, when just the "not very much" $374,000 he earned in speaking fees last year puts him in the top one percent of income earners. Whether or not he really enjoys firing people, who else would lecture a child about his plans to divvy up his estate among his 16 grandchildren? And there's no doubt that the man who spent $12 million to buy his third home (none of which are located on "the real streets of America") didn't win any friends when he offered this prescription for the housing market crisis:

"Don't try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up."

Unless, of course, the homeowner is related to him.
Last week, an emotional Romney choking up as he praised the American spirit shown by generous neighbors who helped his struggling niece and her deaf daughter. With her attorney husband away on duty in Iraq, Romney's niece "now had to live on a much lower income" because "National Guard salaries aren't as high as they were in his law firm":

"Now she's in this home and the outside of her is a whole dirt yard. No grass or anything yet, just stones and dirt. And under the neighborhood association where they have this home, you got a year from the time you buy your home till the landscaping's supposed to be in.
Well, she's a little bit concerned 'cause that time period is coming up. She doesn't have the money to do the landscaping, to pay for it...One morning, she comes outside and there are her neighbors all picking up the rocks out of her yard, raking the dirt. They put in a sprinkler system. They laid down sod. They even build a swing set for her daughter. This is the America that I love."

And with that, Comedy Central reported, "Mitt Romney emits tear-like substance from his eyes."
There's nothing wrong with being born with a silver spoon in your mouth. It's what you do with that good fortune that matters. And that is at the heart of Mitt Romney's problem with the American people. After all, his budget-busting economic plan would shred the social safety net he pretends to protect while delivering a massive tax cut windfall for the wealthy. With those policies, the same man who denounces President Obama as "out of touch" and "Marie Antoinette" shows his aloof detachment and stunning incomprehension of the struggles Americans face every day. And yet, they don't begrudge him either his privileged past or current financial success. Instead, they just want him to acknowledge the debt he owes to the society that made it possible, one that includes all Americans. Even the ones he does not know. Which is why voters will continue to be suspicious when Mitt Romney declares:

"People have burdens in this country, and when you get a chance to know people on a very personal basis, whether you're serving as a pastor or perhaps as a counselor or in other kinds of roles, you understand that every kind of person you see is facing some challenges. And one of the reasons I'm running for president of the United States is I want to help people, I want to lighten that burden."

Which people and which burdens is another question.