You hit it on the head. The discussion needs to be just what you said. Mitt was addressing a question about how he would get votes in the election. He (correctly) stated that 47% are on government support and that the message of cutting government will not resonate with that crowd. He (incorrectly) mangled the rest of his answer for two reasons. One is that it is not a 100% correlation. Many on government support WANT to return to be productive. He could easily turn that around and give hope to those people in his response during the debate. Secondly, by uttering “I don’t care about...”, he opened himself up to this attack. He was referring to caring about getting their votes, not caring about their lives. That’s where it has been mangled, and his phrasing opened up that line of attack. He will hopefully use this opportunity to mitigate any damage from that part of the attack.
Yes! This is what I’m trying to say. Exactly so.