Shepard Smith, the Fox news anchor, was talking about Mitt Romney's "friendship" with Newt Gingrich when he said it, but the sentiment could apply categorically.

"Politics is weird. And creepy. And now I know lacks even the loosest attachment to anything like reality."

I laugh every time I watch that video.

There is indeed something weird about Romney's singular focus on the economy when he, as the former head of a private-equity firm that bought and dismantled companies for profit, knows as much about job creation as a butcher knows about animal husbandry.

There's something creepy about a Republican ignoring tried-and-true red-meat issues, like gay marriage or immigration or "religious liberty," with which Republicans are historically good at dividing and suppressing votes.

And there's something truly surreal about Romney's avoidance of the words "George W. Bush." In Florida last week, Romney said that Obama doubled the national debt but didn't mention the part about the stimulus program, the auto bailout and the fact that George W. Bush added $4 trillion to the debt. (In fact, it was Vice President Dick Cheney who said deficits don't matter.) Evidently, Romney is banking on memory loss but just to be sure, he's avoiding Bush's name so as not to remind us where much of that debt actually came from.

Yet there was a moment of clarity last week of the kind that comes from having the scales fall from your eyes to see the truth about America's classless society. The Obama campaign released a video about the time Bain Capital, the Wall Street firm Romney once headed, took ownership of a steel mill in Kansas City. Former workers recalled Bain loading the mill up with debt, filing for bankruptcy, firing employees, closing the mill, shirking pension obligations, and walking away with a smile.

Let me say this. My father is a truck driver. He hauled steel for more than a decade. He was proud, as most white working-class men are, and he saw what happens when rich guys take over a steel mill. They don't care about the important stuff, only money, and even when they have "enough," as my dad would say, they want more until the company is bled to death. The Obama camp was careful to avoid appearing to be anti-private equity (since so many firm directors give to the Democratic Party), just anti-vulture capitalism. But that kind of hairsplitting means little to working-class men like my father. They know the truth when they see it.

Shortly after it released the video, the Obama campaign released "The Biden," as they like to say. That is, Joe Biden, the vice president, who actually comes from working-class stock. Picking Biden as his running mate was brilliant, but we didn't see it as such four years ago. With the economy still humping along, with Romney as the richest man ever to run for the White House, with unlimited sums of money being poured into this election -- all this makes it crystal clear why a cool and rational wonk like Obama needs a pulpit-pounder like Biden.

The campaign "released" Biden on Youngstown, Ohio, an old mill town gone to seed like rest of the Rust Belt that rings around the Great Lakes. In a speech, Biden took on the notion that complaints about inequality and injustice are rooted in envy. "[Romney] doesn't get what's at the core of all this. It's about people's dignity." He went on:

I resent when they talk about families like mine, what I grew up in. I resent the fact that they think we're talking about envy. It's job-envy. It's wealth-envy. That we don't dream. My mother and my father believed that if I wanted to, I could be President of the United States, I could be Vice President. My mother and father believed that if my brother and sister wanted to be a millionaire, they could be a millionaire. My mother and father dreamed as much as any rich guy dreams. They don't get us. They don't get who we are.

As Bob Moser, of the American Prospect, said: "This wasn’t Obama’s brand of 'class warfare,' which never actually sounds like a declaration of war. This was righteous fury. The real thing. From the gut."

Biden's right. Romney has a credibility problem. He told college students that a simple solution to the rising cost of tuition is to borrow from your parents. He made a bet with Rick Perry (who didn't accept) for $10,000. He said speaking fees of over $300,000 "wasn't much money." And he said his wife drives not one but two Cadillacs.

There's another reason why Romney "doesn't get what's at the core of all this." As the American economy has shown signs of tepid but incremental improvement, Romney has pivoted to focus on debt. The hope, I suspect, is that talk about the national debt will sound so big and scary, as it did two summers ago, that Romney will seem to be the most sensible choice.

But most people don't understand debt, and they don't want to. They understand their own (which is bad), but not the federal government's (which might be good, it depends). What they do understand is jobs. Their jobs and the jobs of the people they love. I'd bet that in the minds of most Americans, the national deficit is big and scary, and somebody ought to do something about it, but it's not as pressing or immediately felt as losing one's job, health insurance, home -- or sense of dignity.

Perhaps politics does lack even the loosest attachments to reality. That's certainly a luxury Romney and the others of the 1 percent can afford. For the rest us, though, this is the real thing. Life lived from the gut.