Now Who's Out of Touch? Romney Tries to Turn the Tables on Obama ORLANDO, Fla. - Mitt Romney understands the power of the gaffe, real or perceived. During the Republican primaries, he seemed to offer up a buffet of them: his wife's "Cadillacs," his friends" Nascar teams, how he liked being able to fire people. Now, having absorbed the painful lessons of the hyper-magnified political blunder, Mr. Romney is turning the tables on President Obama with a vengeance. For the fifth day in a row, the Romney campaign assailed Mr. Obama over remarks that he said revealed the president's disconnect from economic reality, a theme that began on Friday after the president declared that the "private sector is doing fine." In a speech here in Orlando, Mr. Romney seized on a statement that the president made about the Affordable Care Act during an interview on Monday. A television reporter asked the president about a small business in Wisconsin, whose owner said that the president's health care legislation had contributed to its closure. Mr. Obama's said that such an assertion was "kind of hard to explain." Because the only folks that have been impacted in terms of the health care bill are insurance companies who are required to make sure that they're providing preventive care, or they're not dropping your coverage when you get sick. And so, this particular company probably wouldn't have been impacted by that. A gaffe? Mr. Romney thought so, and, in a speech at a factory that makes air filters, he called the statement "something else that shows just how out of touch" the president is. Mr. Romney cited a survey of 1,000 small-business owners, performed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which found three quarters of them will reduce hiring because of the Affordable Care Act. Afterword, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney, Eric Fehrnstrom, said that Mr. Obama's remark showed that "this is a president who is detached from the effect his policies are having on the economy." The Romney campaign has a simple message these days, which it is repeating over and over (and over): what they portray as President Obama's "mistakes" are not mistakes at all. Instead, they are windows into the mind of a man deeply detached from the problems of ordinary Americans and small businesses. It is striking line of attack, not least because it seeks to reverse, sometimes almost word for word, Mr. Obama's central critique of Mr. Romney: that he is an out of touch businessman, disconnected from the economic reality of ordinary Americans. That message is at the core of the television commercials that the Obama campaign has run about Mr. Romney's tenure at Bain Capital, which feature laid off workers. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Romney appeared on Fox & Friends, where he made sure to point out that the president is "out of touch." "The president is really out of touch with what is happening across America," Mr. Romney said. He reiterated it a few moments later with some unsolicited advice for Mr. Obama. "The president needs to go out and talk to people, not just do fund-raisers, go out and talk to people in the country and find out what is happening," Mr. Romney said. The criticism appears to be seeping in. At the event here, Frank Attkisson, a small business consultant and local commissioner, nodded in agreement with Mr. Romney during the speech and, afterword, said the president's statement about the private sector and the health care law "reveals his true colors."