David Corn, who broke the story of Mitt Romney deriding 47% of Americans as freeloaders during his presidential campaign, learned from Romney: A Reckoning that Romney went into depression after those remarks were made public:
He could barely eat during the day and struggled to sleep at night, even after popping a Lunesta. He couldn’t even bring himself to listen to music in his hotel room—“just too sick at heart,” he wrote. When he tried to concentrate on briefing materials, his mind would drift toward the self-inflicted damage he had done to his campaign, and to all the people he had failed. To take his mind off it, he rode the elliptical at a punishing pace.
Night after night, Romney castigated himself in his private diary. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he wrote.
“Awful, shameful, sorrowful,” he wrote.
“How I will have let so many down,” he wrote. “I can’t dwell on it—it is overwhelmingly depressing, even agonizing. I am so, so very sorry.”
Romney later called Stuart Stevens, his chief strategist, and asked: “Should I just drop out of the race?”
