Charles Krauthammer has the least persuasive objection to Romney’t “not concerned about the very poor” remarks:

The real problem here is that it shows he doesn’t have a fluency with conservative ideas. Conservatives are not the ones who engage in the war of the classes or in a division of America into classes.

It might be an inconvenient moment to point out that quite a few conservatives have been more or less favorably discussing Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, which takes as its basic assumption that there are real and significant divisions between classes in America. Murray describes these divisions in cultural terms, but he acknowledges them, and he sees the gap between classes as a problem that needs to be addressed. Krauthammer is wrong in another way. Romney can barely bring himself to acknowledge the existence of different classes. According to him, 90-95% of Americans make up the “vast middle class,” which is a huge overestimation of the size of the middle class. Romney has included almost everyone in a poorly-defined, amorphous “middle class,” and he has made a point of railing against the “division” of America just as Krauthammer wants him to do.

Conservatives should want to reverse declining social mobility, and they shouldn’t endorse a vision of society where class is hereditary, but it’s hardly possible to propose remedies to economic and social stratification if it is deemed un-conservative to refer to the existence of class.