Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney took a swing through California on the weekend, raising money and insulting most, but not all, of the state.

He liked his fundraiser’s home in Hillsborough, south of San Francisco, on Friday. “It was like San Simeon, you know, the Hearst castle,” he told the crowd at his $25,000-a-head gathering in San Diego the next day. “It was this beautiful home with gardens, manicured gardens, and a pool and a topiary and so forth.”

Romney said he assumed the home’s owner, Ada Regan, had old money and that the 13,820-square-foot home with nine bedrooms and nine and a half baths had been in the family for years. At hearing that Regan’s money was first-generation, earned by her husband, Barrie, who started a company that built the lunar landing module heat shield, Romney couldn’t help but marvel at the powerful “American dream” that led the couple to “build their business.”    

The “we built it” theme of Romney’s campaign, which implies a very limited role for government in people’s success, could be deemed slightly out of place when lauding the success of a man who relied heavily on government contracts to make money. The fundraiser at Regan’s home charged $100,000 per couple.

Romney was headed for a Beverly Hills fundraiser later Saturday night, after San Diego, but didn’t plan to spend much more time in a state he owns a home in, but doesn’t seem all that fond of. While bemoaning the country’s descent into a European-inspired torpor along a path carved out by President Obama, Romney warned of perhaps an equally dangerous sojourn. “It's even possible we could be on a pathway to become California— I don't want that either.” Both those courses, he suggested, “were extremely foreign to us.”

It would be surprising to see Romney spend much of the money he is raising in California in California, where he has little chance of winning. He trails in the latest Field Poll, 58-34%, among likely voters. Romney polled six points better in July.

California is one of only 25 states in the country that don’t have restrictive voter ID laws that favor Republicans, and it has a disproportionate presence of the 47%—identified by Romney as Obama supporters—who don’t pay taxes and “believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”

Obama has two fundraisers planned for California in October. The president outraised Romney nationally in August, $114 million to $111 million. That broke a three-month  Obama losing streak.  

–Ken Broder

To Learn More:

Obama: “Top-Down” Economics Never Works (by Jim Kuhnhenn and Nancy Benac, Associated Press)

Romney Focuses on California Fundraising (by Steve Peoples, Associated Press)

Romney Visits California on Fundraising Swing (by Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times)

Field Poll: Obama Leads Romney Big in California (by Ben Goad, Riverside Press-Enterprise)