The Obama reelection campaign better send Mitt Romney a thank-you note today, for uttering such a clip-worthy attack ad statement — "Corporations are people too, my friend" — at the Iowa State fair today, in response to some libtard hecklers. Come on, Mittens! You, specifically, look quite bad saying such things!

Here's how Mitt Romney interacted with the (probably planted) shouty people today:

ROMNEY: We have to make sure that the promises we make - and Social Security, Medicaid, ann Medicare - are promises we can keep. And there are various ways of doing that. One is, we could raise taxes on people.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Corporations!

ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend. We can raise taxes on -

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, they're not!

ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn also goes to people.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

ROMNEY: Where do you think it goes?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: It goes into their pockets!

ROMNEY: Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People's pockets! Human beings, my friend. So number one, you can raise taxes. That's not the approach that I would take.

He is correct that corporations are legally organized as "people," which, thanks for several decades of annoying court decisions, has given them the same legal protections as real people (treating their political expenditures as "free speech," for example), while freeing them from such nagging human restraints as "having a conscience." But at the moment, these "people" are (were?) sitting on trillions in cash made in foreign markets and squeezing out productivity gains from the workers they haven't already laid off to maximize profits for relatively small groups of shareholders. This upsets many of the human "people," even if corporations can't do much about it in an economy with such little demand. Mitt Romney doesn't need to be giving corporations big bear hugs at the Iowa State Fair right now while lecturing the simple folk about America's need to "reform" Medicare and Social Security.

Maybe a gaffe like this won't hurt Mitt Romney as much in a Republican primary as much as it would in a general election. But at least one other Republican candidate has already mocked Romney's line. Romney's spokesperson tweeted, stupidly, "Do folks think corporations are buildings? They're people who incorporate to conduct business. They create jobs and hire more people," to which Jon Huntsman's spokesperson responded, "Was American Pad & Paper Company a person/friend?" American Pad & Paper Company was one of the many corporations from which Mitt Romney made a ton of money destroying during his private equity career at Bain Capital. These are the sort of arguments Mittens would like to avoid.