The Rachel Maddow Show   |  September 24, 2012

Romney suffers setback among flight safety demographic

Rachel Maddow puzzles through whether Mitt Romney is either joking about his wife's terrifying plane fire emergency or actually not understanding why the windows on a plane don't open.

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This content comes from Closed Captioning that was broadcast along with this program.

>>> during a presidential campaign , it is hard to know when it happens. when words captured on video in front of an audience are going to stick. when footage is going to be a turning point in the election. it's going to be a defining thing that everybody remembers about that candidate. it's not always easy to tell when it happens, but something always sticks. today we got this bit of mitt romney talking about the emergency landing last week of a plane that at the time was carrying his wife, ann romney .

>> i appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. i don't think she knows how worried some of us were. when you have a fire in an aircraft, there's no place to go exactly. and you can't find any oxygen from outside the care craft because the windows don't open. it's a real problem.

>> it's a real problem that the windows don't roll down on airplanes? is it also a problem that guns don't shoot backwards through the barrel this way? why don't the windows roll down? i don't think he was joking because he couldn't possibly be joking about his wife being in a plane crash . so did he -- has he never seen gold finger?

>> right? maybe mr. romney was joking when he said it was a real problem he couldn't get the windows to roll down in airplanes when he was joking about scary involving his wife. you wouldn't think a guy would joke about. maybe he meant only planes flying at low altitudes? we don't know. regardless of what he meant and how strange that moment was on the campaign trail this weekend, frankly the roll down the windows moment is unlikely to rock the presidential campaign . it's unlikely to stick the way mr. romney's remarks did on the issue of the 47% of the country he considers to be victims and dependent on the government. tonight there's new news on that it tape. exclusively here. specifically, new tape. it's coming up at the end of the show . stay with us. leave the windows where they are in