Callow as he may have been as vice president, Dan Quayle was ridiculed most when he was most relevant and correct -- when, in 1992, he said the popular television program "Murphy Brown" had set a bad example for the nation by having its main character choose to have a child outside marriage. Since then the nation's rate of fatherlessness has gone above 40 percent, cities are collapsing under the cost of the resulting social disintegration, and academic studies have vindicated Quayle.

Is the same thing happening to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney?

Romney was embarrassed this week by a recording of his remarks at a fundraising event in May in which he said that 47% of Americans are sure to vote for President Obama because they are dependent on the government for their income and believe themselves "victims" entitled to such support.

Then Romney was supposed to be embarrassed for another excerpt from the recording of the May event in which he says the Palestinians don't want peace with Israel.

Romney quickly tried to have it both ways with his remark about the dependent 47%, calling it "inelegant" but not repudiating it. "Inelegant" or not — just impolitic, really — the remark touched on the big issue of government's increasing control of the economy and the decline of the private sector, with markets being manipulated not just by the government but also by the big Wall Street investment houses that even the Democratic national administration refuses to regulate. This issue should be debated in public, not just exploited in private to raise campaign money from fat cats.

And as much as Romney has used the Israel issue to pander to Jewish voters, the Palestinians' irreconcilability long has been on display even if Western diplomacy has found it inconvenient to acknowledge. Indeed, the Palestinians are waging a civil war over that irreconcilability, their Hamas faction lobbing rockets into Israel from Gaza practically every week while their Fatah faction refrains from war only as long as Western financial aid holds out.

If Romney could make a few more "gaffes" like these in public, the presidential campaign might get serious.

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The other day East Hartford provided a metaphor for Connecticut's own social disintegration. A man who has been driving with a suspended license for five years, failed to appear in court three times, was never prosecuted, and was driving without insurance as well struck and killed an 8-year-old boy who was riding his bicycle in the street outside his home at 11:24 at night. It happened on the first day of school, which the boy had missed.

Who lets someone get away with driving without a license for five years and skipping court three times? Who lets a child out in the middle of the night and lets him miss the first day of school?

Connecticut — that's who. For as the New Britain Herald reported the other day, the infamous truancy problem in that city, involving almost half the city's high school students, also involves 29% of the city's kindergarten kids — and New Britain's kindergarten truancy rate is similar to Hartford's, Bridgeport's, and New Haven's.

The wonder isn't just the obliviousness of the supposed parents here but that of state government, which accepts as normal a level of parental negligence that not long ago would have been shocking.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.