Bloomberg's Josh Barro has said he believes the leaked video footage is a disaster for the Romney campaign and could cost Mr Romney the election.
"The really disastrous thing is the clip about "victims", and the combination of contempt and pity that Romney shows for anyone who isn't going to vote for him. Romney is the most opaque presidential nominee since Nixon, and people have been reduced to guessing what his true feelings are. This video provides an answer: He feels that you're a loser. It's not an answer that wins elections."
Columnist David Brooks writes in the New York Times that Mr Romney's comments are a "country-club fantasy", that "self-satisfied millionaires" say to each other.
"It suggests that he really doesn't know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs]? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare?
"It suggests that Romney doesn't know much about the culture of America. Yes, the entitlement state has expanded, but America remains one of the hardest-working nations on earth. Americans work longer hours than just about anyone else. Americans believe in work more than almost any other people."
Writing for the New Yorker magazine, Amy Davidson, adds the figure quoted by Mr Romney - that 47% of Americans are dependent on the government - is not accurate.
"The perfect concentricity of the income-tax-paying and the Republican-voting circles does not bear scrutiny. But the pliability of that number also says a great deal about Romney's world view - the transitive property of wealth - and will make it hard for him to say (though he tried) that he was only talking about his lack of concern for votes, not for lives."
Writing for the Washington Post, Ezra Klein expands on that argument, saying Mr Romney's comments allude to a "vision of a society divided between 'makers' and 'takers'" that is central to the Republican party's policy agenda.
"Republicans have become outraged over the predictable effect of tax cuts they passed and are using that outrage as the justification for an agenda that further cuts taxes on the rich and pays for it by cutting social services for the non-rich. That's why Romney's theory here is more than merely impolitic. It's actually core to his economic agenda."
Meanwhile, Sara Murray and Patrick O'Connor, writing for the Wall Street Journal, suggest the remarks seen in the video touch on ideas the presidential nominee has spoken about publicly.
"Mr Romney's comments echoed ideas he has laid out elsewhere as central to his candidacy: that the federal government spends too much money and has unmoored the country from the principles of free enterprise and hard work."
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