Scott Prouty revealed himself on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” Wednesday night as the bartender who shot a damaging video of Mitt Romney dismissing President Obama’s supporters during a closed-press fundraiser last year.

“I was behind this whole thing,” Prouty said.

The bartender said he brought a camera to the Boca Raton, Fla. fundraiser in case Romney came back to take pictures with the staff, as former president Bill Clinton had done at another event Prouty worked. ”I didn’t go there with a grudge against Romney,” he said. “I really had no idea he would say what he said.”

Prouty grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in Boston, he said. He said he felt that people who couldn’t afford to attend a high-priced fundraiser should get a chance “to find out what the candidate actually thinks.”

He said he struggled for two weeks with whether or not to release the video and risk his own career. He did not have health insurance. After wrestling with the decision, he decided it would be cowardly not to release the video: “I went down the path and never looked back.”

He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to … run. If he could have found someone else to take his place … he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.

A week after losing the election to President Obama, Mitt Romney blamed his overwhelming electoral loss on what he said were big “gifts” that the president had bestowed on loyal Democratic constituencies, including young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics.

In a conference call on Wednesday afternoon with his national finance committee, Mr. Romney said that the president had followed the “old playbook” of wooing specific interest groups — “especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people,” Mr. Romney explained — with targeted gifts and initiatives.

“In each case they were very generous in what they gave to those groups,” Mr. Romney said.

“With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest, was a big gift,” he said. “Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.”

The president’s health care plan, he added, was also a useful tool in mobilizing African-American and Hispanic voters. Though Mr. Romney won the white vote with 59 percent, according to exit polls, minorities coalesced around the president in overwhelming numbers — 93 percent of blacks and 71 percent of Hispanics voted to re-elect Mr. Obama.

“You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity, I mean, this is huge,” he said. “Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group.”

There has stormclouds come over the United States. There is thunderstorms over Europe. There are hailstorms, and I mean major hailstorms, in the Middle East. There are storms brewing through China, through Asia, through everywhere, and there’s only one man that on the other night when President Barack Obama, God bless him, said to Mitt Romney, ‘The cold war is over.’ I have never heard such a thing in my life. The man needs to understand Putin and Russia, so I want you to know that there is one man who will stand tall in this country and fight the storm and bring the United States back to what it should be … Gov. Mitt Romney!

I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.

You wanna rush down (to) the debate stage and take a swing at him.