As far as what you said to me, yes, they’d already given him money, but most of them probably had a couple of extra bucks to spare, which Romney could also use.
To answer the rest of your questions:
“How many politicians think that saying things in a private dinner will stay private and not get leaked, in an age of smartphones with cameras and mics everywhere?”
All of them. No one pays to attend a dinner with a candidate where he gives the same canned speech you could hear for free anywhere. They were there because he was offering them private access. Besides, the odds that anyone was paying to get into the dinner so they could secretly record and embarrass Romney were roughly zero. It’s a risk, but it’s one every politician takes, almost daily.
“Why is the audio sound so clear and crisp, when the clip was video’d on a phone from a considerably far distance? “
A fair question but not one that really suggests a more likely answer. It was definitely shot from a strange location that suggests whoever put it there wanted it to look like it was being done by a hidden camera. Isn’t the most likely explanation that the camera was actually hidden?
“If the person who videoed the clip was against Romney, why wait until now to release something that came out in May?”
Because the sort of people who would be offended by this and whose votes are up for grabs (roughly poorer working whites and hispanics) are traditionally assumed to not be paying much attention to the election until after Labor Day. Releasing this video roughly a week after the conventions end (with a couple of news cycles also taken up by 9/11 and the attacks in Libya) is basically exactly when you’d expect it to be released.
“What part of the clip shows Romney in a bad light?”
I really don’t get what’s so hard about this. It’s a video of Romney coming out and saying that lots of people who he needs to vote for him are in fact too entitled to do so. That’s just not something that’s going to get them to run out and vote for him.