Romney: 'I know what it's like' to worry about getting fired

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Sunday made his latest attempt prove he feels the pain of average Americans.

At an event in Rochester, New Hampshire, the multimillionaire told voters that he also had worried about getting a pink slip.

"I know what it’s like to worry whether you’re going to get fired," Romney said, according to a New York Times report. "There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip."

The Wall Street Journal determined that Bain Capital, a venture capital company founded by Romney, forced about 22 percent of the companies it acquired to file for bankruptcy or shut down completely, "sometimes with substantial job losses."

While the candidate offered no evidence that he had ever feared losing his job, campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul elaborated in a statement.

"Unlike President Obama, Mitt Romney has spent 25 years in the real world economy," Saul asserted. "As a young person just out of college, he worked his way up the career ladder knowing that his continued employment was by no means guaranteed. That’s the way it is in the private sector."

In June, Romney, who has a net worth of around $250 million, told a in Florida that he was “also unemployed.”

Returning to Florida in September, the candidate claimed that he was .

Romney told a group of workers at a steel plant in November that federal employees made more than he did.

After Romney claimed at a debate on Sunday that for him, "politics is not a career," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had finally had enough.

“Look, can we drop a little bit of the pious boloney?” Gingrich quipped. “The fact is, you ran in 94 and lost. ... You’ve been running consistently for years and years and years and years. So, this idea that suddenly citizenship showed up in your mind, just level with the American people. You’ve been running for at least since the 1990s."

“I happen to see my dad run for governor when he was 54 years old,” Romney replied. “He said, ‘Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win election to pay a mortgage.’”

Watch this video from CBS News, broadcast Jan. 8, 2011.