By: John Hayward
7/30/2012 09:29 AM
The Romney campaign continues pushing back hard against President Obama’s infamous “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” statement of collectivist economics with a series of “We Did Build This” campaign events, which give small business owners a chance to answer the President’s snide dismissal of their individual initiative.
Monday will see eighteen “We Did Build This” events across 12 states, including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Missouri, and New Mexico. Romney surrogates, including vice-presidential possibilities Tim Pawlenty and Rob Portman, will appear at these events. Newt Gingrich is scheduled to speak at the one in Virginia.
The Romney campaign has been releasing a series of videos called “These Hands,” highlighting the reaction of small business founders to being told by President Obama that “somebody else made that happen.” The latest installment is set in Ohio, and for the benefit of the desperate propagandists still trying to insist that Obama was somehow “taken out of context,” audio from his Roanoke speech is included at the beginning:
Click here to watch:
The Obama campaign, meanwhile, appears to have concluded that their efforts to convince voters the President didn’t say what he clearly said in Roanoke are doomed, because the Boston Globe reports that the most prominent exponent of “You didn’t build that” economics, Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren, is under consideration for a keynote speaking role at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. The way things are going, Warren might be the only Democrat candidate who actually shows up.
Long before it was discovered that she was a fraud who claimed Cherokee ancestry to game affirmative-action programs, Warren was famous for delivering a fiery speech that hammered home the point Obama apologists have spent the last two weeks claiming he did not make in Roanoke: all businesses are built using public resources, so the government is the senior partner in every endeavor, and the rightful owner of all national wealth. The government therefore has an unlimited right to tax the earnings of any American as it sees fit, and the targets of taxation have no moral standing to object.
Here’s the prospective DNC keynote speaker, after a little tinfoil-hat rambling about how deficits are caused entirely by wartime spending, delivering the straight up, no chaser version of Obama’s “You didn’t build that” economic policy. Note that this video was prepared by Warren’s campaign, not a bunch of right-wingers trying to take her “out of context.” She’s proud of this speech – it’s what put her on the hard-Left radar screen. As she proudly declared in an October 2011 interview with the Daily Beast, she considers herself a founder of the violence-prone “Occupy” movement. “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” she said of Occupy Wall Street. “I support what they do.”
Click here to watch:
So it looks as if the Obama team might be abandoning their attempts to erase the Roanoke speech from public memory, and instead pivot to a hard-sell explanation for how he was actually right to say all the stuff he’s been vigorously disavowing. He’s even thinking of inviting the distaff version of Bane from The Dark Knight Rises to close the sale at convention. Liberal forum trolls, who have been brandishing elaborate sentence diagrams to demonstrate that the President was actually trying to make some minor point about the importance of building roads and bridges, should prepare themselves for new marching orders.
Another sign that the Obama campaign is considering a shift in tactics is a glut of editorials from sympathizers pointing out that many of the businesses attending Romney’s “We Did Build That” rallies have enjoyed some form of government assistance in the past – from taking out a Small Business Administration loan, to claiming one of the thousands of targeted tax credits built into our massive federal code. This is supposed to validate Obama’s contention that no one builds anything without the government’s help. Even accepting a contract to provide services to the government allegedly makes these businessmen hypocrites for objecting to what Obama said in Roanoke.
I know the people making this argument are very proud of themselves, but they’re too clever by half. They’re playing right into Romney’s hands. Their argument amounts to a “resistance is futile” declaration of Borg warfare against entrepreneurs.
The government has already grown so huge that its tendrils are sunk into every aspect of life. Entrepreneurs have been taxed at confiscatory rates to fund a plethora of government bureaucracies, some of which are supposed to help business endeavors, while others are busy putting up regulatory obstacles to their success.
Are the defenders of this $3.6 trillion monstrosity seriously going to tell business owners that they have to shut and pay higher taxes without complaint, and meekly accept that the government’s role in building their enterprises is at least as important as their personal risk and sacrifice, because they benefited in some way from the machinery of our omnipresent State – machinery which investors and entrepreneurs built in the first place, by paying the lion’s share of the taxes?
I first heard a version of this argument a couple of years ago, when liberals tried claiming that Sarah Palin was a hypocrite for speaking out against Big Government because the producers of her TV show claimed some tax credits. It was a dopey argument then, and it will go over even more poorly now that Obama and the Democrats are using it to declare war on the entirety of the American business class.
“Let he who is without subsidy cast the first stone?” Is that really how Democrats want to answer the hard-working entrepreneurs turning up at those Romney rallies? Do they really want to conjure a vision of irresistible Big Government that cannot be criticized, even in the hour of its greatest failure, because it has a million tentacles wrapped around all of our throats?
The frantic efforts to claim that President Obama – in a sloppy defiance of the rules of grammar, even though he’s supposed to be a great orator – really meant “roads and bridges” when he said “you didn’t build that” are a waste of time for liberals, because even if that silly point were granted, it doesn’t change the substance of what Obama and Elizabeth Warren clearly believe about the relationship between the all-consuming State, its millions of “dependent” business enterprises, a private sector that isn’t really “private,” and the “lucky” people our ruling class allows to become rich.
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