Obama: What he did he mean by ‘you didn't build that’?

“Does Obama understand America?” said Pat Buchanan in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. At a recent campaign stop in Roanoke, Va., the president uttered four shocking words that may end up defining the 2012 campaign. In a bizarre speech celebrating the virtues of big government and higher taxes, Obama told the crowd, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Obama later claimed the remark was taken out of context, but by that point Mitt Romney had already fallen on the quote “like an NFL lineman on an end-zone fumble during the Super Bowl. And understandably so.” With those four short words, sure to be replayed around the clock between now and November, Obama showed himself to be “utterly divorced from the majority of Americans,” said Clarice Feldman in AmericanThinker.com. We believe in hard work, self-reliance, and individual achievement. “We do not belittle success or those who achieve it.”

This is a new low for the Romney campaign, said Paul Waldman in The American Prospect. It has resorted to simply lying about what the president said. Obama’s full quotation is as follows: “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business...you didn’t build that.” The “that,” in other words, clearly refers to the “unbelievable American system” and the infrastructure every business needs to be successful. If there were any lingering doubt about what he meant, said Adam Gopnik in NewYorker.com, the president cleared it up a few seconds later. “The point,” said Obama, “is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.” Is that really a controversial worldview? To me it sounds like a description, indeed a celebration, of America itself.

If anything, said Shaun Connell in WashingtonTimes.com, the full context of Obama’s quote was even worse than the quote itself. Elsewhere in the speech, his voice dripping with disdain, Obama sneered, “I’m always struck by people who think, ‘Well, it must be because I was just so smart.’” Does Obama really believe that the success of someone like the late Steve Jobs had more to do with roads and bridges than with individual drive and genius? Yes, he does, said Rich Lowry in RealClearPolitics.com. In his policies as in his speeches, Barack Obama has made it clear that he thinks “everyone is helpless without the state, the great protector, builder, and innovator,” and that “behind every successful businessman there is a successful government.”

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Are we talking about the same Barack Obama? said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. The president I know eulogized Steve Jobs as a “visionary,” and staffed his White House with former Wall Street executives. During his time in office, the gap between rich and poor has widened to unprecedented levels. If you want to measure the man by his words, then why not give Obama credit for saying that “the free market is one of the greatest forces for progress in human history” and that “risk takers and innovators should be rewarded”? Because we don’t think he believes it, said Fred Barnes in WeeklyStandard.com. Obama’s personal “hostility to business, the profit motive, and wealth in general is no secret,” whatever his speechwriters churn out for him to say. “You didn’t build that,” by contrast, had the feel of a spontaneous, heartfelt statement. Its impact “is likely to linger.”