You are hereForums / 2012 Presidential Election / Obama's small business misfire
Obama's small business misfire
"If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. " Obama said that (yesterday I think.) Those words in that order.
This is why I didn't get too hotwired about Romney's presumed insensitivity to his NAACP audience last week This pair of sentences -- apparently off script (Obama must be feeling his oats this week) screams insensitivity to business people and entrepreneurs.
Like Romney's gaffe, this clunky rhetorical flourish re-enforces a bad recurring narrative for Obama: that Obama disdains business and does not understand it. More significantly, it gives Romney some room to do a bit of punching his way out of the Bain/Taxes corner -- using Obama's words (QUOTED ACCURATELY). It certainly gives Romney a better rhetorical weapon than he had before Obama laid this egg.
Unlike Romney's gaffe, Obama's comes at the expense of an audience he needs: small business men and women and the people who depend on small businesses for their livelihood.
Romney isn't going to need, or get, even a modicum of African-American support in any state he expects to win in November. As for Obama, if he fails to get a modicum of support from small business people and the communities that depend on them, he is going to lose a bunch of states between Ohio and Colorado.
Was this quote really taken out of context, as MSNBC and the knee jerk left are saying. No more so than "retroactive retirement" or any one of a couple clunkers from the NAACP speech. But, as our elementary grammar teachers taught us all, a sentence is A COMPLETE THOUGHT THAT CAN STAND ALONE. Obama gave Romney two of them right in a row... in today's communications that is a paragraph. Romney not only jumped on it, he jumped on it in the right way -- both politically and substantially.
I am of two minds about Obama's gaffe. On the one hand, he IS going to make them. And the harder he fights and the more carried away he gets, the more likely he is to do so. It may come as part of the price of seeing him really get enthusiastic about the fight he is in. And I fully support the hard knocks, aggressive approach I am seeing.
On the otherhand, as for "If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen." This is my N-word. This is my "slut." My parents, both children of unlettered immigrants who grew up during the Depression, owned and developed a successful small food service franchise and sent my brother and me to college on it. Did they have very good employees? Yes -- not one of whom depended on the restaurant for the majority of their livelihood; they were college students supported by their parents or adults supplementing their full time income with part time shifts at our place. Indeed, we could not have done it without them.
That doesn't mean my parents "didn't build that.? Is Obama the dumbest man to ever graduate from Harvard? My parents put every penny they had into the business, including "loans" from my brother's and my college funds and treasury bonds our grandparents had given us as birthday gifts along the way.
The restaurant was open 363 days a year, 11 AM - 10 PM (closed Xmas and Thanksgiving [it was a chicken delivery place, forerunner to KFC]). Someone with my last name mopped the floor twice every day for a decade (sometimes that person was in his/her 40s, sometimes that person was in his teens or younger). My parents worked every shift every day. My brother and I worked in it from the time we were in elementary school until we went away to college. Every dinner at home was a board of directors meeting. I do not believe my parents took a single vacation together during the 10 years they had the place. ("If your customers can live without you for a week, they can live without you forever" -- My dad, who knew more about business than every economics advisor on Obama's team combined.)
Obama's dumba$$ phrasing hurt me. My parents didn't "build that"? F you and the Limo you road in on, Sir. I was there. You weren't. My parents were lifelong Democrats; they knew they didn't make a success of it entirely ALONE. They got that. They understood the "village" concept. But they sure as hell BUILT it. "Somebody else made that happen." Umm. No. Not even Michelle Bachamnn is that stupid... Sir. Somebody else HELPED... even helped A LOT. But MY PARENTS made that happen.
This probably won't neutralize Bain and Romney's taxes, but it was a very very useful gift to Romney. I wish he hadn't done it... and certainly wish he hadn't insulted the dignity of my parents' life in the process.
There is a part of me that doesn't want anything to stop the momentum of the Romney/Bain story. Yet there is a small, but palpable, part of me that wants Romney and the GOP to kick Obama's a$$ oon this until he walks it back... about the length of a football field.
While I agree that those two sentences are terrible sounding, and play right into the GOP's hands, it isn't nearly as bad when you read the whole speech. To me he was not downplaying business, but instead, was saying that we all rise and fall together.
Here’s the full context of what he said:
I read the context. But this is a daily war of sound bites, and Obama knows that... or should. This one could be really bad -- it would have been if the Bain/Taxes thing hadn't gone malignant on Romney this week. It still could play out hard.
If we are going to put a noose around Team Romney for small phrases, gestures, and the large truths embedded in small details (someone tell me again, what deep-seeded pathology was revealed with apocalyptic clarity through the dog on the car roof epic?), Obama deserves some blow back on this.
Glad to oblige.
I agree with you on how dumb the sentences were, especially when he knows Fox and talk radio are going to selectively edit every thing he says
Since when does a guy who stashes his money in offshore tax havens think it's a good idea to become a populist, making speeches about the poor taxpayer having to pay for government?
I like the off shore stuff because it puts pressure on Romney, the right wing, and the press to explain the corporate weirdness of "normal business practices" at the highest financial levels. But I wonder how many people on this site over the age of 35, holding any kind of retirement, 401 K, and/or stock portfolio don't have money in overseas investments. If you went to a financial advisor in the last ten years, you probably received advice to "keep a diversified portfolio" -- and international investing has been a central part of diversification for years.
I am low on international right now (under 4% total net worth that I know about but who knows where my other domestic holdings actually are?), But that;s not out of patriotism. I am nearing retirement so we followed standard advice and pulled into more guaranteed safe stuff. We had more intenrational, although we were never big in it, five to ten years ago.
So, Romney and I have overseas holdings. I think others on this site probably do as well. To borrow from G.B. Shaw when purportedly confronting an indignant woman in a tavern who would not sleep with him for 10 shillings but would sleep with him for 10,000 pounds -- we have already determined what I am; we are only haggling over price.
You got good advice since you're missing out on the European mess. Domestic equities are the way to go for the foreseeable future.
I do think Obama may have dodged his own bullet, which is fine with me. Apparently inside the Romney camp there is heated, maybe even frantic, debate on what to do about the taxes.
I hope that if Obama takes to this message again, he is more careful (You didn't build it ALONE is not the same as You didn't Build it). It really is insulting as he spewed it out there. But if he either stays away from this or cleans it up in any future use, I am fine with it.
"Romney is a little rusty in this game. In trying to capitalize on Obama's gaffe, he ended up essentially agreeing with him. (From TPM) "
Don't relax on this yet. GOP breathing some new life and maybe getting new traction on Obama's "You didn't build that" gaffe -- and it IS a gaffe.
washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/obamas-you-didnt-build-that-problem/2012/07/18/gJQAJxyotW_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_politics
Romney is a little rusty in this game. In trying to capitalize on Obama's gaffe, he ended up essentially agreeing with him. (From TPM)
New Obama ad:
It's a pretty good counter ad but there are signs of straining in it.. Obama's BADD sentences are still in play, and the video had to do a lot of defensive contextualizing. Context is a tougher sell than a sound bite but I am glad to see them countering quickly. Still a net loss for Obama but I hope inconsequential comparted to Bain and Tax returns.
Obama has clearly lost his Bain/Tax return edge and momentum.
The "you didn't build that" quote is now in its second week of press circulation. It gave Romney an opportunity to counter some of the press attack on Bain/Tax returns and the Aurora shooting finished the job. Throw in the opening of the Olympics, and you've got a near perfect storm. Bain and Tax returns are on low heat right now -- maybe even in storage. Obama's in trouble if those stories become, like the "Ground Zero Mosque" manufactured controversey, yesterday's news.
To those folks who excoriated Romney for his ostensibly dreadful appearance before the NAACP with all its purportedly damaging sound bites, that story lasted about two days. No one cares now. Obama, the fantabulous communicator, is still up to his elbows in "you didn't build that" and he gave that talk on the 16th or 17th.
In addition to fending off the damage from the "you didn't build that" quote, Team Obama has got to go offensive:
a) Catch (or manufacture... I am fine with diry pool) something compromising that Romney says or does on his overseas venture
b) Get a new angle that is going to get Bain and Tax Returns back on "page one" (That is going to be tough; journalists and bloggers like to get ahead of each other; re-energizing an old story, although it can happen, is generally far less advantageous to them than 'fresh meat.').
I have maintained for months here that Romney, in addition to being "electably white," for all his weaknesses as a candidate has a fantastic campaign messaging team and the money to let that team really do some work. In the primaries, Romney gave Gingrich and Perry not just losses but political smackdowns the likes of which neither man had ever seen. He absolutely destroyed Gingrich, even though Gingrich upstaged and outperformed him in something like 15 of 16 debates.
Obama is not likely to have great July economic numbers to work with. I hope his team is gearing up for some serious, smart, tough messaging for late summer. He's going to need it. In fact, he needs it NOW.
=======================
PS Would like to see the box with links to the four or five most active threads returned to the RFO home page. Just sayin'.