By Mark Rhoads
President Obama is whining that Mitt Romney took his infamous "You didn't build that" remarks on July 13 in Roanoke, Virginia "out of context." What really concerns the Obama campaign managers is that the remarks were very much in the broad context of Obamathink and that they struck a nerve with small business owners who have lost patience the Obama's childish glorification of powerful government as the solution to all human needs and his constant dissing of the private sector based on his own ignorance ofhow a for-profit business works.
Obama is trying to claim he was quoted out of context because when he said "you didn't build that," he intended to refer to government-built infrastructure and not to the successful business referred to in the immediate previous sentence. Nice try, but if you read the entire transcript of his remarks in Roanoke, Obama certainly intended to downplay the role of individual initative of entrepreneurs in their own success and play up the role of government. Look again at exactly what he said in full with no editing below.
Obama wants us to belive the word "that" refers back to the antecedent "infrastructure" and not to the phrase "successful business" in the previous sentence. All this confusion is coming from a speaker who we are all told is very articulate. But he cannot seem to wirte of read a speech on a teleprompter written by handlers in a way that makes his meaning crystal clear. Sometimes he does this deliberately when he takes a page form the Bill Clinton obfuscation lesson book. There is some evidence that came to light recently that Obama speech writers lifted his Roanoke remarks almost word for word from a leading left-wing academic from five years ago. Here is the transcript of Obama on July 13:
We’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts. We can make some more cuts in programs that don’t work, and make government work more efficiently…We can make another trillion or trillion-two, and what we then do is ask for the wealthy to pay a little bit more …
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me, because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t -look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. 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. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for president – because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.”
When Obama uses the word "we," one is never sure if he means we the government or we the country as a whole, or we as in society at large. This obtuse intellectual confusion is deliberate on his part because like most people who believe in the supersitions of socialism, he is just not able to make any distintion between the role of government and the role of society because he never read Tom Paine's Common Sense. Personal freedom is not that important to Barack Obama vs. the plans of elites to govern all of us by their enlightened rules because we are too stupid to be trusted with managing our own lives.
More and more people can now see through Obama's claims of innocence and his attempt to explain he only meant to say 'we are all in this together.' But Obama's actions are always about government knows best and you selfish and greedy entrepreneurs better pony up to help me pay for all my spending for your good. Obama shares the unlimited hubris of many socialists who honestly think they know better what is best for you and your family than you do. That is why his Roanoke remarks caught fire and have brought on a more powerful negative reaction than the Obamistas anticipated.
