‘If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen”: President Obama’s words last week are likely to haunt his campaign and possibly cost him the election.
The line insulted millions of entrepreneurs, small-business owners, garage inventors and plain old dreamers. (The Post reported this week on a few of the New Yorkers who took exception.)
Of course, Obama supporters have relentlessly pointed out that the instantly viral head-scratcher was preceded by some no-man-is-an-island boilerplate. “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. . . somebody along the line gave you some help,” the president said.
And: “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.”
But “you didn’t build that” still stands as an all-too-telling summation of Obama’s worldview.
Forget mentors, friends, family — the kind of built-in support network we all have, people working together, sharing talents and responsibilities, and helping each other. What used to be known as “society.”
In the president’s brave new world, that’s now called “government.” And you’re nothing without it.
No wonder Mitt Romney leapt on the statement Tuesday: “The idea that Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple, that Henry Ford didn’t build Ford Motor . . . is not just foolishness, it is insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America, and it’s wrong,” he said.
And: “I find it extraordinary that a philosophy of that nature would be spoken by a president of the United States.”
Why the surprise? This is what Obama and the dominant wing of the Democratic Party believe — that it’s really government that creates wealth and takes care of its children.
The same week he informed us that “you didn’t build that,” the president quietly gutted Bill Clinton’s successful 1996 welfare reform by effectively — and unilaterally — removing the law’s work requirements. This, when half the population already receives some form of government benefits, and a record number of Americans are now on food stamps.
It also explains Obama’s failed effort to jumpstart a US solar-power industry with billions upon billions of subsidies to the likes of now-defunct Solyndra.
That’s why the party was so wowed by Elizabeth Warren, who’s trying to unseat Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Democrats loved lines of hers like this:
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for . . . but part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
In other words, it takes a village — on steroids.
That’s simply not true. The American people existed long before the American government did. They created our unique, republican form of federal democracy, handing the central government a few enumerated powers in order to prevent it from interfering in the business of the states or the lives of the citizens.
What’s good in the government comes from the people; what’s good in the people does not come from government.
But it’s abundantly clear that Obama believes there’s no such thing as a self-made man, no such creature as the lone genius (Jobs, or Thomas Edison) who transforms everyone’s life through the force of his vision.
The telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the light bulb, the MacBook, the iPhone and the iPad all disprove his thesis. Great inventions are most often conceived by private individuals, sitting alone in a room, not government bureaucrats.
And that’s why Obama’s “gaffe” could well become a focal point of the election — a sharp line of demarcation between a party that stands for collectivism and one that not only celebrates the individual but also gets out of his way.
The president’s been promising “fundamental transformation” of the country since 2008. Altering the relationship between citizen and state is certainly part of that.
Which is why Romney gets to the heart of the matter when he asks: “Do we believe in an America that is great because of government or do we believe in an America that is great because of free people allowed to pursue their dreams?”
And that’s the fall election in a nutshell.