Mitt Romney: Obama’s ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Comments Were Ideology – Not Gaffes
Mitt Romney fired back at the President for his controversial (some would say condescending) remarks about business owners, stressing that Obama’s comments weren’t slips of the silver tongue – they represent ideology.
“No, you heard him right,” pretty much sums up Romney’s response to President Obama’s “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that […] Somebody else made that happen,” remarks, and Mittens is primed to spin Obama’s Roanoke speech into campaign gold, reports The Hill. Romney used Big-O’s remarks on Thursday to further draw the line between himself and the incumbent POTUS on the election’s top issue – our struggling economy.
“It wasn’t a gaffe. It was instead his ideology,” Romney said. “The president does, in fact, believe that people who build enterprises like this really aren’t responsible for it,” Romney said during a Thursday speech in his home state of Massachusetts. “But in fact it’s a collective success of the whole society that somehow builds enterprises like this. My view, we have to celebrate people who started enterprises and employ other people.”
Romney speech, a last-minute campaign event at Middlesex Truck and Coach, a small truck repair shop just outside Boston, was heard by no more than a dozen mechanics, reports Yahoo! News. Regardless, Romney used the venue as an example of his own business principles – principles he hopes to bring to the Oval Office in 2012.
“This is the kind of place that has put people to work over the years, over the decades. … Someone else isn’t responsible for what he did here,” Romney said, referring to the shop’s owner. “This is not the result of government. This is the result of people who take risks, create dreams, who build for themselves and for their families.”
Romney continued to hammer Obama on jobs, pointing to the President’s derelict jobs council, which hasn’t met in six months. Compared to Obama’s hectic fundraising schedule and a recent report showing more Americans actively seeking unemployment, Romney questioned the President’s priorities before flatly saying he doesn’t deserve another term. “You learn something about the president’s priorities,” Romney said. “The job he’s interested in protecting is his own.”
Despite his tough line on the President, which could foreshadow a strong point of rhetoric in the upcoming debates, Romney has skeletons of his own to address. Namely, concerns over his earnings and taxes that have cropped up of late, according to AP.
Still, Obama’s slip, no matter its origins, have at the very least guaranteed that Romney will become an opponent to be reckoned with as the election heats up. Obama needs to realize now more than ever that he won’t be skating into office for a second term. He has to want it. Just like Mitt Romney wants it.
