WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitt Romney says Barack Obama doesn't think entrepreneurs built their businesses. The problem is that's not what the president said.
Exaggeration, taking words out of context, none of this is new for political campaigns. But Mitt Romney's campaign seems to have reached a new low with its attacks on President Obama's remarks in a Virginia campaign speech about businesses needing government help to succeed, if the AP felt compelled to
call them out on it.
The brouhaha over Obama's comments on small-business success shows no sign of fading and the president pushed back hard with new ads scheduled to run in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada in which the president directly counters Romney's claims.
Romney and his allies continue to hammer Obama for comments taken wildly out of context, pummeling the president as a government-obsessed figure who thinks Washington gets the credit for the success of small businesses.
They also mention the contrast with Romney's Olympic speech in 2002 praising the support network of the athletes who didn't get to the games by themselves. As comedian Lewis Black
summed it up on yesterday's The Daily Show, 'you build a business with your own two hands, but it takes a village to run a 4 minute mile'.
That was not Obama's point when he spoke in Virginia on July 13 about the government's supportive role in providing a stable environment in which businesses can thrive. Nor was it Romney's point when he used similar phrasing in 2002 about Olympic athletes who benefited from supportive parents and coaches.
But in a campaign that makes facts secondary to a good attack, the context doesn't seem to matter.
The rest of the article goes on to show the entire quote in context, talks about President Obama's pushback in a campaign speech in Oregon, and his two new web ads that aim to set the record straight, quoting the President's words from the ad and describing it as a 'tidier version' of the speech.
"Those ads taking my words about small business out of context? They're flat out wrong," Obama says, looking into the camera and addressing voters in the 30-second ad. "Of course Americans build their own businesses."
That is a tidier version of what Obama offered in Virginia.
Politico seems to
think that the Obama campaign must think that Romney's attack is leaving a mark as they are pushing back so hard on it.
President Obama, who's gotten a lot of strife from the Romney campaign and national Republicans in the last week for his "you didn't build that" comment, is launching a new swing-state TV ad to push back on the criticism.
For the Obama campaign to address the comment directly, they must think it's starting to leave a mark. And this is the kind of pushback the campaign had planned on delivering late last week, when the Colorado shooting put politics temporarily on hold.
It's also the second ad from the campaign this week in which Obama speaks directly to the camera -- which takes advantage of Obama's high personal likeability, an asset he has that Romney so far does not.
Here is the new ad 'Always', pushing back on 'you didn't build that'.