"Whole-of-Government" Commitment: And This is a Good Thing?

    Today, an article appeared on the White House blog with the grandiose title "A Whole-of-Government Commitment to Inclusive Entrepreneurial Growth." The post begins:

Entrepreneurs and small businesses are the engines of American innovation and our economic success, and President Obama is committed to helping them grow and prosper. Our nation’s small businesses employ over 60 million Americans, or half of the private sector workforce. 

    The article goes on to list a multitude of government resources available to entrepreneurs and small business owners, but the tone of the piece is set early with this [emphasis mine]:

Last year, President Obama spoke with his Cabinet about how every Federal agency has a role to play in promoting the success of American entrepreneurs[.]

    Every Federal agency?  All 479 of them?  Including the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry?  The President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports?  Even the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation?  The disturbing answer is probably, yes, although a cynic might substitute "thwarting" for "promoting" in the sentence above.

    I realize the Small Business Administration has been around for decades (since 1953,) but the level of government involvement in the creation, direction, and nurturing of small businesses has been taken to a whole new level by the Obama administration.  One of the websites featured in the White House blog article is business.usa.gov.  Based on its interface, it might as well be named Starting a Small Business for Dummies:

    If that's not enough, the About Us page of the website spells out the administration's vision of small business in America, 2013:

To strengthen America's competitiveness in the global economy, businesses will need to be equipped with the best tools and information available to support innovation and job growth in the 21st century. BusinessUSA is your front door to all the government has to offer...

    "All the government has to offer."  I fully expect the Obama administration to soon throw all pretense to the wind and name its next website "youdidntbuildthat.gov".  Hey, maybe I should register that domain name now!  I wonder where I could find out how to do that?

Loud and Clear: "Make Our Lives Better"

    A secret video taken by a waiter at a fund raising/donor event for Barack Obama contains the following shocking quote from the president:

"That’s the message I heard loud and clear in the election: Work as hard as you can to make our lives better."

Just kidding!  Kidding about the secret video, not about the quote.  The quote is real and came from the President's weekly address.  It was tweeted out on Barack Obama's Twitter account today:

    Mitt Romney brought justifiable grief on himself and his campaign with his now infamous and oversimplified 47% comments.  Romney had something worth saying about the culture of dependency in America, but managed to express it rather inartfully, as they say.  And yet here is the President of the United States basically paraphrasing Romney's remarks as if this were what the election was all about.

    Granted, the president's address contained references to "your hard work and sense of decency" and "the good people of this country work as hard as you can to meet your responsibilities."  But when it came down to choosing a quote to represent the address, what did the administration choose?  "[T]he message I heard loud and clear in the election" was "make our lives better."  Is it any wonder that the president's detractors heard "You didn't build that" the way we did?

"Rebuild America from the Ground Up"

    The Obama campaign has just rendered the "You didn't build that" controversy moot.  Their latest ad featuring Bill Clinton announces that Barack Obama has "a plan to rebuild America from the ground up."



While most agree that this country is going through difficult times, does it really need to be rebuilt "from the ground up?"  The whole thing recalls Obama's infamous declaration that his election would mean "fundamentally transforming the United States of America."  The question is whether or not Clinton is seriously behind Obama, or if this is more sabotage.  Is Bill Clinton deliberately making a claim that is this outrageous, and then smirking behind Obama’s back as his campaign eats it up?  Go Hillary 2016!

And That? You Didn't Build That, Either!

    Drudge red-headlined this story (LET'S REPEAT AUTO BAILOUT SUCCESS 'WITH EVERY INDUSTRY'...) when it first hit Thursday and it was still on his site Friday morning.  Politico ran the original story on their Politico44 blog (their "Living Diary of the Obama Presidency"):

PUEBLO, Colo. – President Obama, while villifying Mitt Romney for opposing the auto industry bailout, bragged about the success of his decision to provide government assistance and said he now wants to see every manufacturing industry come roaring back.
“I said, I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back,” he said. “Now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.
“I don’t want those jobs taking root in places like China, I want those jobs taking root in places like Pueblo,” Obama told a crowd gathered for a campaign rally at the Palace of Agriculture at the Colorado State Fairgrounds here.

    The money quote that Politico and Drudge focused on was of course "Now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry."  Tacked onto the end of the Politico story, however, is a curious note:

Clarification: This post was updated to reflect the president's intent to express his support for manufacturing success. An earlier version was unclear about his intent.

    I have not been able to locate that earlier version.  I read the story about an hour after it was originally posted, so I do not know how long the unclarified story was up, and I was not able to find a cached or quoted version anywhere.  The curious part of the clarification is, how does Politico (or Donovan Slack, the writer) know what the president's "intent" was?  Did someone at the White House read the story and call Politico?  Or did someone else at Politico read Slack's story and say, "He can't really mean that!"  But the president's choice of words belie Politico's clarification.  He did not say, "Now I want to see the same thing with manufacturing jobs ... in every industry."  He said, "Now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs ... in every industry."  There's a big difference.
    When the controversy over the president's "you didn't build that" remark exploded, the president's supporters argued that the context of the remark made it perfectly clear what he meant.  So what is the context in this case?  From the White House transcript of the speech [emphasis added]:

When all of us share in prosperity, we all do better.  (Applause.)  That’s the choice in this election.  That’s why I’m running for President -- because I believe we’re all in this together.  (Applause.)

We’ve got a bunch of examples of the differences, the choice in this election.  When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse, more than 1 million jobs at stake, Governor Romney said, let’s “let Detroit go bankrupt.”

AUDIENCE:  Booo --

THE PRESIDENT:  I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back and GM is number one again.  (Applause.)  So now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.  I don’t want those jobs taking root in places like China.  I want them taking root in places like Pueblo.  (Applause.)

Governor Romney brags about his private sector experience, but it was mostly investing in companies, some of which were called “pioneers” of outsourcing.  I don’t want to be a pioneer of outsourcing.  I want to insource.  I want to stop giving tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas; let’s give those tax breaks to companies that are investing here in the United States of America, making American products with American workers and selling them around the world.  That’s why I’m running for a second term.  (Applause.)

    Obviously the president never uses the term "bailout"in the speech, but the government bailout of GM is the example he makes a beeline for as the premier example of his economic approach versus Mitt Romney.  And then he cites targeted tax breaks:

I don’t want to be a pioneer of outsourcing.  I want to insource.  I want to stop giving tax breaks...

    To borrow the cadence of John F. Kennedy, President Obama is virtually saying, Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what Barack Obama can do for your business.  Time and again, this president returns to his default view that the typical business just can't get along without the active involvement of the government.  In his more guarded remarks, he stresses infrastructure (roads and bridges) as government's primary contribution to the smooth operation of the private sector.  But he was on a roll in this speech, perhaps spurred on by the Romney-induced "booos" and the frequent applause of the crowd, and bailouts and picking winners and losers via revoking and granting tax breaks rose to the surface.
    In any case, Media Matters immediately began the "context" defense, even though the full context underscores the meaning of the president's quote.  Whatever meaning can be squeezed of the president's phrases such as "you didn't build that" and "I want to do the same thing ... in every industry" by the president's defenders, it is clear that his attitude towards government and the private sector is not "get government out of the way and businesses can prosper."  It runs more along the lines of "my way or the highway - and by the way, government built the highway, too."

If You Wrote a Letter to the Editor, You Didn't Write That

    President Obama continues to push back against the idea that he believes that small businesses are incapable of making it on their own without government help.  This is of course part of the fallout from the president's now legendary "If you own a business, you didn't build that" remark.  In what could easily be seen as doubling down on that dubious concept, the Obama campaign has launched a new page on their website, Letter to the Editor, which provides a sample letter to the editor, a checklist of desired recipients (LA Times, Miami Herald, Wall Street Journal, etc.,) talking points, and even writing tips!  The subject of the sample email is even helpfully filled in: "A Romney presidency will hurt small business."  The sample letter reads as follows:

I worked hard to build my small business. Though it took time, investment, and a lot of hard work, I've built a business I'm proud of.
The American economy is built on businesses like mine - that hire American workers and promote American innovation. If we are going to create an economy built to last, we have to support our small businesses.
But Mitt Romney's plan for the American economy would put business like mine at risk. His plan would gut investments that benefit small businesses - like education and infrastructure -  so he can give more tax breaks to millionaires like himself and to companies that ship jobs overseas. His top-down philosophy won't grow our economy for the long run - we already tried it for the past decade, and it crashed our economy and hurt the middle class. If Romney thinks his plan is the best way to grow our economy and help small businesses, then he must have forgotten how we got into this mess in the first place.
Mitt Romney believes we can afford to shower the wealthiest Americans with tax cuts, but that it's a bridge too far to rebuild the roads, runways and ports our businesses rely on to ship goods across the country and around the world. He believes we can afford to cut taxes for companies that ship our jobs overseas, but that we can't afford to invest in the training and education that American workers need to compete for those jobs in the global economy.
Small business owners can't afford the failed policies of the past. And Americans can't afford a Romney presidency.

    The page includes the wise counsel: "Revising the letter and making it your own greatly increases the chance that a newspaper will publish it." So never again let it be said that Barack Obama doubts the ability of the American business owner to build his own business.  But, hey, letters can be tricky.

It Depends on What the Meaning of the Word "That" Is

    The defenders of Barack Obama have been clocking a lot of overtime this week.  The president's "If you've got a business, you didn't build that" statement from a speech last week in Richmond took a while to build up steam before it exploded this week.  Now the Obama campaign is even going to extraordinary lengths to explain that the president didn't say what he undeniably did say as the Weekly Standard reports.  The president's own Truth Team at his campaign's website provides a tortured reading of the president's words.  James Taranto of the Best of the Web at WSJ.com dissects their reasoning:

The [Obama Truth] Team then explains: "The President's full remarks show that the 'that' in 'you didn't build that' clearly refers to roads and bridges--public infrastructure we count on the government to build and maintain."
That's bunk, and not only because "business" is more proximate to the pronoun "that" and therefore its more likely antecedent. The Truth Team's interpretation is ungrammatical. "Roads and bridges" is plural; "that" is singular. If the Team is right about Obama's meaning, he should have said, "You didn't build those."

Although they are not even willing to go this far, the president's defenders are saying in effect, "Come on, give him the benefit of the doubt.  You know he really didn't mean it like that."  Just for the sake of argument, let's try that shoe on the other foot.  Imagine if Mitt Romney said this in a speech:

Sure, I think it's great for the government to provide low cost medical care and women's health services to those who can't afford it.  But if you want a contraceptive, I don't think you should get that.

Liberals would be falling all over themselves to get in front of a microphone to say: "Mitt Romney wants to ban contraceptives!" And grammatically, they'd have a point.  "That" more logical applies to the singular and more proximate "contraceptive" rather than the plural "low cost medical care and women's health services" from the preceding sentence.  Instead, Romney's theoretical statement should be:

Sure, I think it's great for the government to provide low cost medical care and women's health services to those who can't afford it.  But if you want a contraceptive, I don't think you should get those.

    The construction is still awkward, as was President Obama's statement, but at least it would be clear that "those" referred to "low cost medical care and women's health services."  The point Romney would be making is that the government should not be paying for contraceptives, which would be entirely consistent with his position stated often elsewhere.  But if he used the former statement rather than the latter, his foes would latch onto "that" as evidence of his desire to oppress women, especially poor women, because it fits their preconceived notions of Romney, however caricatured those notions are.


    Barack Obama, on the other hand, has given us plenty of reason to doubt his commitment to small business and free enterprise. It's not much of a stretch to get from "spread the wealth around" to "you didn't build that."  Is it any wonder that his listeners are inclined to take his latest words at face value?




UPDATE:  I've been informed by one reader that my theoretical Romney statement is wholly inadequate.  I'm having a hard time disagreeing.  Perhaps I should stop writing blog posts after midnight.