This Is Not A Gaffe

Ken AshfordObama Opposition, RepublicansLeave a Comment

Republicans are popping the champagne based on 15 words, taken out of context in the video above, specifically the words:

Don’t let anybody tell you that, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.

Unfortunately, reliance on this phrase (to stab Hillary with it) will likely backfire.  Why?  Because it’s substantively identical to a gaffe they seized upon two years ago, weeks before they went on to lose the electionto their great astonishmentby a pretty wide margin.

In 2012, Republicans made “you didn’t build that”a decontextualized comment Obama made about the fact that the wealthy depend on and must contribute to the public spacethe unifying theme of their party convention in Tampa, Florida. They were certain that it would cause, or at least contribute, to Obama’s demise. But in hindsight, many conservatives acknowledged that the GOP’s obsession with that gaffe revealed more damaging truths about the Republican Party than the gaffe itself said about Obama.

“One after another, [Republican businessowners] talked about the business they had built. But not a singlenot a singlefactory worker went out there,” Rick Santorum told activists at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last year. “Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them. You know what? They built that company too! And we should have had them on that stage.”

After the election, conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru lamented that “the Republican story about how societies prospernot just the Romney storydwelt on the heroic entrepreneur stifled by taxes and regulations: an important story with which most people do not identify. The ordinary person does not see himself as a great innovator.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell aped this analysis when he admitted in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute that Republicans “have often lost sight of the fact that our average voter is not John Galt.”

None of the Republicans pushing the “corporations and businesses” line actually thinks Hillary Clinton meant to say that investment isn’t a component of economic growth, just as they know from their perches in congressional offices and at donor-dependent non-profits that the entrepreneur isn’t the solitary engine of job creation.

But it’s clear they all still believe that riling up business elites by selectively quoting Democrats is a key to political success. The fixation on this gaffe foreshadows another Republican presidential campaign centered on the preeminence of the entrepreneur, to the exclusion of the wage worker and the trade unionist and the unemployed. It suggests an unwavering faith that a majority of voters will support the other guy when they hear “don’t let anybody tell you that … it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” They haven’t considered the possibility that voters will instead hear Clinton’s 15 words and think she makes a decent point.