Does “you didn’t build that” ring a bell?
Via The Hill:
Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter threw the recent line of attack against the president back at the Romney campaign, asking if Romney understands how the US economy works.
“Apart from the flagrant hypocrisy, these attack ads make you wonder — does he even understand how our economy works?,” Cutter asked in a web video released on Tuesday. “We build our businesses through hard work and initiative with public and private sectors working together to create a climate that helps us grow, President Obama knows that.”
The Romney campaign has seized on a quote from an Obama campaign speech in which he argued that business people were able to succeed in part because of the country’s history of public-private partnerships.
“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you help,” Obama said earlier this month. “There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”