He Is Mocking People': Krauthammer Takes on the 'You Didn't Build That' Philosophy

The Obama campaign on Thursday saw it fit to accuse Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney of being the type of politician who will say anything to get elected because he, um, quoted the president.

Seriously, Romney quoted verbatim an excerpt from President Obama’s infamous “You Didn’t Build That” speech and the Obama campaign released an ad defending the president from Romney’s insidious misrepresentation [“That’s not what [Obama] said,” the ad argues].

As we pointed out yesterday, that is what the president said. Perhaps Team Obama would like to challenge Romney over context. Well, alright then. Let’s talk about context.

Let’s bring in conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer[ via Fox News]:

Transcript of Krauthammer’s comments:

That is the process but the content here is utterly damning. I mean, Romney said it's not a gaffe. A gaffe defined in Washington is when a politician accidentally speaks what is really in his heart. This is his political philosophy. And it's elaborated. I don't care about that one sentence, although I would say I disagree with Steve [Hayes] that one sentence as I just heard it, and as anybody looking at it would see in print, that you build, 'that' is a reference to person's idea he built his own business. It is not a reference to roads and bridges.

But let's look at the whole context and let's ignore that one sentence. He starts with a mocking reference to people who succeed believing it might have something to do with intelligence or hard work. Sort of laughing at them.

So he is mocking people, a Korean immigrant who works 16 hours a day in a candy store and he builds it and he sends his kids to college with that, you know, with the money he finally makes 20 years later. Or a physician in medical school, you know, who goes 60 or 80-hour weeks, works hard and then in his 50s, begins reaping the rewards of his work. That is number one. Secondly, everybody he says who helped you along the way. It's no accident everybody in his example is an agent of the government. It's either a teacher, or a road, or a bridge, or the internet, which he says incorrectly was invented by the government so we could create opportunities in the marketplace.

It's all government. And this is his philosophy that government is the root of the success, individual and national and it's not individual enterprise -- he has to some extent to individual enterprise. But anybody who thinks it's that, obviously is rewarding himself in a way that is undeserved, it's the government. And that's the heart of his philosophy. That is the real division between left and right in the country. That's why Romney ought to hit it every day until election day.

(H/T: FN)