Sometimes people don't *hear* things in context.
I've been harping on a couple of threads about the whole "...you didn't build that" scenario and I'll just offer an example of the consequences of what he said.
I have a friend who is a small business owner. More accurately, she is a small business. She started out as a young single mother with a toddler. She went back to school and learned a skill, then worked a job for experience, then started taking on clients on the side. Eventually she could buy a small house with a sunroom that she could use as an office and built her client list working late into the night and weekends until she could afford to quit her "day job" and devote herself to her business. I don't know if it was because she's smarter than everyone else.......I don't think she's more intelligent than I am.......but she obviously worked smarter and reached a point that she's simply the best at what she does. Nowadays, she says that she's amazed that some potential clients offer her more money for her services than she would ever suggest herself..Today, 20 years later, she is a very wealthy womam and, by the way, she has never had an employee, though she does contract with a couple of independent sales consultants who market her services in parts of the country where she would otherwise not have a presence.
And so it's understood, in some ways, she's farther left on the political spectrum than I am.
So we were talking the other evening over dinner and she said that she had heard the President's remarks in Virginia and she stopped dead in her tracks. No one from the press or the Romney campaign had to tell her what he said, she heard it herself, and in context. Those two sentences literally screamed at her........"If you have a business, you didn't build that. Someone else made that happen." The rest of what he was saying faded as her blood pressure rose and her heart sank at hearing what her President had said. She said that what went through her mind was "Well shit! Why was I working 12 hours a day all those years if someone else was really creating my success? Who the Hell built this business if I didn't? I mean, I wouldn't have missed so many of my kid's football games and music recitals if I'd known someone else was 'making my business happen' for me. Dayum!!" After that, she couldn't remember anything else he said and, at least initially, she didn't care. She was insulted. (She also said something to the effect that Sister Mary Elephant back in the 4th grade sure as Hell wasn't getting any of the credit, which made me laugh.)
Look, everyone here knows what the President was talking about and what he meant. Unfortunately,amongst the rest of the speech, he uttered two sentences that conveyed his meaning extraordinarily poorly, those sentences stood out from the rest for a lot of people for varying reasons and some people were extremely offended by them and others are doing their best to use them against him. They were his words and they were very clumsy. Accept those facts or deny them, they're still the facts and they may or may not hurt the President.
For the record, I don't think this will change Melinda's vote in the end. There's just too much at stake in this election. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that she's as pissed about that as I've seen her about anything in the last 25 years. And I do understand how she feels and would be surprised if there aren't others out there that reacted similarly.
'Nuff said. I'll try really hard to get off my soapbox now and stay off.
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and thank you and Melinda.
Unfortunately you are correct that his words were clumsy. He might have said the same thing somewhat differently, or with different emphasis/pause, as did Elizabeth Warren, so as to be better understood, but 'misunderstandings' are a HUGE part of our daily lives; happens ALL the time, between individuals/friends/family, and in the public realm. And of course, repugs take advantage of the need for attention to nuance, and run with their propaganda.
