PLANK AUGUST 30, 2012
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TAMPA—So I was sitting in the Tampa Bay Times Forum the other night and I was confused because on the big screens over the arena they kept playing video segments that, at first blush, looked and sounded like those classic Barack Obama ads from 2008—there was the upbeat background music, afternoon-light shots of American vistas, and over it all, his disembodied voice in its most exhortatory mode. And here's what he said:
Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—if you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.
The crowd roared in delirious disapproval, because this was of course not an Obama ad but a sort of mirror image of one, held up to mock the man. This, after all, was Obama's notorious riff from a stump speech last month in Roanoke, Va., when he tried to echo Elizabeth Warren's viral YouTube riff last year about how "there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own." But, wait a second, I thought—was this clip I was hearing boomed into the hall, over and over, really what Obama had said? I looked it up again to be sure. And here's what he said in Roanoke.
Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.
The lines that I've put in bold here? They were gone from the clip. The riff simply flowed past where they had been, with not a ripple to signal the elision. It was exceedingly artful—the surgeons had even retained the first clause from one of the excised lines in order to strengthen the key final line. It was, I recalled, what had been done with Obama's riff when it was used in campaign ads and Fox News clips in the weeks after he said it; in fact, just a few hours earlier I'd seen Fox News play just the most damning final line. And here it was, the longer, spliced-together riff, being piped into this hall with a captive audience of thousands.
This struck me as rather irksome. See, I'm a journalist, and I work with words, and it's always bothered me when anyone uses, or plays with, words to knowingly deceive others. But from what I could tell, my disquiet was not necessarily shared by my colleagues in the press risers, who mostly remained bent over their laptops, seemingly oblivious to the incessant video loop. This surprised me—after all, while campaigns often took words out of context, they rarely built entire convention themes out of such tricks (the Democrats had chortled for a few weeks over Romney's less-bad-in-context remark that he liked "being able to fire people," but they had never constructed an entire ad campaign around it.) Whereas this brazen editing of Obama's riff seemed very much in keeping with the Romney campaign's equally brazen declaration that the Obama administration is doing away with the welfare work requirement.
So I did what any petulant reporter does: I took to Twitter. But I did not find much sympathy there from colleagues. (A representative response came from Richard Grenell, a sharp-witted conservative who was briefly Romney's foreign policy spokesman: "@Richard Grenell: lol. You sound sad about it." Well, yes.) Clearly, I had no choice but to submit to the good intentions of the Romney campaign's editorial judgment. Perhaps I simply hadn't listened to the edited clip enough.
Repeated exposure eventually produced a late-night epiphany: I needed to learn to let go. Those 55 elided words had been here with us, but now they were gone, and I needed to learn to live without them, because they clearly were not coming back. Someone had come for them in the night, knocked on the door and taken them to an undisclosed location, a place on the edge of town whose existence has been rumored for a while, spoken of in hushed terms, but which could not be officially confirmed since no words had ever returned from it. The disappeared words would be missed, sure—they had added meaning to our life—but there was nothing to be done about it, and lingering over them would only make me, well, sad. And who wants to be sad?
So the next morning I awoke and resolved to start fresh. I saw that a few of my more outspoken colleagues had decided to speak out about the disappearance—here, here, here, here and here—and I felt a twinge of regret over my decision, but then I remembered that they were a small minority of a much, much larger press corps and that their search for those words would be a lonely and futile one.
To confirm my new resolve, I asked around about the missing words—carefully, to be sure—to make sure that they were in fact no more. I ran into New Hampshire Congressman Charlie Bass, a reasonable fellow whom I've known since my years as a reporter in Concord. Here's what he had to say:
Well, fundamentally I think President Obama believes that government is the most important factor in economic growth in the country and it hasn't really been entrepreneurial spirit. It gets down to his fundamental philosophy and that's why they're using this line.
But I asked, lowering my voice further, what about the...line or two in between that's been taken out?
I guess my response would be, what struck small business people were not the two lines in the middle but the two that they heard that the president was somehow demeaning the difficulty and anxiety and frankly sometimes terror that is associated with running a small business.
So, got that? People hearing the clip in the hall were more upset about the lines they were hearing than the lines that they were not hearing. I had a vague memory that I may have once been bothered by such reasoning, but in my new state of mind this seemed liked a perfectly adequate justification.
An hour or two later, to make absolutely sure of my new equanimity, I asked another gentleman, a tree farmer who was attending the convention with a Southern delegation and who asked me not to use his name. He said he was dimly aware of the fact that some lines had vanished from the clip, but was also untroubled by it. "Unfortunately, in the world we live in, sure, they splice it," he said. "But the general theory is...." The general theory is what? I asked. He said: "It was fair game."
My new outlook thus emboldened, I went out into the world. At lunch at a great Greek diner in downtown Tampa, I ordered the artichoke and feta omelette and a coffee. When the tab came, I took a pencil from my backpack and gently erased the omelette charge, taking care not to tear the pale-green receipt. I then paid only for the coffee. Challenged by the waitress, I said I didn't know what she was talking about; after all, there was no mention of it on the receipt and no more omelette on my plate, was there? And the fundamental principle of my having come to the diner had been to get my system recharged, and it was, really, the multiple cups of coffee that had done that. She didn't seem to understand, and went off to get the manager, but I didn't have time for that and walked back out onto the street. The world's moving fast, we've got tweets to write and Instagram photos of convention hall balloons to post, and you sure as heck aren't going to qualify as a maker in a makers-and-takers world if you're quibbling over a piddling erasure. Memory is for moochers, and hangups about words are for print journalists, and just look at what's happened to them.
follow me on Twitter @AlecMacGillis
14 comments
Oh Alec MacGillis-less, you parasitic moonbat. Why can't you say what really happened? Obama's original speech did not include the bold-faced words you quote above. Immediately after Obama made the speech, an advisor came up to him and told him that he had let his true collectivist beliefs show a little too much, so Obama and his Chicago thug minions in the fawning press corps changed the tape to put the paean to capitalists into the speech. That's why the "editing" between the supposed original and the supposedly doctored quote is so seamless. There was no editing, that was what he said; the editing came later. Get over it. And while you're at it, please to be getting over the welfare attack too. What happened was, a couple of Republican governors went to the Romney campaign with a classic ratf**k operation. They would request permission from Obama to waive welfare work requirements, knowing full well that the opportunity to make more people dependent on government would be too delicious for Obama to pass up. It worked like a charm. Herbert and Sandoval are getting Presidential Medals of Freedom shortly after Romney's sworn in, after Romney restores the great American tradition (that Obama has of course abandoned) of laying a wreath on Ayn Rand's grave on John Galt Day. Your true America-hating credentials are really on display when you quote Shariah-sympathizer Charlie Bass. I mean, really, can you imagine anything more despicable than a Congressman who refers to running a small business - the very backbone of this great Republic - as "frankly terror." No, Rep, Bass, small businessmen are not terrorists. No wonder you respected this man when you were a "reporter" in Concord. The people of that great town, which fired the shot heard round the world before the British could take their guns, will make short work of this Bass in the next election.
- GeoffG
August 30, 2012 at 10:50am
Oh, no. With the entire Bush-II/Dick Cheney/Karl Rove thing, we HAD this "Reality is what I say it is" Orwellian idea. On the surface, it sounds good. But the problem with it is that when Reality is NOT what they say it is, then we get expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we get Hurricane Katrina decimating New Orleans, we get a CDO crisis that wipes out 15 Trillion dollars overnight, we get 12% unemployment and GM and Chrysler declaring bankruptcy. So if Romney/Ryan are going down the same path, and from Ryan's speech last night they both sound as Reality Challenged as the Bush administration, then we've been there and done that and it turned out really badly. Let's not go there again.
- AllanL5
August 30, 2012 at 10:54am
Japan tried massive infrastructure spending to re-boot job growth, but you also need entrepeneurs who will risk starting a business along that new road or train station. Japan spent trillions, mostly just make work jobs for bridges and roads to low population areas. That is what I think of when I hear the Dems pushing infrastructure spending as their solution to the eight million Americans who have disappeared from the work force. Neither remnants of America's two major political parties has a clue, sort of like the Dems thicnk the chicken, encumbered by stifling regulations, comes first and the GOP thinks the egg comes first. Both parties share equal blame for the de-industrialization of America since 1978.
- K2K
August 30, 2012 at 12:29pm
At least the country benefits from the infrastructure spending, having roads and bridges for the citizens to traverse. And no one said it would solve the economy over night. But it seems like a good win win for people who are hungry and want to eat and might even be willing to work for their food, and a government that wants to feed them.
- GSpinks
August 30, 2012 at 12:45pm
Time to nail "I like to fire people" and "I don't care about the poor" to Romney's forehead, repeat it over and over leaving out the rest. And then run big banners of the British newspapers mocking Romney as Mitt the Twit saying if he can't even refrain from insulting our nearest ally imagine the wars he will lead us into. Time to get medieval (or should I say medi EVIL) on their asses.
- blackton
August 30, 2012 at 1:22pm
The willingness of the Romney campaign to repeat this and other lies may suggest that Romney lacks a moral core. Alternatively it may suggest a fundamental weakness: an unwillingness to say no to his campaign staff who are professionally focused on winning at any cost. In that case I see parallels with Bush II, who I view as a fundamentally decent person but susceptible to manipulation by the people around him.
- brthompson
August 30, 2012 at 2:43pm
If you are ever in my neck of the woods, it would be a pleasure to spend some time with you over a meal. On a lighter note, let's recall that the often repeated edited statements of the President might be intended to show the President's hostility to those who didn't lift one finger to build roads or bridges or seaports; but when the time came, those folks had the audacity to place their business near the improvements. Why they didn't remain away is any one's guess. Going one step further, the statements were almost nearly made by a President who has never operated a coffee shop, book store or costco franchise. Can he really be like us? Didn't spend a day in uniform. Too many fancy schools with strange ideas.
- Doug12
August 30, 2012 at 2:57pm
"... I see parallels with Bush II, who I view as a fundamentally decent person but susceptible to manipulation by the people around him." <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Precisely why I fear a Romney presidency. I'm willing to have a Machiavellian president, at least in part. I'm not willing to have one that can't say no to even his craziest supporters. When, oh when, will Romney have a Sister Souljah moment? Even if it's scripted, obviously scripted, at least have one. At least PRETEND that you have a spine.
- gwcross
August 30, 2012 at 3:39pm
The idea of a President who's willing, demonstrably willing, both to sell his soul to extremists and to sanction bold faced lies and to slander a good man, Barack Obama, repeatedly, is terrifying. An honest difference of opinion is one thing; fine - let's debate. But we cannot debate lies. Finally I have no idea why the Republicans seem to think that business and infrastructure, or small business and government, or big business and government for that matter, are necessarily in opposition to each other. This isn't an either/or proposition, it's both/and. Meanwhile, New Orleans is under siege from a hurricane again. Who did Bobby Jindal call requesting help? Who built the levies that have functioned well? Who's flying those helicopters? One man on CNN said the Coast Guard pilots are like god on a helicopter (I hope that's accurate, at any rate it expresses his sentiment.) So - who built THAT? Why the hell can't we acknowledge that we need each other? These smears and attacks not only against Obama but against all of the people who work together to make the community otherwise known as the United States of America are appalling to me. If the Republicans all want to move to certain Red States and secede I'm all for it at this point. Clearly they're over the edge morally, ethically and even in terms of common sense. Their message is irrational. Also I have had it with this baloney about faith based charity. Like faith based organizations can replace Medicaid? Since when?
- Sophia
August 30, 2012 at 4:34pm
Alec, the truth about Obama is actually far worse than depicted on that big screen. Properly edited, what he really said to the country was: "You aren't smart. You didn't build America." How Orwellian to present his comments the way the convention blatantly did. And how lazy of most of the press corps to take it in stride.
- Thunderroad
August 30, 2012 at 6:03pm
I don't know what the big deal is. The Republicans' choice to severely edit POTUS's speech was perfectly cromulent.
- Konstantin
August 30, 2012 at 8:07pm
"Neither remnants of America's two major political parties has a clue, sort of like the Dems think the chicken, encumbered by stifling regulations, comes first and the GOP thinks the egg comes first. Both parties share equal blame for the de-industrialization of America since 1978." You got it, K2K. But what's the solution? You implied that business people are too chicken to start businesses (next to new roads and stations). Is capitalism dead in America? I thought capitalists were the brave people. So I guess they ain't gonna help Romney create those 12 million new jobs that he promised in his first term either. America will never be a socialist country (where the government owns all of the means of production and there is no private property). So I guess America is dead, too. Our brave capitalists have given up. The real problem is that Americans and all others in the world have to buy boatloads of stuff they don't need, just to keep people employed and paying taxes. And there's no long-term solution to that circular type of economy. Maybe the rest of the world will turn socialist, with America just lying there, dead in the water.
- magboy47.
August 31, 2012 at 12:01am
well magboy47, a good place to start is to change the Wall Street paradigm that still insists on quarterly earnings increase, a paradigm that sprouted from the Great Inflation 1973-75. Then, repeal of ACA and Dodd-Frank, add in a moratorium on new EPA regulations. I concede that the GOP needs to stop screaming "socialism" (and the social cons need a muzzle, so end all government funding of Planned Parenthood), and the Dems need a crash course on how to budget. I also think ALL of the Bush43 tax cuts should finally expire, and the Dems should stop creating the illusion of class warfare by solely focussing on the tax cuts for those over $250,000. But, first, ban all lawyers from being in Congress. Probably too late to re-industrialize, and it sure will not happen when America's energy sources are litigated to death by alleged environmalists. They sure have lost me with their near-Luddite litigation strategies.
- K2K
August 31, 2012 at 7:43am
"Neither remnants of America's two major political parties has a clue," These would be the two political parties that rely on vast armies of economists, analysts, experts, data, businessmen and women, activists, government officials, international contacts and close to 150-years of solid experience - neither "has a clue"? And you have descended from Mt. Sinai, on your own, unaided by the information, data and expertise that these parties have been relying upon, to devise a strategy that would reindustrialise the United States? Because before the ACA and Dodd-Frank, the US was on a massive industrialisation binge, and these two pieces of legislation destroyed all of that? Oh, and make sure that laws are written by people who have no background in how laws are written, interpreted and applied? Such blinding wisdom, out of one solitary person. Or is it perchance possible that other people do have a clue, and perhaps more than just a clue, and that you simply disagree with their interpretation and analysis of the data? And that the same universal health care that is in place in Germany - an industrial powerhouse, still - can't, in itself and in 2012, be the reason for the de-industrialisation of the United States, which began in the 1980s? No clue, eh? Just saying.
- icarus-r
August 31, 2012 at 4:19pm