Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter is pushing back against Mitt Romney’s attacks over a recent remark from the president, accusing the GOP candidate of “not telling the truth about what the president said.”
“Mitt Romney recently launched a TV ad that blatantly twists President Obama’s words on small-business owners and entrepreneurs,” says Cutter in a new Web video released on Tuesday. "Romney’s not telling the truth about what the president said and is taking the president’s words out of context … The president said that together, Americans all built the free enterprise system that we all benefit from.”
The Romney campaign has seized on a quote from an Obama campaign speech in which the president argued that businesspeople 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.”
The Romney campaign has used the “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” line, arguing that it shows Obama thinks the government should play an outsized role in free markets.
The Obama campaign is now pushing back. In addition to Cutter’s video, the team released another ad on Tuesday called “Tampered,” also accusing the Romney campaign of taking the president’s words out of context.
“Apart from the flagrant hypocrisy, these attack ads make you wonder — does he even understand how our economy works?” Cutter says in her video. “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 denies that it's taking the president's words out of context.
“It's clear what President Obama believes because he told us: 'if you've got a business – you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen,' " campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg said in an email to The Hill. "He said it, and he meant it.”
Cutter also charges that Romney was himself a recipient of government aid.
“Ironically, Mitt Romney knows better than anyone that business can’t always do it alone,” she says. “When Bain and Co. was on the brink of bankruptcy, Romney himself negotiated a $10 million bailout with the FDIC, and under Romney some of the companies Bain profited from received tax breaks.”
Cutter argues that Romney would cut investments in infrastructure, education and technology to give tax breaks to the wealthy, which she says will harm small businesses.
