Georgia Business Owner Not Quite Certain That He Didn’t Build That

Ace @ Ace of Spades HQ:

“Kiss my ass,” a sign says in response to “You didn’t build that.”

Below, a Romney ad — “These Hands” — you’ve probably seen. I never thought this thing would have this kind of leg in it.

Also below, a Romney ad attacking Obama for the ending of GM dealerships — the “Vampire Corporatism” Obama practices. Jen Rubin finds the ad confusing or something:

Is Romney saying that in a “managed bankruptcy” these dealershiips wouldn’t have closed? If he is saying these guys got hit because the politically-connected UAW got sppecial treatment, that would make sense. The ad doesn’t say that.In short, I don’t get the point of the ad.

Let me suggest the point of the ad starts as simple as tu quoque — you did it too — and then suggests more than that. Obama’s whole attack on Bain is based on a deliberately infantile obtuseness about business. It’s based on little-baby style thinking: People lost jobs. That’s bad. If you fire someone that means you’re a bad man.

But of course it’s a great deal more complicated than that. Businesses prefer to grow and expand their operations and their employee base, opportunity and profit permitting; contractions are not sought, but are imposed by circumstance.

Romney’s ad doesn’t say that. But it certainly confuses Obama’s baby-talk narrative. Because he must explain what makes his layoffs different from Bain’s; the answer is that there is no difference. A business losing money must soon lose employees as well.

Some of Obama’s people know this, but they trust that the typical Obama voter, who’s been an employee all his life (and, disproportionately, a government employee, who has therefore never before even had to consider “What if my employer runs out of money?”), are too stupid to know this. Well, perhaps this ad might wake them up, as they ponder “Gee, why did the man fire those poor people?”

Read more