Hat tip to Sarah Jenislawski.

Hat tip to Jake McGuire.

Hat tip to Sarah Jenislawski and Anne Tiffin Taylor.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Jonathan Chait reacts as liberals always do when conservative arguments prove effective. Why is Obama’s “You Didn’t Build That” Roanoke speech hurting Obama? Racism!

The entire key to the rise of the Republican Party from the mid-sixties through the nineties was that white Americans came to see the Democrats as taking money from the hard-working white middle class and giving it to a lazy black underclass. Reactivating that frame is still the most mortal threat to the Democrats and to Obama. That is why Obama is reacting so urgently to reestablish himself.

In essence, people like Chait believe their own views to be so morally obligatory that you cannot prefer personal responsibility to redistribution and hand outs without thereby manifesting a negative attitude to certain groups stereotypically on the receiving end of the same.

What Chait is really saying is “If you don’t like welfare, you hate Negroes.” Which, really, if you think about it, is a perspective less than complimentary to African Americans. Who then really is the racist, Mr. Chait?

Via Theo.

John Kass

Barack Obama’s Roanoke speech struck a deep personal chord for Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass. Kass, born in the early 1950s, was the son of a Greek immigrant grocer who can remember very well exactly what government did for his family.

When President Barack Obama hauled off and slapped American small-business owners in the mouth the other day, I wanted to dream of my father.

But I didn’t have to close my eyes to see my dad. I could do it with my eyes open.

All I had to do was think of the driveway of our home, and my dad’s car gone before dawn, that old white Chrysler with a push-button transmission. It always started, but there was a hole in the floor and his feet got wet in the rain. So he patched it with concrete mix and kept on driving it to the little supermarket he ran with my Uncle George.

He’d return home long after dark, physically and mentally exhausted, take a plate of food, talk with us for a few minutes, then flop in that big chair in front of the TV. Even before his cigarette was out, he’d begin to snore.

The next day he’d wake up and do it again. Day after day, decade after decade. Weekdays and weekends, no vacations, no time to see our games, no money for extras, not even forMcDonald’s. My dad and Uncle George, and my mom and my late Aunt Mary, killing themselves in their small supermarket on the South Side of Chicago.

There was no federal bailout money for us. No Republican corporate welfare. No Democratic handouts. No bipartisan lobbyists working the angles. No Tony Rezkos. No offshore accounts. No Obama bucks.

Just two immigrant brothers and their families risking everything, balancing on the economic high wire, building a business in America. They sacrificed, paid their bills, counted pennies to pay rent and purchase health care and food and not much else. And for their troubles they were muscled by the politicos, by the city inspectors and the chiselers and the weasels, all those smiling extortionists who held the government hammer over all of our heads. …

One of my earliest memories as a boy at the store was that of the government men coming from City Hall. One was tall and beefy. The other was wiry. They wanted steaks.

We didn’t eat red steaks at home or yellow bananas. We took home the brown bananas and the brown steaks because we couldn’t sell them. But the government men liked the big, red steaks, the fat rib-eyes two to a shrink-wrapped package. You could put 20 or so in a shopping bag.

“Thanks, Greek,” they’d say.

That was government.

Read the whole thing.

1:17 video

Pat Sajak, at Ricochet, identified Obama’a Roanoke speech as the defining moment of the 2012 Presidential Election.

It’s as if President Obama climbed into a tank, put on his helmet, talked about how his foray into Cambodia was seared in his memory, looked at his watch, misspelled “potato” and pardoned Richard Nixon all in the same day. It’s fun to imagine the hand-wringing that must be going on within the White House as staffers try to figure out how to undo the damage their boss has done with his anti-entrepenurial riff. Defining moments in politics are strange beasts. Sometimes they’re only recognized in hindsight, while sometimes they throw the train off the tracks before a sentence has been completed. Sometimes their effect can be contained and minimized, while sometimes their effect on the political narrative metastasizes. This one is very bad for the White House.

———————————

Bill Jacobson observes that the speech could very possibly cost Obama the election.

Obama has stepped in it big time, and we have Elizabeth Warren to thank. …

Obama has hitched his wagon to an alien ideology touted by a tainted candidate who might be too liberal even for Massachusetts.

I don’t think this is going away. It is a theme handed to Romney on a silver platter, a silver platter built, of course, on roads the rest of us paid for.

It is a game changer. And we have Elizabeth Warren to thank for it.

———————————
And the mockery is unlikely to stop anytime soon.

Latest Romney Ad.

From Vanderleun.

“Jefferson Starship gets educated by President Obama. They didn’t, in fact, build that city on Rock and Roll. Somebody else made that happen.”

Obama has his own Tumblr now. But he didn’t build it. Somebody else did.