WASHINGTON — Relentless GOP criticism of a 12-day-old remark about business owners has taken a campaign toll on President Barack Obama, forcing him to defend himself and giving Republican Mitt Romney a break from steady attacks.
The development has delighted Republicans, who were eager to shift the campaign focus from Romney’s tax returns, overseas assets and Bain Capital record.
Acknowledging that the Republican’s criticisms were hitting a mark, Obama’s team rolled out two new TV ads this week in which he employed for the first time what many Democrats consider a powerful tool: the president talking directly into the camera and countering GOP claims.
“Those ads taking my words about small business out of context — they’re flat-out wrong,” Obama says in the newest ad.
In the immediate future, Democrats hope Obama’s response will help him move past the flap about business owners. But Romney aides kept up the pressure Wednesday, sponsoring 24 events on the topic while Romney was overseas.
Democratic strategists acknowledged Wednesday that Obama was being hurt, at least a little, by Romney’s repeated jabs at comments the president made in Virginia on July 13, which originally drew little notice.
“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” Obama said, in part. “Somebody else made that happen.”
Most GOP attacks ignored the broader context of the speech. In it, Obama discussed a favorite theme: the claim that government-assisted infrastructure including roads, research and schools help sustain American society, including private enterprise.
Romney and his allies have used the quote in countless ads, videos, statements and conference calls, painting Obama as contemptuous of hard-working entrepreneurs and business owners.
Still, Obama and his advisers realized the attacks were starting to hurt, and they filmed the 30-second response ad in the White House chief of staff’s office on Saturday. In the ad, first aired Tuesday, Obama says: “Those ads taking my words about small business out of context — they’re flat-out wrong. Of course Americans build their own businesses.”
And Obama also began to push back in his stump speech.
“Over the next four months, you are going to hear a lot of stuff,” he said at a New Orleans fundraiser Wednesday evening. “Sometimes they will play around with things I say. They’ll take out whole sentences. They’ve got an ad right now where they just spliced it and diced it and make it seem like I don’t appreciate the incredible work of small businesspeople.”
Romney and the Republican National Committee have since urged voters to review the entire speech. Their criticisms of Obama are fair and in context, they say.
