One of the major unions supporting President Obama apparently decided it would be helpful to remind voters of the most unpopular words of his presidency: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.”
The Service Employees International Union is distributing buttons, at the Democratic National Convention, that say, “I helped you build that.” SEIU explained the choice of the phrase in a statement saying that “without a strong community and a fair economy nobody can build a successful business that lasts.”
The buttons allude to Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech in earlier this summer.
“I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart,” Obama said on July 13th. “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 . . . 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.”
