Robert Vickers
Harrisburg Patriot-News
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will dispatch his campaign forces to the Keystone State Wednesday to highlight small business owners putt off by President Barack Obama’s recent off-the-cuff claim that “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”
Featured among the seven Romney “We Did Build This” campaign events occurring Wednesday through Friday will be 11:45 a.m. comments from small business owners and GOP U.S. Senate candidate Tom Smith.
The effort will also visit York, and Mechanicsburg, where a new campaign office will be opened. Romney will not make an appearance, but his campaign bus will tour the state.
Romney has seemed invigorated since Obama made the remark about government’s role in spurring economic development July 13 in Roanoke, Va. Speaking Monday in Costa Mesa, Ca. the former Massachusetts governor blasted Obama for advocating a system where citizens rely too heavily on someone else.
“Now that someone else, of course, is the government of the country,” Romney said. “Whether you’re the person who came up with it, or the people who work there and contribute to it, you did build it. Government did not build it.”
Surrogates for the president have said the president’s words have been twisted, and have likened the comment to Romney’s earlier campaign declaration that “I like being able to fire people.”
Obama has fired back in a television ad airing in seven swing states, but not Pennsylvania.
“Those ads taking my words about small business out of context, they’re flat out wrong,” he says in the ad. “Of course Americans build their own business. Everyday hardworking people sacrifice to meet a payroll, create jobs and make our economy run. And what I said was that we need to stand behind them as America always has. By investing in education, training, roads and bridges, research and technology.”