HOW SAYING THE SAME THING DIFFERENTLY TO A DIFFERENT AUDIENCE CAN BITE YOUR ASS!

About a year ago, the now Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, Elizabeth Warren, won the hearts of lefties everywhere with a speech that claimed that successful businesses were fundamentally collective instead of individual accomplishments:

"You built a factory out there? Good for you," she says. "But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did."

This summer just past, President Obama tried to make exactly the same point, but so botched his presentation of it that he handed the right a rallying cry (helpfully rendered in to out-of-context bold below):

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. 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. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. 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.

In all the argument over whether conservatives were taking "you didn't build that" out of context, few on the left acknowledged that he was trying to say what Warren had said to such acclaim from the Democratic base. Even in context, the argument that accomplishment in business is collective is deeply offensive to most people in business, at least when they are not camouflaging themselves at a college town cocktail party.