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"You didn't build that," Mr. Obama explained to the nation's entrepreneurs, and has been explaining ever since. He only meant to say we need government as well as private initiative, and who could disagree? This argument is anodyne, dispositive of nothing that is in dispute.
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Of course, it's healthy not to be overawed by the successes of others, and to remember the American institutions and policies that let entrepreneurship thrive. But if Mr. Obama lost the point in the soundbite that so bedevils his campaign, it's because his campaign doesn't have a point.
Mr. Obama himself chose to lash his re-election bid to his tax hike for the rich. His tax hike isn't valuable to him because of the revenue it would raise (which isn't much). It isn't valuable to him because it somehow fits into his green-eyeshade management of the budget (neither he nor his party in Congress have shown much interest in managing the fisc).
His tax hike is only valuable to him because it nominates a villain for the campaign season—the greedy, undeserving, unpatriotic rich. It's valuable because it affords a rhetorical escape route when the subject of unsustainable spending comes up. He can talk about making the rich pay their "fair share," not about the chasm that would persist between spending and revenues, with or without his score-settling tax hike.
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Like the anti Bain anti Romney ads they are all part of an elaborate voter suppression effort trying to get voters who were not going to vote for Obama anyway to stay home. Meanwhile they throw in a misdirection play claiming that Voter ID laws which have zero to do with voter suppression will somehow suppress the votes of Obama's constituency which they are desperately trying to fire up. For a candidate who ran against cynicism four years ago, Obama is running the most cynical campaign in modern history.
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