http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323869604578368353424655998.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
It was a gaffe on the order of bitter clingers, and this time in full public view: “If you’ve got a business–you didn’t build that,” President Obama said at a July 13, 2012, campaign rally in Roanoke, Va. “Somebody else made that happen.”
The president’s defenders and sycophants rushed to rationalize it away. Look at the complete context, they said, and we did:
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.
See, he meant somebody else built roads and bridges!
Of course that presupposed that the brilliant double Ivy graduate and former part-time elite law school professor lacked basic skills in grammar, logic and exposition. “That” is a singular pronoun; the plural equivalent is “those.” Along with the agreement in number, the noun “business” was proximate to the pronoun, as an antecedent should be. And even accepting the hypothesis of Obama’s hopeless incapacity for grammar, what was the owner of a construction contractor that builds roads and bridges supposed to make of the putative assertion that he did no such thing?
Obama’s vicious little riff turned out to have its origin in the work of George Lakoff, the Berkeley linguist who has written a series of books on leftist cognition and rhetoric. The best way to understand Lakoff is as the anti-Ayn Rand: As she celebrated the individual and scorned the collective, he does the converse.