Romney comes down on Obama’s ‘building businesses’ speech during Roxbury visit

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney criticized President Barack Obama’s comments about business while touring the Middlesex Truck & Coach in Roxbury Thursday afternoon.

The former Massachusetts governor said Obama was not supportive of small businesses after the president said business owners did not achieve success on their own, according to a live video stream of the speech on Rightspeak.net.

“The president does in fact believe that people who build enterprises like this really aren’t responsible for it, but in fact it’s a collective success of the whole society that somehow builds enterprises like this,” Romney said in his speech.

Romney pointed to Brian Maloney, founder of Middlesex Truck & Coach, as an example of someone who built his own business.

“This is not the result of government,” Romney said. “This is the result of people who take risk, who have dreams, who build for themselves and for their families.”

Romney said Obama has opted to campaign rather than develop jobs in recent months. He said unemployment figures have increased and consumer confidence has decreased for the third straight month.

“In the face of that, we’re surprised that the president has not met with his job council in the last six months,” Romney said. “Over the last six months, he has done 106 fundraisers.”

Romney’s statement came in response to Obama’s speech on July 13 in Roanoke, Va., in which he said “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”

The Romney campaign released an advertisement Thursday that includes the sound clip of Obama’s comment, where he said seconds before that if people obtain success it is usually due to someone helping them along the line.

“There was a great teacher somewhere in your life,” he said. “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.”

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein noted in the Wonkblog on Thursday that in Romney’s ad “that” refers to building a business, while in Obama’s speech, “that” refers to roads and bridges.

Maloney, who started out his business with $500, said after Romney’s speech that he was offended at the idea that he did not establish his business on his own.

“I worked with my hands to afford grad school at night, and my wife supported me,” he said. “I started a little body shop and was able to bring together people, one at a time . . . to work as a team to make this place successful.”

Maloney said he supported Romney and that government has done more harm than good. More government oversight, he said, would only interfere with his business.

“We don’t need any more government help,” he said. “We haven’t had any – we’ve only had pain.”

“Who’s going to pay for those big union companies that, like cookies, the president gives out exemptions to?” he added.

Jason Stephany, spokesman for MASSUNITING, a grassroots organization advocating for more jobs and corporate accountability, said that while his organization is nonpartisan, they believe Romney’s record is bad for small businesses and workers.

“When you take a look, you don’t need to look any further than Mitt Romney’s record either as governor of Massachusetts or as CEO of Bain Capital to see just how terrible he has been for jobs and small business in this country,” Stephany said.

Romney helped found Bain Capital and served as its CEO from 1991 until 1999, when he departed from the company to manage the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City.

While Romney served as governor, the state had $18 billion of debt, more debt per person than any other state and was ranked 47th in job creation, Stephany said.

People do not even have to take a look at how he governed, he said.

“You can take a look at his guiding philosophy, which was founded at Bain Capital, the company that he founded,” Stephany said, “and their model was they’d make billions of dollars of profits by systematically slashing wages and benefits, shuttering plants and shipping thousands of jobs overseas.”