{"id":11879,"date":"2012-09-26T12:29:49","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T16:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/?p=11879"},"modified":"2012-09-27T09:32:38","modified_gmt":"2012-09-27T13:32:38","slug":"who-built-what-diving-deeper-into-this-seasons-campaign-rhetoric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/2012\/09\/26\/who-built-what-diving-deeper-into-this-seasons-campaign-rhetoric\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Built What? Diving Deeper Into ‘We Built This’ Campaign Rhetoric"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Emily Corwin \/ NHPR<\/p>

Jack Gilchrist at his home<\/p><\/div>\n

The three words of what has become Governor Romney\u2019s campaign slogan, \u201cWe Built This,\u201d are hard to avoid these days.<\/p>\n

One could argue they exemplify a political rhetoric that pits business-loving Romney supporters against government-loving supporters of President Obama. And although \u201cwe built this\u201d has become a rallying cry for the right, we found that even New Hampshire businessman Jack Gilchrist — who has become the face of the slogan — has had enough of the divisive tactics.\u00a0 So has long-time free-market economist, Brian Gottlob.\u00a0 So what\u2019s behind the We Built This slogan, and how much do entrepreneurs really relate?
\n
\nA couple days after President Obama said \u201cSomebody invested in roads and bridges. If you\u2019ve got a business — you didn\u2019t build that. Somebody else made that happen\u201d in Roanoke, Virginia, the Romney campaign dispatched a video crew to Jack Gilchrist\u2019s Metal Fabricating business in Hudson, N.H. They had used his business for campaign events before, and knew he would be sympathetic. In the advertisement they came out with<\/a>,\u00a0Gilchrist asks President Obama, \u201cWhy are you demonizing us\u201d for building a business?<\/p>\n

And Gilchrist says he does<\/em> feel demonized by President Obama\u2019s comments about businesspeople. And he isn\u2019t alone. In fact, he\u2019s received almost 400 sympathetic emails after recording the campaign ad, and then speaking at the Republican Convention.\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n

Brian Gottlob is the principle of PolEcon, and an economist in New Hampshire. He says Romney\u2019s rhetoric is effective at mobilizing\u00a0business people, because it targets a common quality.<\/p>\n

\u201cBusiness people, entrepreneurs, have to have a lot of self-reliance, they have to be very confident, they put in a lot of hours,\u2019 he says. \u201cSo if you want to incite them, a great way to do that is to suggest that they have succeeded for a reason other than their own initiative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a historical detour here
\n<\/strong>
\nUniversity of Maryland historian, David Freund, says the rhetoric from this campaign runs much deeper. \u00a0It starts with the fact that, throughout American history, \u201ca lot of people could come to the U.S. from modest origins and do well for themselves.\u201d This fed an identity a self-reliance upon which the \u201cwe built this\u201d rhetoric is built.<\/p>\n

But then, thanks to the New Deal, the G.I. bill, and other post-depression federal programs that proliferated between the 1940s and 1960s, both Republican and Democratic administrations created what Freund calls \u201ca large interventionist state.\u201d The resulting programs gave birth to a large middle class after World War II. But still, he says, \u201cthe beneficiaries of these programs were really invested in the idea that the thing that made them more successful was their own hard work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the 1930s \u2013 and particularly during the racial angst of the 1970s and 1980s, Freund says, it became politically expedient to frame the small amount of resources going to the underprivileged and minorities as \u201cwelfare.\u201d Meanwhile \u2013 according to Freund — the \u201cenormous amount of resources going to the working class, the middle class,\u201d like the home mortgages, which \u201cthe government redesigned and propped up,\u201d were intentionally masked, and marketed as \u201cprotecting markets, unleashing markets, that kind of rhetoric.\u201d So now, Freund says, that created the impression that the only thing the American government does is hand out welfare checks to the needy.<\/p>\n

Freund says today, he sees the consequence of this masking rhetoric in his history classes.\u00a0 College students just don\u2019t understand the role institutions play in their lives. And if they don\u2019t know what the government does, how can they \u2013 we \u2013 participate effectively in our democracy?<\/p>\n

But back to New Hampshire
\n<\/strong>
\nBrian Gottlob is a long time free-market economist, so he\u2019s all about maintaining a lean government.\u00a0 But he, too, is worried about the effects of rhetoric that \u201cdrives a wedge\u201d between business interests and the government.\u00a0 Believe it or not, Gottlob is nostalgic \u2013 almost longing \u2013 for the economic recession of the early 1990\u2019s. Back then, he says, New Hampshire’s economy took an even hard hit than it has recently. But, he says, that didn’t stop government and business interests from working together to solve problems.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey came up with an adjustment to the tax structure that broadened business taxes,\u201d introducing the Business Enterprise Tax, which \u201ccaptured a lot more businesses,\u201d Gottlob says. \u201cI think we have those issues now, but I don\u2019t see a willingness or an interest in sitting down and saying \u2018how do we work these out?’\u201d<\/p>\n

The surprising thing is, even Jack Gilchrist \u2013 whom you might call a mascot of the Romney campaign \u2013 is tired of the campaigns\u2019 divisive, unproductive rhetoric. “When we peel off the layers of that misinformation, we\u2019re really not very far apart,\u201d Gilchrist says. \u201cThere\u2019s not a lot of way righties and way lefties out there. So we need to be reasonable, and we need to make conversation with each other. Not talking points.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gilchrist keeps a folder in his email inbox called \u201chaters.\u201d In it, there are more than 400 angry emails, mostly from supporters of President Obama. Gilchrist has written back to every single one.<\/p>\n

And most of the time, he says, he finds a middle ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The three words of what has become Governor Romney\u2019s campaign slogan, \u201cWe Built This,\u201d are hard to avoid these days. One could argue they exemplify a political rhetoric that pits business-loving Romney supporters against government-loving supporters of President Obama. And although \u201cwe built this\u201d has become a rallying cry for the right, we found that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":11884,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[54,51,53,14],"tags":[380,383,382,502,381],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11879"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11879"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11925,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11879\/revisions\/11925"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}