It’s already turning out to be a great week for Fox News.
Last Friday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handed Republicans the sound bite of their dreams at a Boston address.
“Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and business that create jobs,” Clinton said, while rounding up women voters at a rally for Massachusetts Democratic gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley.
Promptly compared to President Barack Obama’s infamous 2012 “You Didn’t Build That” campaign speech, Clinton’s snafu is gladly being thumped around by conservative hosts like a beachball at a pool party.
Hillary’s “businesses don’t create jobs” quote is honestly inexplicable. Like, cannot be explained. https://t.co/grmRwd5iKS via @theblaze
— S.E. Cupp (@secupp) October 26, 2014
Hillary: “Don’t let anyone tell u it’s corporations&businesses that create jobs.” How then did private sector people get jobs? Who did it???
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) October 24, 2014
The semantic blunder, however, is unlikely to toss a wrench in her un-campaign—after all, it’s not like she wrote off the poorest 47 percent of Americans as welfare parasites. (Of course, Mitt Romney’s comments were inevitably taken out of context, too.)
With context applied, Clinton’s speech feels a lot less like an attack on mom-and-pop small business and more like an assault on supply side economics—though many don’t make that distinction. Moreover, a Clinton aide reportedly told Politico later that day that Clinton’s comment referred specifically to tax breaks for corporations.
“More tax cuts for the top and for companies that ship jobs overseas while taxpayers and voters are stuck paying the freight just doesn’t add up,” Clinton continued at Friday’s rally. “Now, that kind of thinking might win you an award for outsourcing excellence, but Massachusetts can do better than that.”
A spokesperson for Charlie Baker, who is running against Martha Coakley for Massachusetts governor, declined to comment for this story.
Photo via marcn/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)