Rick Santorum Laments: GOP Didn’t Use ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Enough Against Obama In 2012

Speaking at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, D.C., former senator argued that the Republican Party did not sufficiently exploit a partial quote of Obama’s during the presidential campaign, leading to the defeat of the Romney/Ryan ticket come November.

After President Obama said during a 2012 stump speech that “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” Mitt Romney made it a campaign theme despite the fact that the meaning of the quote was largely disputed given the president’s preface about the roads and infrastructure that allows people to conduct business.

Even though the GOP used the slogan against Obama at their own Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fl., Santorum believes they did not use it correctly. Instead of showing off self-made business owners to rebut the Obama quote, Santorum said, the convention should have featured blue-collar workers who’ve benefited from those businesses.

“One after another, they talked about the business they had built. But not a single—not a single —factory worker went out there,” Santorum said, according to POLITICO. “Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them. You know what? They built that company too! And we should have had them on that stage.”

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