BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

There has been much written about President Obama’s speech in Roanoke, VA, on July 13. What drew so much attention was this: “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.  The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet…”

There is some discussion as to what “that” refers, whether it is the small business or the “unbelievable American system”. But semantics is a distraction.

The debate should be over the speech itself, not its sentence construction. Continue reading →