Remarking that he likes Gatorade, Yodels and Klondike ice cream bars – and buying bottles of Gatorade on his way out – Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown burnished his “everyman” image by choosing a Quincy 7-Eleven for the setting of his latest attack on Democrat Elizabeth Warren’s comments regarding business success.
Brown visited the store owned by Dennis Lane, president of the New England 7-Eleven Franchise Owners Association and the national spokesman for “Reform Swipe Fees NOW!” That group is a coalition of business owners who support provisions in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill reigning in fees for processing debit card transactions. Brown said he worked with Lane on the swipe fee issue.
Lane, speaking to reporters with Brown by his side, said he was “extremely offended” by Warren’s August 2011 comments, in which she said, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. You built a factory out there, good for you…but you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.”
The comments made national headlines this month when President Obama echoed Warren’s remarks at a campaign rally saying, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life … Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and Brown have painted Warren and Obama as anti-small business.
Brown, on Friday, let Lane make the argument for him. “I’ve watched that clip half a dozen times, each time I see it I get angrier and angrier and angrier,” Lane said, referring to a video of Warren’s remarks. “My response to that well-quoted phrase that ‘you did not do it,’ yes, I did….I built this business. There are days I’m here 16 hours a day, there are weeks that I’m here seven days a week, there are times I travel to Washington to work on behalf of small business all across the country.”
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This story first ran in the Springfield Republican on July 27, 2012.
