Romney targets entrepreneurs, forgets other people exist

Ineffective. You want to know one of the many reasons why Mitt Romney is losing? Look at this:

Mitt Romney intensified his own rhetoric on Tuesday and called President Obama's recent comments about small business "insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America."

And this:

Just a word to the women entrepreneurs out there. If we become, if we become president and vice president we want to speak to you, we want to help you. Women in this country are more likely to start businesses than men. Women need our help.

And this, from his convention speech:

Fourth, to assure every entrepreneur and every job creator that their investments in America will not vanish as have those in Greece, we will cut the deficit and put America on track to a balanced budget.

Indeed, the GOP's whole convention revolved around "you didn't build that," although they helpfully made Pres. Barack Obama's point by morphing that into "We built it!"'exactly the point Obama was making before his comments were sliced and spliced to mean something entirely different.

So is Romney wise to focus so intensely on entrepreneurs. First of all, are there even enough entrepreneurs to give Romney a significant electoral boost? There are about a billion ways to define the word, as this article explains. They range from 27 million small businesses, to 6 million small businesses with employees, to less than two million small businesses with employees that have been around less than five years. And you can keep getting more restrictive than that if you'd like.

Put another way, is a taxi driver or chiropractor or yoga instructor an entrepreneur the same way that Steve Jobs and Sam Walton were? Of course not. So the word itself suffers from vagueness.

But let's use the more expansive definition anyway, as I assume that most self-employed people fancy themselves entrepreneurs. I could be wrong, but let's assume that for argument's sake. If you've started a business, whether it's a dentist's office, or a consultancy, or an eBay or Etsy shop, or Facebook, then you're an entrepreneur. And 27 million of them is a significant number.

Still, that's less than 10 percent of the American population, less than the 37 million African Americans in the country, or the the 50 million Latinos.

(Continue reading below the fold.)