The Obama campaign is not backing away from the "you didn't build that" message, if Mike Allen's account of plans for the Democratic convention is accurate. He writes:
Each night of the convention will include a star turn for what planners call "real people" – an auto worker whose job was saved, a student who benefited from college loans and an entrepreneur fueled by federal research-and-development funds.
This idea that government, rather than individuals, are responsible for success is not some gaffe or out-of-context remark; it's the Obama campaign's core message and ideology. Charles Krauthammer has a new column that ties this ideology to Obama's failures:
If Republicans want to win, Obama's deeply revealing, teleprompter-free you-didn't-build-that confession of faith needs to be hung around his neck until Election Day. The third consecutive summer-of-recovery-that-never-came is attributable not just to Obama being in over his head but to what's in his head: a government-centered vision of the economy and society, and the policies that flow from it.
Four years of that and this is what you get.
The same vision is made clear in the Obama campaign's slideshow on the life of "Julia."
As I said about Julia, it's a long distance from "ask not what your county can do for you" to "look at all the free goodies the government is giving you."