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Jan. 21, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:30
January 21, 2010, Thursday, Hour #2
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Time Text
My my, my, my folks, it it just, it's it's all going wrong for the one.
I mean, it's all falling apart on Obama.
Try this headline from the Jerusalem Post, Obama.
Our expectations of Mid East progress were too high.
Yeah.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen.
I am Rush Limboa, serving humanity, having more fun than a human being.
Wait a second.
This microphone sagging.
Just a second.
There it is.
Okay, we're back.
800-282-288-2, the email address, L Rushmall at EIBNet.com.
A hearty welcome to those of you watching the Ditto Cam today in high definition.
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Okay.
Get this.
It's from Jerusalem Post getting the Israelis and Palestinians to agree to negotiate, or even to agree to the framework in which negotiations will take place is just really hard.
President Obama said in an interview with Time magazine published today as the president was completing his first year in office.
and that is really hard is in quotes its just really hard Yes, yes, it's stored.
That's how you have to interpret that.
You talk about crash and burn all in one week.
Obama admitted the administration overestimated, quote, our ability to persuade both sides to negotiate when their politics ran contrary to that.
So overestimated his own ability to persuade.
Imagine that.
Now let's go to this political story.
And yes, you we're getting to your phone calls in a second segment of this hour.
In fact, in this half hour.
Obama's first year, what went wrong?
Specifically, it was wrong on three major counts, the administration.
Obama and his team believe that the 2008 election represented something seismic.
In other words, something fundamental and long-lasting.
Just like the Republicans made the same mistake in 1994 when they won the House.
The second thing that went wrong, Obama believed that early success would be self-reinforcing, building a powerful momentum for bold government action.
The belief was the essence of the White House's theory of the big bang.
You get the porculus slush fund passed, and that provides the impetus and the momentum for everything else to follow.
So this tells us they were in a panic for much of this year, particularly when we get to August when the Tea Party started.
And the, well, the Tea Party started before August.
Those town meetings.
And they started hustling trying to get health care done before the August recess.
The third, most devoutly of all, the Obama team believed that there was something singular about the president's appeal and the ability to surprise.
Now, this is in the politico, and these are the first three things that went wrong.
Say believed he was the Messiah, that the porcupist bill was going to presage uh the passage of everything else, and that America had undergone a seismic change.
But there's actually a fourth.
Ladies and gentlemen.
Now you know that uh I uh I have manners, and I I was uh I was raised properly with a great set of core values, and one of those is to not brag.
And of course, it ain't bragging if you've done it, and ain't bragging if you can do it.
I think it was Babe Ruth who said that.
But as you know, I I do not like talking about myself.
And I'm very uncomfortable with that.
I'm I'm very uncomfortable with me being the issue, but I have been a lot of this year.
And this is one of those things, if I don't say it, it won't be said.
And this one Is fundamentally true.
There are four things that went wrong.
And the first one, the first one.
Five days before he was immaculated.
I said, I hope he fails.
That burst this messianic celebrity-tarred bubble that Obama was in.
Up until that time, everybody, every Republican, every Democrat, everybody in the political class, had censored themselves.
And we're talking about the historic nature and how we must drop all partisanship.
We must all work together to help this historic president succeed in his job.
And there came one voice.
And it belonged to me.
Ill Rushbow, the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all-feeling Maharashi.
I simply said, I don't like his policies.
They are going to destroy the country as we know it.
I hope he fails.
And that took away all of the gilding.
That took away all of the stars.
That took away all of the celebrity that forced him into a political bubble even before he was immaculated.
Had that not been said, the rest of these three things might not have gone wrong.
Had I joined the fray, and I had I had I come before you on this program and behind this microphone, and had I said, folks, we've got to stand down.
This is too important for the country.
This is too historic.
We cannot afford for this president to fail.
We must.
Not only would I have lost over half of you, forever, but we probably would have health care today.
We probably would have cap and trade by now.
Maybe not on cap and trade because the uh the uh uh uh climate gate thing.
And he never knew.
I mean that the Tea Party people and the and the uh uh town hall people might have been able to stop health care on their own.
Because I'm not saying I was a singular player here, but there was only one person who dared treat this president as any other president is treated, as a political figure.
They said conservatism was dead, they said the era of Reagan was over, they said we could no longer win anywhere but the South with white people.
Uh they said that we were dead in New England.
All of that conventional wisdom was wrong, and all of it did not scare me into silence.
It did not motivate me in the changing course so I could be accepted by certain numbers of people.
There is another story here in the uh Washington Post.
Obama blames the Massachusetts Senate loss on the middle class economic pain.
We were just too busy getting stuff done.
Uh Obama will explain to us why his policies that were rejected are good for us.
He's gonna have to do that.
He's gonna have to tell us why what we misunderstand.
Uh what the president needs to do is explain to the people exactly why what has been done is going to get us on a better path in the future, said the former Obama White House communications director and the Ma'o loving Anita Dunn.
He's gonna have to tell us what we don't understand.
So the arrogance and the conceit is still there.
And this story in the Washington Post says this this election of Scott Brown had nothing to do with health care.
It was not that.
Yet the New York Times lead editorial, the Massachusetts election is about Obama.
He has lost touch.
He has not said or done the right thing often enough.
Mr. Obama seems to have lost touch with two core issues.
Their jobs and their homes.
Mr. Obama's challenge is that most Americans are not seeing a recovery.
Mr. Obama has not said or done the right thing often enough when it comes to job creation and housing.
Mr. Obama has three years to show the kind of vision and leadership on the economy that got him elected.
There wasn't any such vision that got him elected.
What got him elected was cult-like speeches.
We're gonna make the sea levels fall.
Obama's given it his best shot, New York Times.
He only knows to do what he did.
There's a story in the stack, by the way.
House Democrats, some of them, have asked the White House to extend the Bush tax cuts.
House because of this economic recovery being so bad.
Obama, the White House said, no way, we're not doing it.
But so House Democrats asked for the Bush tax cuts to be extended.
New York Times, Obama trying to turn around his presidency, reeling from the Republican victory in Massachusetts.
And uh inside the White House.
A debate has ensued.
This is the Times version of this, not the political version.
Uh what lessons to draw?
Did the president try to enact too much change or not enough change?
Was he too liberal or too close to financial institutions?
Should he tack to the center or more aggressively push a progressive agenda?
Mr. Obama has often confronted moments of challenge with a major speech with the State of the Union now scheduled for Wednesday.
He has another such opportunity.
AIDS said he will use it to reframe his record and aspiration.
A speech, which is all he does.
His this is a speech.
That's you've got to try to change it with a speech.
Well, the luster is gone from the speeches.
So they have not learned anything.
You gotta hear this.
Chuck Hugh Schumer, livid, livid over the Supreme Court decision, which takes away all the bans on whatever amount of money corporations want to spend on advertising in political campaigns.
He just hates it.
The Supreme Court has just predetermined the winners of next November's elections.
It won't be Republicans, it won't be Democrats, it'll be corporate America.
Our system of governments, the best in the world, due to the ability of average citizens to participate and engage their elected officials without the belief that there are corrupting influences at play.
I have not seen a decision that more undermines campaign finance.
And it's probably one of the three or four decisions in the history of the Supreme Court that most undermines democracy.
We will regret the day that this decision has been issued.
Quite the contrary, Chuck Hugh.
Freedom is awakening from its coma today.
This does not undermine democracy.
It strengthens it.
It gets away from all these other liberal ideas that everything must be equal, to be fair.
Big corporation can't donate any more than a little corporation.
There have to be limits at all.
100 years of precedent has been tossed overboard.
It is such a great decision, and you know it's a great decision when you know Chuck Ush Schumer is this angry.
And again, did you hear him?
I I thought I've told you for the past couple of days, if you have a job in America, you have a bullseye on your back because the Democrat Party is targeting your corporation, your company, your small business.
Look at their enemies list: big oil, big pharmaceutical, big hospital, big insurance, big retailer.
Any of these people, you work for them, you've got a bullseye on your back because your employer does as well.
It will be corporate America that wins the next election.
What he really means here is that we Democrats will uh we Democrats will regret the day this decision was made because now corporations can fight us back.
Now corporations can fight back against us, and I can't wait to see what the banks do with their advertising since Obama has tried to put the screws to them two or three times the latest time just today.
Back after this.
So Chuck Hughes all concerned.
By the way, I thought I thought we weren't supposed to criticize the court.
I thought the court was independent.
Remember Chuck Hughes said, not supposed to criticize the Supreme Court.
He just did.
Chuck Hugh, let me tell you something.
I would much prefer corporations winning and running elections than I would unions.
Much prefer it.
It reminds me to get to this Daniel Henniger piece in the Wall Street Journal soon, but I I promise we'll go to the phones, so we'll go to the phones.
We'll start in Jacksonville, Florida, with George.
Great to have you on the program today, sir.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, it's an honor to be speaking with.
Thank you.
I will tell you after monumental events like the election of uh Scott Brown in Massachusetts, I sometimes wonder what if.
And I remember when Senator Kennedy on his deathbed sent a letter to DeVall Patrick and said, No, no, no, can't follow the law.
Let's change the law and immediately appoint somebody because health care is that important.
My teenage daughter sometimes says, Karma is a witch.
And I'm I'm wondering whether if that had not changed, whether today Martha Coakley might be the new Senator.
Well, I think I think that the bunch of people doing postmortems on this and would agree with you that if if they had just, you know, just followed the law and and and gone ahead with with their special election and and not changed the law so that the governor could appoint somebody, uh then they would probably have still held on to the 60th seat.
But those who live by the case, there's no question about it, in fact.
You know, those who live by political chicanery die by political chickenery.
Yeah, uh, I love that phrase too.
It's absolutely right.
Thanks, George, appreciate it.
Where are we going next?
Uh Detroit, Ken, nice to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Yeah, hello, Rush.
I uh wanted to uh uh comment on how uh not only uh Obama and um the Democrats have responded to the election in Massachusetts, but what we seen from it.
Uh first of all, when we look at their behavior, their total rejection of it, it shows that they're not living in a real world, Rush.
They're living in the world of fantasy.
Um the vote clearly showed that those of us who love freedom, who love this country, who embrace the Constitution.
We have said that we reject the statist uh socialist agenda that uh Barack Obama and uh the Democrats are trying to force on us, Rush.
I mean, that that's pretty clear that uh the American people, this is how we feel, this is what we're getting out of this uh look at I I know what you're saying, that they've heard us.
They see.
They've they've got they have received a clear message.
Don't think it's going to change them.
No, not at all.
It's gonna they're gonna dislike us and hold us in contempt even more.
They're gonna think we're even stupider than they thought, and they're gonna get even with us.
This is the way the Democrats operate.
They love you when you elect them, but when you don't see the light, when you haven't done the right thing, you become their enemy.
Look, they were governing against the will of the American people to begin with, and they're gonna double down on that.
They're gonna go through a two-week or three-week show here, as I said, trying to convince people they have changed their minds, that they have seen the light, that they now understand that they were out of touch with the American people.
Like this story here.
Uh, this is ABC News, this this exclusive interview that Obama did with uh with Stephanopoulos.
We lost touch with the American people last year.
Obama said today he believes he lost a direct connection to the American people in his first year in orifice because he focused too heavily on policy making.
If there's one thing that I regret this year, is that we were too busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of the sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make those sure those institutions are matching up with those values.
He doesn't know what the core values are.
He wants to impose new ones.
He wants to enforce new this is this is so much poppycock.
The president said he made a mistake in assuming that if he focused on policy decisions, the American people would understand the reasoning behind them.
My God, this guy made more speeches in anybody his first six months.
He made more speech.
He did not lose touch with the American people.
He just exposed himself to be somebody he was not in terms of who they had voted for.
That I do think is a mistake of mine, Obama said.
I think the assumption was if I just focused on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law, or if we're making a good rational decision here that people will get it.
They got it.
They didn't like what you were focusing on.
They didn't like what you weren't focusing on.
They didn't think you were making rational decisions.
And listen to this.
This is the Pies de Resistance.
If you think these guys just tell folks, do not fall for this.
This this we've seen the light.
We have received your message.
We know we overstepped.
We know that we were out of touch.
We know we tried to grab too much.
We know we were governing against Europe.
Don't if e none of that is true.
And the president's quote here in an interview with Stephanopoulos illustrates it.
Here's my assessment.
This is Obama speaking.
Here's my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country.
The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office.
People are angry and they're frustrated, not just because of what's happened in the last year or the last two years, but what's happened over the last eight years.
So he is still like a spoiled rotten little man child blaming George W. Bush.
Now he is either delusional or he is trying to move public opinion in this direction.
He's trying to tell people that the reason they're mad is not the reason they're mad.
They're mad at him.
They're mad at health care.
They're mad at spending.
They're mad at this out-of-control socialist agenda.
It wasn't anger at George Bush that elected Scott Brown.
Scott Brown is a Republican.
They are not folks going to change who they are.
They have heard and received the clear message.
Behind closed doors, they are shouting obscenities aimed at us.
Don't doubt me.
State controlled associated press has a piece out today.
Basically say they're they're trying to destroy Scott Brown.
Uh this is the kind of piece that they would have normally run before the election, but the opposition research didn't pull anything up, so now it's time to take him out after he's been elected.
That coming up first, George in East Hartford, Connecticut.
Nice to have you on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Yeah, Rush.
You know, what I'm most hopeful out of the Scott Brown victory is the following, and that is that my biggest fear in the 2010 elections were going to be these third party candidates, these Tea Party folks that I line up with, because it's a very conservative message, whether it's the war on terror or the deficit or this health care debate.
And Scott Brown mirrored that message perfectly.
So now the message swings both ways.
The Republic uh Democrats are ignoring the message of Scott Brown.
The Republicans do need to take heed.
All they have to do to keep these third party candidates out, which I think favors the Republicans is to march on the same blueprint that he did.
Conservative conservatism, like you say, wins all the time.
They take that message and run with it, Rush.
Well, take more third party out.
Okay, here's the two things on this.
And I, you know, I'm uh again grounded in reality here.
I am Mr. Literal.
And uh do not doubt me.
The Republican Party is kind of like the Libs in a way.
Not nearly as bad, but they're they're they're out there crowing about how happy they are too.
But believe me, the people in the party who consider themselves Rockefeller Republicans or liberal Republicans, this this is not they don't want guys winning in pickup trucks.
They dislike Sarah Palin for the same reason.
Now the Republican Party right now is going to embrace, uh, and I hope the embrace continues.
My my history with the Republican Party is that they're not happy with conservatives.
They really didn't like Reagan.
Of course they loved winning, and they put up with it, but Reagan is not really to the to the Northeastern Country Club blue blood types, Reagan was not the answer.
Now, this is what this is why, you know, I I I spent so much time yesterday kicking back at these people.
They're the ones.
It was Republicans.
I played the sound bites of Chris Shays and Colin Powell.
These are the people I'm talking about.
Um the people that liberals think ought to be the Leaders of our party, because they'll take it down to the sewer.
They'll take it so low we will never win anything.
We are gonna be a regional party.
We're only gonna attract the votes of white Southerners.
Uh we'll never elect anybody from New England.
All of that's out the window now, with a basically conservative message.
Now the third party people.
Uh yeah, this probably puts a damper on on third party uh stuff because Scott Brown won big time as a Republican.
He did not win as a third party candidate.
He did not disavow being a Republican.
He did not disavow being a conservative.
And so to the extent that uh that people want a third party, uh Powell or uh Scott Brown here has got a little bit in the way.
It'll be interesting to see their reaction to it, if there is one.
Uh but a third party on our side would only guarantee Democrat victory.
I I it's it's a it's just a bad idea.
It is this especially, especially upon reflection after this election on Tuesday of Scott Brown.
The you know, we say take over the Republican Party, well, how do we do it?
This is how you do it.
You get candidates who can articulate conservatism, who understand what they're running against.
In Brown's case, he was running against elitism.
He was running against the machine.
Now, what is the machine?
Well, let me go right to Dan let's go to Daniel Henniger's piece because this you have to hear this.
Wall Street Journal today.
It's entitled The Fall of the House of Kennedy.
The battle over who defines the work and institutions that make a nation thrive and grow.
Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts will not endure unless Republicans clearly understand the meaning of the machine that he ran against and defeated.
Yeah, it is about a general revulsion at government spending, what is sometimes called the blob.
But blobs are shapeless things, and in the days ahead we will see the Obama White House work hard to reshape the blob into a deficit hawk.
Unless the facade is ripped away, the machine will survive.
The revolt against the machine began with the voters' 2006 ouster of the Republican majority in Congress for making a mockery of fiscal rectitude.
An angry electorate then swept Obama into office.
And now Obama is uh is saying voters elected him on the same wave of anger that elected Scott Brown, sorry, but Messrs.
Obama and Brown are not surfing in the same political ocean.
As an aside, except for what he said on spending, Scott Brown is George W. Bush.
You would not you I believe George Bush would beat Obama today if the election were today, knowing what we know now.
But back to Henninger.
The central battle in our time is over political primacy.
It is a competition between the public sector and the private sector over who defines the work and the institutions that make a nation thrive and grow.
In 1962, this is key.
In 1962, President JFK planted the seeds that grew the modern Democrat Party.
That year, JFK signed executive order 1098, allowing the unionization of the federal workforce.
This changed everything in the American political system.
Kennedy's order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public workforce in many states and cities.
This in turn led to the fantastic growth in membership of the public employee unions.
The American Federation of State County Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union, and the National Teachers Education Association.
They broke the public's bank.
More than that, they entrenched a system of taking money from members' dues and spending it on political campaigns.
Over time, this transformed the Democrat Party into a public sector dependency.
They became different than the party of FDR, Truman, Meany, and uh and and Walter Ruther.
That party was allied with the fading industrial unions, which in turn were tethered to a real world of profit and loss.
The states in the north and on the coasts turned blue, because blue is the color of the public sector unions.
This tax and spend milieu became the training ground for their politicians.
Until the Obama acception, the only recent Democrats electable to the presidency had had to be centrist Southerners, little known to the country.
Every post Kennedy liberal who tried failed, including Teddy.
What an irony it is that in the same week the Kennedy labor legacy hit the wall in Massachusetts.
The National Education Association approved a one million dollar donation from the Union's contingency fund to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate.
It is the Kennedy legacy, this Kennedy legacy, the public union tax and spend machine that drove blue Massachusetts into revolt Tuesday.
That is the machine.
That is the machine.
The public union tax and spend machine.
Yes, health care was ground zero, but Massachusetts, like New Jersey, like California, like New York, has been building toward this explosion for years.
According to a study done for the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, spending in specific public categories there skyrocketed the past 20 years.
Public safety, the last 20 years spending up 139%.
Social services up 130%.
Education up 130%.
Let's see, and of course, Medicaid madness up 163% before mass care kicked in more Medicaid obligations.
But here's the party's self-destroying kicker.
Feeding the public union's wage demands starved other government responsibilities.
It ruined our ability to have a useful debate about any other public functions.
Massachusetts spending fell for mental health, fell for the environment, fell for housing and higher education.
The physical infrastructure in blue states is literally falling apart.
But look at these public wage and pension related outlays ever upward.
Enter the Obama administration, the first one born and raised inside this public bubble with zero private sector cabinet members.
Act one, a $787 billion slush fund, which they brag mainly saved state and local jobs.
Then came the six-month odyssey for Obama's one trillion dollar health care bill dripping with taxes.
Independent voters felt like everything was being sucked into a public sector vortex.
This is why New Jersey's Chris Christie won running on nothing.
It is why in California, Carly Fiorina is within three points of Barbara Boxer.
It is why the party JFK enabled, the machine is hitting the wall.
And there's no way out for these Democrats.
They made a Faustian bargain 40 years ago with the public unions.
For the outlays alone, they will get some version of Obama health care.
They will also get the same old populist anger as well.
Scott Brown's victory has given the GOP a rare, narrow chance to align itself with an electorate that understands its anger.
Now the Republican Party has to find a way to disconnect from a political legacy that smothered governments at all levels and is now smothering the Democrat Party.
In other words, the machine is all of the growth of the public sector, government, state, city, federal, growing.
With public employee unions growing and wages growing, sucking money out of the private sector.
This is why.
This is why every one of the so-called conservative pundits who are the new intelligentsia, who say we got to get rid of Reagan, who say we have to realize the public wants more government.
We have to realize the public understands that more government's good, they want spending, We've got to do it better.
Do not listen to them.
They could not be more wrong.
Scott Brown showed them how wrong they are.
The machine is all of these people in Washington whose lives are oriented around the government growing and being involved in as much of everything as policy, from policy to infrastructure to whatever.
That's the machine.
The Republicans have got to get out of town.
They have got to understand that people will only this this is what being an outsider means.
Being an outsider means you're simply not a member of a union.
You're not a member of a public employees' union.
You live in the country, and you want the cat the private sector to be the place where economic opportunity is.
You don't want it to be in government.
You don't want it to be in the public sector.
You don't want unions to be growing while everybody else is unemployed and starving.
That's the machine.
Do not listen to a single conservative pundit living or breathing in the New York, Boston, Washington corridor, who tells you that the American people want more government.
That the era of tax cuts, that's over.
The era of Reagan, that's over.
One election has shown this.
We'll be back.
Do not score away.
I have to hit this again, ladies and gentlemen.
I touched on it, but I have to hit it again.
Obama told Time Magazine interview is too optimistic on the intractable Middle East.
Obama said in an interview published today he had underestimated the ability and the difficulty of resolving the Middle East conflict.
He had set expectations too high.
If we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high.
Now who is the president wasn't quite sure how tough this would be before he was elected?
That is scary.
We all knew how tough it would be.
No, everybody thought Bush was an imbue.
Nobody's ever gotten Middle East peace.
I think what he's really surprised at, I think what he's really surprised at is how intractable the Palestinians are.
I think that's what he's found out.
With Pelosi saying she can't get health care through the House, this is it, folks.
It's officially dead.
From the Hill.com.
Chuck Yu Schumer has called for hearings on the American Supreme Court decision, lifting limits on corporate spending in political advertising.
Unbelievable.
Chuck Schumer's announcing that he's going to hold hearings on the impact of the Supreme Court decision today within a couple of weeks.
The sheer arrogance he's calling the Supreme Court decision unamerican.
That's about an independent judiciary, I thought, Senator Schumer.
We're not supposed to criticize judges and uh justices.
And this is not, you can't change a decision of the Supreme Court.
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