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Nov. 27, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:35
November 27, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #3
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I want to take some calls in this hour about something I started in our number two of today's program filling in for Rush.
I'm throwing out my theory as to what happened in the election earlier this month.
Let me explain it this way.
You ever get drunk?
I know some of you are gonna admit to it.
Ever get high?
You ever go in a spending binge?
The thing about those things are the people that do it, they're enjoying it while they're doing it.
You just pay for it later.
And that's what I think is happening with people who vote purely for their own self-interest so they keep getting things from government.
We're gonna pay for it later.
Socialism flops everywhere.
I can prove my point though on this.
You get people who are in denial about the damage that's done long term.
Look at the states, the states here in the United States that have the biggest budget problems right now.
Number one is probably California or it might be Illinois.
They go back and forth.
Take a look at any of these states that have huge unfunded pension liabilities, whose budgets are on tilt, they keep raising taxes and borrowing money, but their deficits get larger and larger and larger.
Those states are run entirely by Democrats.
And the voters keep re-electing them.
You look at California, you wonder how they could possibly keep putting in place the same Democrats that have driven them off the edge.
Look at the big cities in the United States.
With dysfunctional public schools, broken budgets, high crime problems, almost all of them are run entirely by liberals.
Yet people keep voting for them.
Because those politicians keep promising to keep the benefits coming.
And people that are in need can't imagine living without those benefits.
The new thing in America is other than maybe during the depression.
We haven't had as an economy as bad as this one in a long time.
During the depression, though, we didn't yet have the welfare state.
There was perhaps a sense that things could turn around, which they did, but there weren't all of those people that were dependent.
Now we've got so many people on this program or that program or the other program.
Oh my goodness, if the Republicans cut mass transit aid, I'll lose my bus route and how will I get to work or how will I do how will I do this?
You can fill in whatever blank you want to fill in.
When you have so much dependency in place, it's hard to argue against politically the people upon whom the voters think that they're dependent.
Rush talks about how you can't run against Santa Claus.
Giving away all of this stuff to people.
That's a challenge.
The good news about this is the election was close.
And if you look at the red and the blue maps, just about if you were parachuted into the United States, you'd almost certainly land in an area where American values are still strong.
The whole country's red.
Unfortunately, the concentration of blue is where a lot of the population is.
But the American values are still there.
Many people still hold them.
You have kids that are getting out of high school and getting out of college who still dream of going out and starting a business, or going to work in a field where they can become successful, become an executive.
There are people who go to work in the manufacturing industry, hoping they can learn from the boss in ten, fifteen years maybe partner up with him.
This still does exist.
People still passionately care.
All you have to do is talk to people.
But there's a real disconnect between those people and the ones who voted for Barack Obama.
I remember, can I quote can I quote a guy who's on Fox?
Can I can I do that?
I can't.
Bill O'Reilly said something.
He said he couldn't believe that the Democrats at their convention were making such a big deal about abortion and contraceptives that he didn't think that those were issues that resonated this.
I thought he was right.
I didn't think that social issues Would matter all that much in an election in which the economy stunk because when the economy stinks, that tends to trump everything.
But the Democrats must have known what they were doing.
I mean, you have people out there who were convinced that if Mitt Romney ran, abortion was going to be illegal two days later.
And they were freaked about that.
Freaked about the what's going on in our country, freaked about the devil.
No.
They were freaked about that.
It in one way or another, what the Democrats have done is they've cherry picked all of these groups, public employee unions, people on food stamps, senior citizens, and they've gotten them all dependent in one way or another on government.
And that's a hard thing to run against.
And we now have people that will vote their own self-interest, even trivial self-interest, I don't know.
Rather than for the kind of values that have made our country what it is.
That's my take on the election.
1-800-282882 is the phone number at the Rush Limbaugh program.
Let's go to a cell phone in Illinois.
Rafael, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show with Mark Belling.
Hi, uh good to talk to you.
Thank you.
Um I think I think you're uh very hitting up right up on against the point.
You can't expect people to vote against their own self uh economic interest.
I mean it's against human nature to do that.
It's it's something that nobody, you know, in the right mind would do.
It's you know, and and well, and that's why that's I I think you're right, and that's why the problem is how many people who are now dependent.
It used to be that we had people who were dependent upon government because we set up a social safety net in this country that in many ways was well was well well advised.
We created social security, we created Medicare, and we originally created food stamps for people who were truly hungry.
We did all of that.
But th that was never the majority.
You now have so many people that are dependent upon government, and that's the real threat of Obamacare if we now get our health care from the government that all they're going to do in every election is keep telling all of these individuals and groups the Republicans are going to take this stuff away from you, even if it isn't true, or even if eventually some stuff is going to have to be taken away because we don't have any money left.
And you're right.
I mean, and studies after studies, even with little children show that people will go for the small benefit right away rather than waiting for the large benefit.
They've done this with room fulls of kids where they put them in a room full of uh, you know, with a plate full of cookies and say, if you just wait a little while, we'll give you two cookies, or you can have this one.
Well 90 percent of the city.
It's the flaw with human nature.
We all know that if we eat too much we beg we get overweight, develop health pro problems, but boy, that food looks good at the time.
Same thing with the alcoholic.
He realizes he's making you know making a mess of his life, but he needs that drunk to get his next buzz.
That's the problem of dependency, and it's the reason why we've got to do something about it sooner rather than later, or we're going to lose the country.
And I I think that you've got to start with understanding that the problem is people who are casting their votes with this in mind.
The one point though that I want to emphasize here is that some of these dependencies that I'm talking about are over things that are what you would have thought in the past rather trivial.
We're not talking about maintaining one's life.
We're talking in some cases about getting somebody else to pay for their contraceptives, even if it means telling the Roman Catholic Church that it has to just abandon its religious beliefs.
Well, I want my this, I want my that.
And what Obama and his campaign did, starting with the Julia with the Julia cartoon and going all the way through is they found all of these groups that they could get on one form of a dole or another and then tell them that the Republicans would take that away.
Thanks for the call, Rafael.
Let's go to Cheyenne, Wyoming and Jeff.
Jeff, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, um, thank you very much for taking my call, and it's a pleasure talking with you, Mr. Bellingham.
I just want to say that um I think part of this is that it's a misunderstanding of people or by people of economics, you know, of how we got to where we are and how to fix it.
And an example of that is the fair market versus the free market.
Mitt Romney kept saying that we need to have free market uh forces unleashed.
And Obama said, Well, we need the fair market and everybody needs to play by the rules.
Well, last night I was uh emailing a woman on a dating website, and I am single, and um sh I asked her what she did for a living, and she said that she stopped her seven year um business because um the only way that she was convinced the only way that we could fix things is if everybody would become generous and kind to their fellow uh Americans
and be led by the government as opposed to wanting to be their own boss and going out there and starting a business.
In fact, what she didn't do.
And people taking, she said that's what the small businesses do.
Well, and that that's probably her rationalization for the fact that she was failing, so she opts out and she doesn't believe in it anymore, and she thinks that we're dependent on something else.
What it comes down to is, I think for a lot of people, a rejection of the values that made America what it was.
When you look at the Republican convention and the rhetoric that you saw and all the small business owners that were out there and the we built that and all of that, I think that for many people that message resonated, but I think you have to acknowledge that for a lot of other people, it was a tuna of people, well, I'm never going to start my own business, I'm gonna work for somebody else, or my job is going to be with government, that that these things didn't really, you know, identify with them.
They didn't ring true to them, they didn't think they were relevant to their lives.
And the disconnect occurs when people don't realize that if you don't have somebody producing, if you don't have somebody making money, if you don't have somebody creating jobs, if you don't have some wealth out there, there's no way to pay for all of this.
That's where in the end this is all going to end badly for the people who are dependent, just as we've seen now in Greece and in the other countries that are facing economic collapse.
If you keep voting yourself more and more and more and more stuff that we don't have, the sixteen trillion dollar debt and the eighty-six trillion in unfunded liabilities becomes thirty and one hundred and twenty and forty and one hundred and fifty, and then we can't finance our bonds, and then we have to inflate the currency, and then the value of people's savings is gone.
All of these things are the logical conclusion of spending money that you don't have.
But in the short term, people are enjoying the benefits of the spending, and it's really, really hard to convince them that they're voting long term to screw themselves up.
We're a very, very short-term pleasure-oriented society.
Thank you for the call.
Now, how do the Republicans compete against this?
Some believe that fiscal conservatism has to change.
That you simply have to become more relevant to a culture that looks upon government as their mom and their dad.
The problem with that is that if Republicans tried to adapt to this new reality, they'd never be able to win.
You can't outpromise a Democrat.
Whatever you try to offer up to people, they'll just one up you and they'll do better.
What you have to do, and I know that this is a long-term project, and right after an election, it's really, really hard to give people any hope, but you've got to re-win the argument.
The one this sounds bad, but it isn't really.
The one upside of the mistake that the American public made is I think it's going to be proven to be a mistake.
You know, the 2010 elections did occur.
It's not a fate accomplished that we're going to be voting for Democrats again and again and again.
If things do get worse, or if pub people do see that these policies don't work, there's the likelihood that you can move in another direction.
I do think the Republicans have to expand their voting base.
I mean, the exit polls showed that 59% of white Americans voted for Romney.
59%.
But Obama so dominated all of the other groups that he was able to win.
You shouldn't have seventy-one percent of Hispanics, though, voting for Democrats.
Many Hispanic Americans are people who have the same values as conservative Americans.
They're socially conservative.
Many are entrepreneurial.
There hasn't been a good success rate in communicating with people who are not white Americans.
You can still win this argument.
The alternative is is to simply say that we're going to become a country that doesn't make it.
And I don't think that anybody is ready to give up on the United States.
The upside, the good part of this though, is as I said, it's still close.
The election was decided by a very narrow margin.
It's not like you've got to get everybody who's dependent to come around to our side.
You just need to win the argument a little bit better and maybe with better candidates.
With a few more people, and you can still turn this thing around.
My name is Mark Belling and I'm in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm still going to tell that story about the West Point goat.
It relates to all of this.
We're talking about the results of the election.
What happens when a country has too many people voting to keep their own benefits rolling in when they think they need government to take care of them?
Now we can argue academically.
Look around the world, it's never worked.
It's flopped everywhere it's been tried.
People in the short term, though, tend to vote their own self-interest.
Selfishness is a major motivator.
The thing is, and I mentioned the William McGurn column of today's Wall Street Journal a minute ago.
He does make the point that all of this stuff that they're voting for doesn't work.
One of his big campaigns was student loans, student loans, I'm gonna make student loans, I'm gonna forgive student loan debt, the whole thing.
Well, when you have loose student lun student loans and we hand out all these student loans, it just results in tuition inflating because the universities can charge high tuition because everybody's getting a loan.
Look what happened with the housing market.
When Barney Frank convinced Freddie Mac and Fannie May to start subsidizing and underwriting subprime loans because we wanted everyone to have a chance to get in on home ownership, the housing market cratered.
All of these things where we hand things out to people become self-destructive.
Look at what's happened with people who are in second, third, and fourth generation welfare dependency now.
Instead of helping them, we've ruined their lives.
Those are arguments though about what works and what doesn't work.
The challenge for conservatives is to win the argument, knowing that we're dealing with a political party and a political movement, Democrats and liberalism, that have decided as their basic strategy to get as many people as possible on the dole so they can keep holding the dole over them.
They're no different than crack dealers who hand out crack for the fur to the first time or for free, knowing they'll be hooked forever.
Let's go back to the phone, Zachron, Ohio and John.
John, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, me, Mark Belling.
Mark, thank you very much for having me on your show.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Um, your comments about the entitlement mentality, I think are a step ahead of the game.
I think if you go back a little farther, what you're gonna see is that what has happened culturally is that success has been effectively demonized somewhat by c corruption and in the nature of it and and also the fact that minorities have been kind of tagged so much as victims that there's there's no interest in becoming successful.
I I grew up with an idea that being on welfare was the wrong thing to do.
Now the the whole culture, it seems, has developed into an idea that that it's perfectly acceptable to take these entitlements.
It's perfectly acceptable to have your hands.
Yeah, I think for two reasons.
They've de as you said, they've demonized the notion of success, and people think that they can't be successful.
You know, and part of this, you know, part of this is the control that liberals have of the culture and the education system in which they're told that there isn't a fair shake in America, that you don't have a chance, you're owed this, that somehow people in the middle class are suffering because the rich have too much and that they didn't get it legitimately.
As I mentioned a little bit earlier, in a weird way, Obama is rewarded for the for the failure of stimulus and the miserable state of the economy.
Because the economy isn't doing well and hasn't done well for some time.
I think a lot of people fear that the private sector isn't going to recover.
They don't feel as though they have a chance to go out and become successful, and they therefore feel as though they need government.
Had he been more successful than he was, he might have actually paid a greater political price.
My point, the people who moved on to food stamps during his presidency.
In other words, take the people who weren't on food stamps four years ago, but are now.
In other words, the victims of his bad economy, the people who lost jobs after he came in.
My guess is the majority of them probably voted for him.
Instead of blaming him for the policies that put them on the dole and dependent now on the government to eat, they probably voted for him because they fear that that dole is going to be cut off.
In an odd way his failures helped him to succeed politically.
But this story's been written before.
We've seen it in a lot of other places and a lot of other countries where once you get people on the dole, they vote to keep that going again and again and again.
I don't think you can take away the responsibility though of the voter who is putting self-interest ahead of what's in the best interest of our country and what our true American values are.
I've got that West Point goat story still to come.
Mark Bellingham for Rush.
I wonder how many people who buy Prius or other cars that get that subsidy, the energy subsidy, thought about voting for Obama because they figured Romney would do away with it.
We've got so many handouts that you literally have to sit down and think about the number of all these little groups, buy a vote here, buy a vote there.
Now I want to tell you the story about the West Point goat.
This is a great story I found today in the Wall Street Journal.
I think it explains so many things.
One of the things that's happened in our society over the last twenty to thirty years, and we had a caller about fifteen minutes ago who made this point, I think really, really well.
He said success has been demonized in our society.
It really has been.
We don't like anymore to keep score, to keep track.
High schools used to have honor rolls in which a handful of kids who got the best grades were on them.
You look at an honor roll from a high school now, half the kids seem to be on it.
Universities used to keep ranks of where people graduated in their classes.
Doesn't happen much anymore.
Letter grades are being tossed out in schools everywhere.
Some youth sports events they don't want to keep score.
Got to make sure all the kids play.
Nobody gets cut from the sports team.
All of this, I think, is a part of this trend that has created this big, big, big government that we have.
The idea that we have to shield everyone from failure.
That if you don't do well, we have to do something for you.
First of all, we can't tell you that you didn't do well because Lord knows that it's not your fault.
Just as the person who did really, really, really well, we can't give that person too much credit because he didn't do it alone, you didn't build that.
So we've ended up with a society in which nobody's ever rejected for anything.
Employers have talked about the millennials who've entered the workforce, people in their twenties, that when you criticize them they fall apart because they've never heard any criticism in their lives.
They've been protected from any kind of sanction for any kind of failure.
They were never yelled at in school.
They were told that all of the projects that they did were great, that if somebody else did better than them, well, you've got your own skills and abilities.
We've never allowed any kind of harsh reality to enter their lives.
Well, not at West Point.
They still keep track publicly of the class rank, exactly what your grade point average is, and where you figured at the time that you graduate.
That means somebody's number one and somebody's right at the bottom.
They have a term for the cadet who does graduate, who does make it, but did so with the lowest class rank.
They call him the goat.
And according to the tradition at West Point, that when the goat go graduates and goes up and gets his diploma on graduation day, he gets the loudest ovation from all of the cadets.
Not only that, the other cadets are expected to give him money.
They designate him out as the goat.
In a way it's a positive reinforcement that while you didn't thrive here, You stuck it out.
You weren't the greatest student.
You probably weren't greatest in the extracurriculars.
Maybe your leadership scores weren't all that good.
But despite the fact that you weren't the best, or you weren't even in the middle, you didn't quit.
You did enough and you got through.
And there's something to be said for that.
We're not going to sugarcoat where you stood.
You were last in your class, but you still are a graduate of the United States military academy, and that means something.
And that accomplishment is something.
We're not going to pretend you're at the top of the class.
We're in fact going to call you the goat for being at the bottom, but we still respect you for succeeding in achieving your goal of getting out.
Where else do we do that anymore?
Where we actually keep track of someone who did achieve something, but it was the minimum.
We don't like to keep school.
That's humiliating.
Well, here's the thing about the goat at West Point.
In many cases, they have gone on and thrived.
They used it as motivation.
Well, I'm not gonna let that happen to me again.
I did a store uh a segment on my show in Milwaukee a couple of years ago about kids who were cut from sports teams.
You'd be amazed at how many people remember that.
It becomes a motivator for them later on in life.
That failure to achieve that then, the pain that they felt from it, that was something that propelled them forward.
Rather than encouraging dependency and sheltering people from failure?
How about using failure as a positive motivator?
Just because you didn't do really well at something doesn't mean that you can't do well in the future.
The story in the Wall Street Journal about the goat.
When cadet Roberto Becera Jr. walked on stage to graduate from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2007, the entire ceremony ground to a halt as he before a crowd of thousands transformed into a goat.
For that achievement, Viserra received a rousing ovation and was handed an envelope stuffed with cash in a two hundred ten year old military academy bristling with traditions.
The goat is a curious custom that one might not expect to find at a school better known for its selectivity and high standards.
Yet every year the last ranking cadet to make it through to graduation is anointed the goat, showered with praise, given a dollar from every other fellow graduate, amounting to roughly one thousand dollars, and granted the biggest applause at the graduation ceremony.
It did come as a shock when I was told that I was the goats at Mr. Bacero, twenty-nine years old of El Paso, Texas.
At first I honestly had mixed feelings about it.
I was like, well, I don't know if I should take this as an accomplishment or a scarlet letter.
The score story went on to describe his successful military career.
The story continues, being at the bottom means goats are last to pick their assignments after graduation, so while top students would branch out to become engineers, the lowest rung joined the infantry.
Despite starting at the bottom, a few goats took advantage of their frontline positions to become the stuff of American legend.
A recent example of one impressive goat is Philip Font, who said he fur first found out he was the last man when he walked on stage at graduation in 1993, was handed a pillowcase full of money, shook President Bill Clinton's hand, and received a huge cheer from his class.
I felt like Rocky, he said.
Following in the footsteps of Custer Pickett and others, Font who said he was challenged by the commitments of both a West Point Academic Workload and a varsity football schedule was hardly discouraged by his bottom ranking.
He served six years in Army Field Artillery, his last two years as a gunnery instructor.
In 1999 he joined the FBI as a special agent when a fewer than ten percent of applicants selected that year.
Quote, I look back and even though I had struggles, it's a completely fond memory of my time there.
Where I ended up in class has not affected me personally or professionally in the negative.
Now I bring this up in the context of a society that keeps handing things out in an attempt to buy votes, and a society in which people think that they have no chance of getting ahead and they have to depend upon government for everything.
It doesn't work.
Telling people where they stand and challenging them to do better, and isn't that what America has always been about that's what works.
That's the true American achievement.
Do we want to be a country in which people are proud?
Of how many benefits they get from government?
Do one do we want to be a country in which the government tells you who your doctor is, who your insurance company is, the government gives you your money for your bus fare, gives you your money for your food, gives you your energy stub, and people are supposed to feel good about living that type of a life.
Or do we want to be a country that celebrates people who overcome that?
It is a challenge politically to win that argument.
What we still have going for us, though, is we do have this in our souls.
It's in the national DNA.
The American dream is still something that people relate to.
What I fear happened in this election, though, was that we are starting to lose that as a nation.
We haven't lost it.
One election doesn't permanently change anything.
But it's going to be a real challenge in the future.
Revotive remotivating Americans to believe in the concepts of achievement and success and knowing the long-term damage that is done when more than half of us are on a dole in which they live off of the rest of us.
And do understand when you're living off of government, you're living off the people who actually are paying in.
We have too many people taking out and not enough paying in.
And when that happens, eventually they're going to demand so much that the rest of us don't have it left to give.
This argument can still be won.
But not if we refuse to accept that a big part of the problem is the Americans who aren't succeeding, that are selfishly voting in their own short-term interest rather than what's good for all of us.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Marshall Imblock.
Anybody have any theories as to why liberals are so okay with Morsi?
That's his name, right?
You've convinced me it's Morsey.
The uh elected president of Egypt who's now making himself the dictator of Egypt, why they're so kind of okay with this?
Why they hated the fact that the last guy, Mubarak, was a dictator, but they're okay with this guy giving himself more power than.
I think most liberals have a soft spot for despots.
They like the idea of all this dictating and so on.
Plus, he helped negotiate that peacekeeping agreement.
What's our what what's our guess as to when that thing ends between the Israelis and the Palestinians in Gaza?
My guess is is that whenever the arms Samaran get back to Hamas so that they can reload and start firing the rockets back into Israel is when that's going to end.
Let's go to the phones right now.
Uh who do you suggest?
I don't have any I don't have any green on my screen.
Should I do I get to pick?
All right, I'll pick.
Ann in Peru, Indiana.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Oh, well, first off, let me wish you great peace and joy.
Thank you.
It's all going to work out.
I don't know how.
I just I got a lot of faith.
It's all just gonna work out somehow.
But a couple of comments, and uh I'm waiting for my little guy to get off the bus.
Are you there?
Can you?
Yes, I'm here.
I'm here.
I'm all ears, Andrew.
All right, I am I'm a single mom on the dole in that we get food stamps and we have uh health care.
Grateful for it.
Worked in health care myself for 17 years, and I voted for Mitt Romney, and I'm disgusted at how many people who have jobs who voted for Obama.
I live in North Central Indiana, a lot of unions here.
We did go red this time.
Praise God.
Uh Catholic.
I want to get it all in because I'm just so disgusted.
How many people who have jobs who are doing quite well, who voted for Obama, and they were under the impression that Mitt Romney could just come along.
And he's never proved himself to be this kind of person to just come along and take union benefits from them.
And you talk about people voting from the people.
Well, sure.
Well, they've got they've what I felt.
I really felt like these folks were so selfish, they're happy to keep people like me in my place.
And I'm disgusted by it because you mentioned you you mentioned union benefits.
That's a key.
Once again, it's dependency, this notion that you won't have these things unless you have the union or somebody else to give it to you, this need to have it from someone else, and we see this with union members all the time in which they feel as though their success is because of the union uh of the unions rather than themselves.
That's a key thing.
Now you meant you mentioned your own personal situation.
One of the mistakes of the Romney campaign was those inane comments that he made that were captured, you know, captured on video that they saved for that they saved for you know most devastating impact later on in the campaign, in which he talked about not being able to get any of the forty-seven percent.
I want to make it clear that my commentary here is I'm not writing off everyone who's on one form of the dole or another.
You can get some of them.
You do need to communicate as to how conservative principles are good for you, that our goal is for is not is for you to not be on the dole forever to rise up and move on.
And I think that Romney did a very, very poor job of communicating that in those comments, and I understand that they weren't for public consumption, and you say things when you're at a fundraiser and so on, but he did say them.
Most true conservatives don't believe that.
They don't write everyone off.
They think there are people like you out there, Anne, that are voting for a better life and don't think that it automatically has to come from government.
So I think that there was a very, very poor job by Romney done in actually running and on communicating on how those principles would apply to people who right now may be in need to communicate to them that you can move forward, that there are alternatives to simply getting everything from Barack Obama's federal government.
Thank you for the call.
My name is Mark Bellingham, I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm really happy and called from Peru, Indiana, because I hope I didn't fail at one thing in communicating my points about the election and my general disgust with people who voted, I think, for the most inane possible reasons for policies that are terrible for the country that so many of us care deeply about.
And that's the mistake that Romney made in assuming that just because you are dependent, you're a lost cause.
I think most people, once they do get on one form of a government dole or another, it is almost impossible to get them back.
But my key there is the word most.
This is why Obamacare is going to be such a challenge.
In a weird way, the fact that Obamacare will be miserable is a good thing because I think it'll be possible to perhaps get people to reject it and still salvage the system in time because it isn't going to work well.
But the more people that become dependent, the more people that will vote to keep their dependency going.
But that doesn't mean that all of them are lost causes.
There are a lot of people on food stamps.
There are a lot of people who are on extended unemployment benefits.
There are a lot of people who are lower income, who are still conservatives who believe in the principles that made America great.
They do understand and they do get it.
Candidates like Romney who say the things that and I understand he only said it once, and it wasn't part of his campaign message.
But when you start telling people that we know we'll never get you because you're just on the dole.
You can't write them off.
You do have to keep this communication up.
You can't give up as the result of an election defeat.
You can't automatically say that we can't ever persuade people to come around.
The whole story of America is people believing that they can make lives better for themselves.
And I'll tell you this the only people who have ever made a better life, the only people who have escaped poverty, the only people who have gone on to be something better than what they were, were people who do believe in this, who did think that it was possible.
You've got to keep working with them to explain why the principles that so many of us believe in are going to be good for them.
The problem is it is hard when the other side controls the government and keeps handing out all of this stuff.
It's why I do think the last election turned out as badly as it did.
It's not because we were wrong.
I think our side was right.
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