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Dec. 28, 2024 - Sean Hannity Show
30:44
What Is Pennsylvania? December 27th, Hour 3
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This is an iHeart podcast.
All right.
This is Jeffrey Lord filling in for our friend Sean Hannity.
You can call us at 800-941-7326.
And we are going to talk now with a friend of mine from Pennsylvania, a great Pennsylvanian by the name of Jeff Bartos, who was a former Senate and Lieutenant Governor candidate himself and played a, as I understand it, a real role, a serious big role in the campaign to get Dave McCormick elected to the United States Senate.
Jeff, how are you?
Happy New Year.
Happy to hear it to you, Jeffrey.
And thank you so much for having me on.
And of course, I hope you and your family had a joyful and relaxing and just very amazing Christmas holiday as we wind down probably not many years in our lives more extraordinary than 2024.
Boy, I think that's the case.
You know, as I said to people that I would meet in the campaign as time went on, I said, take notes because you're going to want to look back and if you forget some of these things, this was a big deal.
This was serious, major American history here.
So what are your thoughts, Jeff, on Pennsylvania?
You know, I thought from the get-go that it was entirely possible that President Trump was going to carry Pennsylvania.
And I thought that Dave had a more uphill battle simply because his opponent was Bob Casey Jr.
But still in all, they both came through.
What are your thoughts on the electorate in Pennsylvania?
And is it shifting a little bit?
Is it more red than purple?
Or what are your thoughts?
Well, President Trump, I mean, Jeffrey, you were very involved in 2016, and you had a firsthand view of the remarkable win that President Trump and the team, our friend Ted Christian and David Urban, and the great folks that were all involved in that 2016 campaign and what President Trump was able to do.
At the same time, Senator Toomey won re-election in 2016.
So it was a fascinating study about Pennsylvania's electorate, which I think really is a microcosm of the country.
I grew up in Reading, and I know you and I have deep roots in the Lancaster and Harrisburg area as well.
And so, Cheryl's from Allentown, but I feel much more familiar, if you will, with Berks County and Lehigh County than I am in Montgomery County, where we raised our girls.
And it just, I think that what President Trump was able to achieve in 2016 never went away.
You know, we had some years where we didn't win elections, and who knows, we can look back on that, I guess, and articles have been written.
But I always felt for me personally, from the morning of October 7th of 2023, right through 4 a.m. on November 6th of 2024, I never, I mean, let me put it more positively, I had an unshakable belief for me and Cheryl, our family, and the people that we spent a lot of time with that not only was President Trump going to win, but that Dave McCormick was going to win.
And as the summer went on, I felt very strongly that we were going to flip those three flippable United States House seats.
We ended up flipping two of them.
And of course, Stacey Garrity and Dave Sunday and Tim DeFore were able to win.
It's the first time, I think, in my lifetime since the Attorney General's race in Pennsylvania became an elected spot where we've held all three row offices.
So I think the electorate in Pennsylvania, microcosm of the country, the message that President Trump led with, you know, that uniting message of cutting through the silos of identity politics that the left have been trying to build for the past 15 years, he obliterated them with a message that united all Pennsylvanians and all Americans around economic prosperity, peace through strength, a secure border.
Those cut across socioeconomic lines, racial lines, religious lines, age lines.
I don't know.
I'm still, I mean, you can hear it in my voice.
I'm still as excited today as I was on the evening of November 5th and early November 6th.
Yeah, yeah, me too.
Well, I think it's amazing.
And from my own experience earlier in my career, one of the things I did in working for Senator John Hines, and I was his executive assistant in the Senate, and you know how this works when you get to election season, if you're going to participate in the campaign, you have to leave the Senate staff and go from Washington to Philadelphia and get involved there.
And one of the things that I did, I became a big coordinator of what was known in the day as Latinos for Heinz.
And it was very interesting.
He paid a great deal of attention to the Hispanic community in the Philadelphia area and around the state.
He would go to their events.
I would be talking on the phone to these folks all the time.
And, of course, he won re-election in a considerable fashion.
And I thought there's a lesson there for Republican candidates.
Get out.
Don't just do the traditional sort of things that Republican candidates have always done, but go out to other constituencies and spend real time with them and create the bond that I've seen created.
This is something that can be done.
And when I would drive around the state, as you know, I'd get invited to go here or there, and I would drive.
And it always amazed me how many Trump signs I saw.
They were all over the place.
And I thought, hello, is there a message here of what's coming?
But I really do think that there are lots of grassroots enthusiasm for him.
And I'm wondering what your thoughts are for how it plays down the road.
I mean, come January 20th, then what?
Well, so at a very, I'll tell you a real quick personal story lines.
We live in Laura Marion, and I say a lot of highly educated people who may have a somewhat lacking in common sense neighborhood.
And we love most of our neighbors.
It's also grown over the last 20 years to be a very hotbed, a really kind of vibrant Orthodox Jewish community in and around where we live.
And, well, gosh, it was a couple days after the election.
Cheryl and I were going for a walk, and a rabbi that I know, Orthodox rabbi that I know, stopped his car.
He saw us walking, came over and gave me the biggest hug that I've probably ever received from a man and not someone not in my family.
And he just, the joy on his face and the relief on his face that President Trump had won, that Dave had won, and that we had had this big victory up and down the ballot.
He didn't even need to say anything.
It was just there's a lot of people I know.
And we saw a lot of Trump signs in our community, in our neighborhood, that you never would have seen in 2020 and you didn't see back in 2016 either.
So it was, you had the sense.
And so for me, looking forward, I think we as a Republican Party, we as a reconstituted, realigned Republican Party with the statewide success that we had, the House race success we had, the state senate, I mean, that state senate seat, picking up a state senate seat in Philadelphia, in Northeast Philadelphia.
Right.
We have a once in a generation, you made reference to Senator Hines and, of course, President Reagan at that same time.
We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to really take this message of economic prosperity, peace through strength, safe neighborhoods, secure border.
And we have a chance to take that, I think, through for the next decade or more and really build a sustainable coalition that should win a lot more elections.
And it's on us to do it.
We have, I mean, President Trump's a once-in-a-hundred-year candidate.
JD Vance is a generational talent.
Dave McCormick ran one of the best Senate campaigns in our lifetimes with a great team.
So we have leaders at the federal level and across the state that can take us there.
And it's really up to us to deliver.
And I'm very, as confident as I was that President Trump was going to win and that Dave was going to win and we were going to have this success.
That's how confident I am that we're going to deliver.
Yeah.
Well, delivery is all.
And one of the things I learned in working for Senator Hines, there was always two tracks to what he was doing.
One was the thing that every United States senator has to do.
You know, the issue comes up about some foreign policy situation or do we vote yay or nay on some tax bill or budget bill or what have you.
But beyond that, there's Pennsylvania itself and whatever problems may be current for Pennsylvanians that are not current for Americans in other states.
And when I was there, the Philadelphia Navy Yard was a big deal.
And because of the Reagan buildup, there was a constant battle to get the Pentagon to deliver ships.
They called it the SLEP program, Service Life Extension Program, and to get these battleships and aircraft carriers into the Navy Yard so that they could be re-outfitted and sent back out.
Well, hello, and you will get this immediately.
There was a guy named Trent Lott who represented like the Philadelphia Navy Yard equivalent in Mississippi or Louisiana.
I know he was a senator for Mississippi, but we were constantly doing battle.
And we had to bring the Navy Yard folks into the Pentagon.
They had to see the Secretary of the Navy.
They had to make their case.
But we made sure that they got it.
And I remember on one occasion, Senator Hines and I was with him.
We were able to borrow, thanks to the good graces of our visitor to the Navy Yard, that would be Senator John Tower from Texas, who was then the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
We were given a loaner from President Reagan of Marine One.
And we flew from the Pentagon to the Philadelphia Navy Yard so that Senator Tower could be shown the USS Wisconsin, which of course had been in World War II and all of this.
And it was now in Philadelphia, the Navy Yard, for SLEP and how important it was.
And it really helped a lot with all of this.
And that's the kind of thing.
And then, you know, this being a big state with different interests, you'd go to the other end of the state and you realize you needed to work on tariff issues with U.S. steel.
So that's the kind of thing that, you know, is downhome politics, if you will, that I think can't be forgotten.
It isn't just the national issues here.
And I think, wow, we have such a diverse state.
You know, I went to high school my last two years of high school in Allentown, and Allentown is an area, and it isn't Leicester, as it were.
Yeah, I find Pennsylvania having, it's been such a privilege to run twice statewide, once as the standard bearer of our party as the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor back in 2018 with our friend Scott Wagner.
What a privilege it is to campaign in a state like Pennsylvania because it's so diverse.
And you never, I mean, the issues are never, forget, boring, right?
They're never dull.
They're never easy.
You're always challenged.
But we have the leadership to do it.
I think a race to look for.
Look, we should take a little break from looking at upcoming races.
But there's going to be a primary in Philadelphia in, I believe, April or May.
We have a chance to take out the Soros-backed prosecutor.
Oh, wow.
And that will be, you know, in the Democrat primary, there will be people lining up.
And I wouldn't be surprised if we see some of the folks who got involved in national politics for the first time recognizing that they could be a counterweight or, frankly, even prevail over the Soros back, which we did just last month.
We should be able to take some of that energy and some of those wins and some of that organizing that we did just over the last year, last year and a half, and take that to taking back cities like Philadelphia.
Philadelphia is critical to Pennsylvania's well-being and economy.
And the only thing really, not the only thing, the major thing holding us back right now is a district attorney who won't prosecute crimes.
The Wall Street Journal today wrote an op-bet about it.
I'm shocked.
I'm open to the Wall Street Journal, and there's an op-ed about Philadelphia and the DA and how he's backed the mayor's progress.
The Democrats are eating each other for the good of Pennsylvania, for the good of Philadelphia.
We really have a chance now, I think, to take out just, frankly, the worst elected official in Pennsylvania right now, and Larry Craster, and put someone in there who will actually prosecute crimes.
Well, I've become increasingly convinced.
I mean, this whole business with Soros prosecutors around the country watching what's going on in, I guess it was Los Angeles, where, you know, sort of a similar situation.
And finally, there was a rebellion.
I forget whether it's Los Angeles or San Francisco, but.
Both, both.
Yeah, there was a rebellion to all of this.
And, you know, one of the things that I think people sometimes forget, and this applies to President Biden as well, is you've got candidates out there that say, elect me and I'll do A, B, and C.
Then they get elected and they actually do A, B, and C.
And it turns out the results are terrible.
And it backfires.
And in this situation, you had, I think, people around the country that saw the Biden presidency at work and said, you know, thanks, but no thanks.
It was a whole scale, I mean, for the sitting president who's on his way out to once again fail to take any responsibility for the failures of the administration, right, an administration where nobody was fired, going all the way back to the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, all the way forward to its last days.
This is really, I said about the Vice President Harris's campaign, it was a campaign born in desperation that meandered for 110 days or so without a message and then died not with a bang, but with a whimper.
And you really could almost talk about the Biden presidency that way.
Remember, they installed him as the nominee back in the spring of 2020 in desperation.
And this is a presidency we will long forget.
Little remember this administration, I think 30, 40 years down the road, it will be.
I think you're right, Jeff.
Jeff, we are getting the hand sign signal here.
So thank you very much for coming on.
The future beckons, and I know you will be involved.
A healthy and happy new year to you and your family and all of your listeners.
And thanks for having me on today, Jeffrey.
Thank you.
You bet.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Welcome back to our last half hour.
This is Jeffrey Lord filling in for our friend Sean Hannity.
And feel free to call us at 800-941-7326.
And as I read the board, I see that there is Bob from Massachusetts who knew me from Crescent Street, where I grew up, and that his dad was my principal.
Bob, are you there?
I'm there, Jeff.
All right.
Give me your last name.
President, we're ready to vote for you and give you a room similar at Forbes Library that we gave Calvin Coolidge.
Yeah, do you know my dad held Calvin Coolidge's Ward 2 seat on the city council when we were there?
Okay.
And I was the kid.
And wow.
And I always say Calvin Coolidge is the one president who really worked his way up from the bottom.
He was, I think, first a town clerk.
Then I think he became the town solicitor.
He got elected to the city council, then mayor, state representative, state senator, lieutenant governor, governor, vice president.
And finally, he hit the big one and became president.
Once, and that was it.
He said, that's enough.
Yeah, exactly.
And in the later days, he passed in 1933, as I recall.
But Mrs. Coolidge was alive and well, and my mom was the chair of the Hampshire County Republican Women.
And she and her colleagues in that group, it was one of the things to do was to go pay a courtesy call periodically on Mrs. Coolidge and talk to her about what's going on and politics and all of that kind of thing.
I always found that kind of fascinating.
So what'd you call about, Bob?
A Christmas story.
Yeah.
Your dad and my cousin Bobby, who was in the Navy and submarines, he had gotten released in Norfolk, was on the Beltway hitchhiking up to Barry, Vermont, but he didn't get there.
Your dad picked him up, took him up to Crescent Street, and of course, my aunt's house, Quey's, on 57 Crescent Street down near the Magna House.
And so they had a long talk all the way up until you made the curb up there where the Novotnys live, where you live.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And basically, it was just such a nice thing that this poor guy got out of the submarine, and your dad saw Sailor hitchhiking on the road and literally, and he got to bury the following day.
Of course, someone called up, hauled him up there and all that.
But what a neat thing that your dad did.
Oh, those are great people.
Yes, they were.
And he was going to Barry, Vermont.
As you could guess.
What's that?
He was going to Barry, Vermont, did you?
Well, that's where Bobby Mitchell, who's now a Queen's cop, retired, of course.
And he, his son, by the way, is, I think, a general now.
Wow.
Went to West Point.
I mean, his dad served under patent.
I mean, it was a military family.
Wow.
Hey, my dad wasn't a shrieker either.
He doesn't talk about it, but he was on Tenian when the ENOA gave flew off and ended the show.
Wow.
Wow.
I bet you didn't know nothing about that.
You just knew him as a principal at Vernon Street.
Yeah, and his last name was Moriarty.
Oh, Mr. Moriarty.
Of course.
Of course.
Exactly right.
Got it.
Yeah, he was terrific.
He was terrific.
I gave up.
I'm a conservative like you.
And you've been on the Howie Carr show, and I wasn't able to catch you in there because with you on that, they give you the old Northampton treatment.
But we have a room available at Forbes Library, which, by the way, my dad ended up being trustee of.
And every election, he got the most votes of anybody in town.
Wow.
And, you know, but you knew him, of course, as just the principal at Vernon Street.
Yes.
And I think you moved on before I went to Hawley.
Did you go to Hawley?
I left after the eighth grade.
So that would be circa 1965.
Not have it wasn't integrated like it is now.
Well, where they make the eighth graders blend in and all that.
And then you moved, I guess, to Pennsylvania.
Great state there.
We moved first to Virginia, to Stanton, Virginia.
Dad was in the hotel business.
We were there for two years, and then we went on to Pennsylvania.
And they stuck around.
I got involved.
I got, you know, graduated from high school, from college there, and then went to work my first job in the Pennsylvania State Senate Republican communications staff.
And ever after, it was Pennsylvania as home and still is, I might add.
Oh, yeah.
It's a great state.
It bailed us out and gave us Trump.
If you think you're going to get help from Massachusetts, oh, my God.
Hey, Reagan, right?
I go to the tribute for Coolidge, and it's right on near the courthouse.
I know exactly where it is.
I think I was in the White House when President Reagan called to, that was part of the ceremony for that.
I was looking like, Northampton, don't you get it?
You had a president of the United States, and you're not respecting him.
Well, I was a big Coolidge.
And we had a double connection in our family with Coolidge.
My father's mother, my grandmother, her family lived on the farm that was next to the Coolidges, and they were friends of the Coolidge family.
And if you know the tale, his namesake son, Calvin Jr., died when Cal was in the White House, and he was playing tennis on the White House tennis court, got a blister, it got infected, and he died.
So my grandmother was invited to the funeral and took my then 10-year-old dad and went to it.
And I had the presence of mind to get my grandmother on audio tape talking about this.
And I can still hear her saying, I can see Cal's red hair glinting in the sunlight.
It was pretty amazing.
And then all those years later, dad gets elected to Calvin Coolidge's seat in the city council, and mom is spending time with Mrs. Coolidge.
It was interesting.
And, you know, when I went to work in the White House, one of the first things that President Reagan did when he took office was hang Calvin Coolidge's official portrait in the cabinet room so that every single time there was a meeting, a cabinet meeting or whatever in the cabinet room, they would be reminded of Calvin Coolidge and the conservative President Reagan really liked Calvin Coolidge a lot.
Hey, Trump would like him.
Yes, I think that's so, and you know, of course, he had this reputation as being very taciturn.
In other words, not speaking a lot.
And the joke was that some society lady sat next to him at an event and said, Mr. President, I have a bet that I can get you to say more than two words, to which Coolidge replied, you lose.
That was coming.
It's sad that they've really let the Coolidge room at Forbes Library go to hell.
That's too bad because I've been there.
I went, you know, this was a number of years ago.
I went.
Oh, yeah.
You know, fascinating stuff.
And one of my best friends from school, the Mazorskis, lived caddy corner to the house there that was on Massasoit Street where the Coolidges had lived.
And then they got, what did they call it, the beaches?
I think that was the.
Yeah, that was over on Pomeroy Terrace.
Yeah, yeah.
If I'm kicking in, I know that you left a long time ago, and it was my stopping round.
Although I worked all over the country, so.
Yeah.
Well, I went back, I guess it was two summers ago.
I went back.
First, I went with a friend.
We went to Boston to see the Red Sox play, of course.
And she had to leave, so I hightailed it to Northampton and did sightseeing, saw some old friends, and it was great.
Great memories there.
Dad was dad and mom, very involved in politics, and they helped elect one of his friends, Durbin Wells, who was also a friend of his son, Teddy, was a good friend of mine.
And so, you know, it was good times back then.
Innocent, I must say.
So, okay.
All right.
Well, Bob, thank you very much for calling.
And on we go here.
I'd like to go to, oh, wow.
Frank in Denver.
Did your family bug you for White House tours when you worked for Reagan?
Yes.
I'm here.
It wasn't just my parents, in fairness.
And it was interesting to me is that that was part of the assignment of the White House political staff.
You'd have your workday done by 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock, or whatever.
But then you had to stay and take Reagan supporters who had called in to announce that they were coming to Washington and all this and give them a tour, a West Wing tour, which I did over and over and over and over again, every night after work, it seemed, and then also on the weekends on Saturdays and Sundays.
I remember on one occasion, we had a couple and their kids, and they were from Pennsylvania.
I didn't know them.
Their congressman had called and asked if I would take them around.
So I do this, but it was going to be on a Saturday.
And I thought, well, okay, so it's Saturday.
Nobody's generally around on a Saturday.
So they arrive, and I start to take them on the tour.
And we get stopped suddenly by the Secret Service that said, the president's in the Oval Office, so you have to wait outside here.
Well, they were pretty agog, and I thought, oh, my goodness.
And sure enough, within a matter of minutes, out came President Reagan, nicely attired in a dress sports coat and tie and all this because he felt that working in the Oval Office was sanctrosanct.
So he was always well-dressed and came out and I introduced him to these people and told them they were Penn State fans.
And by chance, Penn State happened to be playing that day.
And so he, off the top of his head, goes into all sorts of stuff about Joe Paterno, whom he knew, and what was going on with Penn State and all that.
So it was quite fun.
You never got to know who you were going to meet when you did these tours.
Well, Frank, thank you very much for calling.
And I want to move on to Jose, who from Texas, who wants to talk about election integrity being the number one issue facing the country.
Yes, sir.
Can you hear me?
I can, Jose.
I can.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Yes, sir.
So I'll keep it short because I know you're running out of time here, but I just think that If we don't put voter integrity of utmost importance at the top of the list, we're going to lose everything because we will no longer be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
You know, you can't buy cigarettes, alcohol, a vehicle, and numerous other things without an ID.
But yet, we have so many states that don't require a voter ID to vote, and that's probably the most important privilege that we have in America.
Yeah, I totally agree with you, Jose.
You know, as I was saying, I have lived in Pennsylvania now since high school, and I came up through the Pennsylvania political system.
You know, I was in the teenage Republicans and the college Republicans and all that kind of thing.
And if I learned anything to my sorrow, it is that my home state of Pennsylvania has had a pretty not-so-good reputation for election integrity.
And we had in, I think it was 1994, there was a special election for a state Senate seat in Philadelphia.
And the next thing you know, it was on the front page of the New York Times of all places.
And the deal was that the loser, so-called, in quotes, was the Republican.
But he was somebody I know.
He worked for Senator Arlen Specter.
He had the presence of mind to challenge the results.
He did so, and the federal judge overturned the election and said there was a massive scheme by Democrats to steal it, and they had to redo the whole thing.
So, well, I guess, Jose, I'm just about out of time here.
So, thank you very much for calling, and thank all of you.
And we'll be back in a minute.
All right.
Welcome back.
I recognize that music from my youth.
Wow.
The monkeys.
This is Jeffrey Lord.
I have filled in today for our friend Sean Hannity.
And I wish you all a happy new year out there.
2024 was, to say the least, interesting.
That is one for the history books that you will be telling for those of you who are going to be having great grandchildren.
You're going to be telling them this for a very long time to come.
It was quite remarkable.
So now we move on.
So now we move on to the second Trump administration.
And we've all gotten to know him a bit.
And doubtless he has all kinds of plans that he is going to go out of his way.
He is very focused.
I've gotten to know him a bit.
He's a very focused guy.
He knows what he wants to do.
He asks questions.
And he says, as I recall the other day in a speech, that he wants to make this America's golden age.
So with that in mind, thank you very much.
We've got a lot to look forward to.
This is Jeffrey Lord, filling in for Sean Hannity, and on we go to 2025.
Happy New Year.
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