RUSH: Bloomberg story. Here’s the headline: “‘Obama Fails to Stem Middle-Class Slide He Blamed on George W. Bush’ — Barack Obama campaigned four years ago assailing President George W. Bush for wage losses suffered by the middle class. More than three years into ObamaÂ’s own presidency, those declines have only deepened.” That’s the lede! And Bloomberg is a State-Controlled Media outlet. “The rebound from the worst recession since the 1930s has generated relatively few of the moderately skilled jobs that once supported the middle class, tightening the financial squeeze on many Americans, even those who are employed.
“‘It started long before Obama, but he hasnÂ’t done anything,’ said John Forsyth, 58, a railroad-car inspector and political independent from Lebanon, Ohio. ‘He kept pushing this change, change, change, and he hasnÂ’t done anything.’ Underlying the erosion of the middle class, defined by some economists as the middle 60 percent of income earners, are trends that stretch back decades, including competition from lower-wage workers overseas and technological advances that allow factories and offices to produce more with less labor.”
They don’t mention anything here about the illegal immigrant population. Here’s the story on Walmart moms. I mentioned this the first hour. This is ABC News. And what happened here is that two different groups — one a Republican polling group, the other a Democrat — assembled some focus groups of “Walmart moms.” And ABC News has the story. Now, what is a “Walmart mom”? Have you ever heard of a “Walmart mom” politically? We’ve heard soccer moms and NASCAR dads and all this. Here’s what a “Walmart mom” is.
“These ‘Walmart moms’ — defined as a voter with kids under 18 living at home who shops at Walmart at least once a month — are a sought-after demographic. Even more important, the women engaged in this online discussion were from the key battleground states of Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The discussion was moderated by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm, and Momentum Analysis, a Democratic firm. What they found was that these women are hurting financially.” What amazes me is that they had to “discover” that people are “hurting financially,” that this might not have occurred to them.
Maybe it did. But of course, nothing can ever be assumed from common sense. You can’t assume that people are hurting when unemployment’s over 9%. You can’t assume people are hurting when their homes are underwater. You can’t assume that people are hurting when their homes are be foreclosed on. Nope, you have to somehow substantiate it. So they did. And they get focus groups assembled of these Walmart moms. ABC News says, “If you want to know why Americans are frustrated and fed up with Washington, I present exhibit A: the debate between Democrats and Republicans over Osama Bin Laden.”
I don’t have the author of this story. I don’t know who wrote this story. It’s just from ABC News. “Democrats suggest that Mitt Romney may not have had the guts to take out the Al Qaeda leader while Republicans sniff that the PresidentÂ’s public preening over the successful operation is unseemly. Americans, meanwhile, have been very clear that they want the candidates to fix the economy, not one-up each other on their anti-terrorism credentials. In January of 2012, 51% of Americans polled by ABC/Washington Post said that the economy was the single most important issue in their choice for president. A paltry 2% picked the issue of terrorism/national security.
“Eight years ago, in the first presidential campaign after the 9/11 attacks, 22% of Americans said terrorism was their top concern. … Today, it is the GDP, not [Osama Bin Laden] that is driving this election. And, many Americans feel that Washington doesnÂ’t understand or appreciate just how tough this economy has been on them. Nowhere is this frustration more evident than among a group of 29 [mothers] brought together by Walmart for an online discussion about the economy and the upcoming election. These Walmart moms’ — defined as a voter with kids under 18 living at home who shops at Walmart at least once a month — are a sought-after demographic.”
Now, there is a quote, there’s a singular quote in this story that stands out. “Walmart moms are frustrated with the state of the country, but they are skeptical about WashingtonÂ’s ability to address the key issues that will have a positive, tangible impact on their household.” Now, you know me. I have, on this program, repeatedly defined the people who make this country work. And it’s apparently people like this in this ABC story. They’re anonymous. They get up every day and they do the best they can to play by the rules. They do the best they can to live as morally proper a life as they can. They care about their kids. They try to keep ’em sheltered from all the pitfalls that are awaiting them out there.
Nobody’s perfect, and these people clearly aren’t, but they’re not seeking fame, and they’re not seeking any kind of notoriety. They are the great unwashed. They’re anonymous. Nobody knows who they are. But they’re the ones who get up every day and go to work, make this whole thing churn, make it happen. And they are frustrated. This is the Tea Party, by the way, too. Let me add that. And they are frustrated with the state of the country. They may not know, in an ideological sense why, but they know that this isn’t right. They know that this is not how things get done in America. They know all of this. Gigantic government is not going to fix their lives. They know it. They may not be able to tell you why in a conservative versus liberal way, although my objective is that one day they’d be able to. ‘Cause I think if we ever get to the point where people are steeped in ideological understanding, that’s it for liberalism.
If people could simply understand liberalism 50% as well as I do, it’d be the end of it. But that’s a big project. I mean I can illustrate it. Go back to the 1980s, robust economic growth, lowering taxes. It was all there, and people lived it. And yet the Democrats for 50 years have been playing this class warfare stuff, the evil rich stealing from the middle class. They never change. They say the same stuff over and over, year after year, election after election. And despite their policies never working, people continue to still vote for them. Their policies never work.
The latest volume in a four- or five-volume series on Lyndon Johnson just came out yesterday. It’s by Robert Caro. I downloaded it, and between power failures and Wi-Fi, screeching-tone UPS fries and so forth, I had enough time to read the foreword. And it was eye-opening, even for me. Because the foreword described of course what’s coming in the book, laid out the premise of the book, the period of time in Johnson’s life the book would deal with, and spoke of his Civil Rights Act, War on Poverty, and Great Society as the single greatest best thing that has ever happened in America, and the author, Robert Caro even admits none of it worked. And it was still the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I mean, not just the greatest thing, the superlatives used to describe these policies and plans by Lyndon Johnson and how he did it being hated by the Kennedys, being relegated to obscurity as vice president, desiring to be president all of his life, and finally realizing that when they made him vice president it was over. And then one day in Dallas changes everything and all of a sudden there he is as president, his time to get even with all these people who were trying to shut him up and end his career. It was time to go transform America, pick up where FDR left off. And this guy Caro writes of Johnson, the press doesn’t talk about Obama the way this guy was describing Lyndon Johnson in the foreword of this book, or the introduction, I forget which. I don’t have the words, and I don’t have his words in front of me, don’t have the book in front of me to describe the way he was talking about the Great Society and the War on Poverty while admitting, sadly, none of it worked. But it’s still the best damn thing ever.
All it did was destroy the families of poor people, particularly minorities in this country. The very intended recipients of all this great stuff were the ones harmed the greatest by Lyndon Johnson and his ideas, and it’s still to this day, those policies, plans, programs, War on Poverty, Great Society, they are still wreaking havoc with people to this day. Medicare and Medicaid, Lyndon Johnson. It never works. And even when it fails it’s the best thing ever, because of the great personalities and the great people who wanted it to work and who came up with the ideas, good, big-hearted, brilliant politician liberals. It was, well, I don’t want to say sickening. But my point here is, these Walmart moms know something’s wrong. They know that government’s the problem. They don’t know why. They just know it doesn’t work.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Twenty-nine Walmart moms in a focus group run by Democrat and Republican strategery groups, and what they find out: Walmart moms are frustrated with the state of the country, but they’re skeptical about Washington’s ability to address the key issues that will have a positive, tangible impact on their household.
I’m convinced that if more people equated Washington failure with liberalism, Washington failure with Democrats, then we would be much more ahead of the game. I gave you the example, this Lyndon Johnson biography, this author just over-the-top praising all of these failed ideas, praising them from the present back 50 years, knowing full well how they failed, admitting in the foreword of the book they failed, and yet they’re the best ideas anybody’s ever had. You know what did him in was Vietnam. If Vietnam hadn’t happened, oh-ho. Let me read to you from the description of this book on Amazon.
“We see how within weeks — grasping the reins of the presidency with supreme mastery — he propels through Congress essential legislation that at the time of KennedyÂ’s death seemed hopelessly logjammed and seizes on a dormant Kennedy program to create the revolutionary War on Poverty. Caro makes clear how the political genius with which Johnson had ruled the Senate now enabled him to make the presidency wholly his own. This was without doubt JohnsonÂ’s finest hour, before his aspirations and accomplishments were overshadowed and eroded by the trap of Vietnam.”
The trap of Vietnam! Kennedy and Johnson laid the trap! Oy, as my friends say. But you get the flavor. That’s just the description of the book on Amazon. Here’s another one. “In its exploration of this pivotal period in JohnsonÂ’s life — and in the life of the nation –The Passage of Power is not only the story of how he surmounted unprecedented obstacles in order to fulfill the highest purpose of the presidency but is, as well, a revelation of both the pragmatic potential in the presidency and what can be accomplished when the chief executive has the vision and determination to move beyond the pragmatic and initiate programs designed to transform a nation,” which is just astonishing insofar as no sentient being can deny LBJ’s programs have done more to destroy this country than even Obama could dream to accomplish. LBJ did in three years, all that stuff, Medicare, Medicaid, and he capitalized — not the right word — was aided by the death of John Kennedy. Because everybody wanted to honor the dead president.
They passed a lot of Kennedy’s stuff in sympathy and Johnson, while that was going on, started larding things on it. And the Civil Rights Act — Johnson had voted against every civil rights bill that had come before him before he became president. Then he becomes president and authors his own and there are other biographers who will tell you Johnson told them I’m gonna make sure that my party has the African-American — well, the black vote, it wasn’t African-American back then, the black vote from now to eternity. That’s what it was for. In the midst of demonstrable destruction and failure, we’re getting a book about how this is one of the greatest presidents ever, marshaling his power, overcoming the hatred of Robert Kennedy. Oh, the book details how Robert Kennedy hated LBJ, did not want him on the ticket. But JFK knew he wouldn’t win Texas if he didn’t have LBJ on the ticket.
So you have these Walmart moms. They’re frustrated with the state of the country. They’re skeptical about Washington’s ability to address the key issues. Anybody paying attention should be skeptical about Washington’s ability to address the key issues that will have a positive, tangible impact on their household. If you don’t work, Washington matters. If you do work, Washington’s in your way, when run by liberals. The reason that this is a key quote to me is because Washington cannot address key issues in a positive, tangible way, which has been our problem since I would say the New Deal, even before the Great Society and the War on Poverty. But that’s what Johnson wanted to finish, the New Deal. He wanted to build on it and cement it.
Washington can only do a few things: tax, spend, and regulate. And none of that helps anybody in a tangible way for long term. They don’t create wealth other than for themselves, but they don’t do anything other than take it, redistribute it, in some cases destroy it, but they don’t create wealth for anybody. Look at what Washington proposes to do when it aims to fix the economy. It promises, proposes to provide tax relief and freedom from government bureaucracy. When they’re honest about it, what do they do? They tell you they’re gonna get out of the way. They’re gonna lower taxes or do something.
I sit here and I get frustrated because turning liberalism into the genuine electoral minority that it is in terms of just numbers, I mean the percentage of people in this country who admit to identifying as liberals, is 20%. Forty percent self-identify as conservatives. If these Walmart moms just understood the ideological makeup of big government types, as I say, it just astounds me that in the midst of demonstrable, provable failure of liberal policy after liberal policy, they still run the same kind of campaigns; they still use the same rhetoric; they still do class warfare; they still have the same enemies list. It’s always successful, major corporations. It’s always successful rich people other than Democrats. They always tell the middle class that they’d be rich if it weren’t for Republicans and businesses stealing money from ’em or charging ’em too much for gasoline, or in some cases killing them.
It ought not be anywhere near as viable as it is. You and I know why it is. The appeal, all this compassion, and as much as anything is the demonization they have succeeded in labeling Republicans as various types of demons, racists, sexists, bigot, homophobes, all those kind of things. But it’s an ongoing frustrating thing to me, has been. You have the 1980s, and there’s still plenty of people who vote, who were alive then, who loved America. Their patriotism was at an all-time high. The military was being rebuilt after disastrous Carter. We got the second term of Jimmy Carter now. And this is why I said last week I think that this election could surprise a lot of people.
Dick Morris, by the way, is predicting 55-45 landslide for Romney. Bob Beckel at The Five thinks, “Ah, Rush is dreaming ’cause there’s this thing called the Electoral College, and that means the popular vote doesn’t matter.” And Beckel said, “Remember when Bush stole the election from Gore in 2000. Gore actually won the popular vote by 200 and some odd votes,” whatever it was. And Beckel’s right. He’s right the Electoral College does factor in. But if it’s a 55-45 popular vote, the Electoral College will fall into place.