RUSH: This is from today’s website, Politico.com: ‘Barack Obama promised he would lower taxes for 95 percent of Americans and presumably raise them for the 5 percent who benefited most under President Bush’s tax policies. But, remarkably, the most affluent 5 percent supported Obama and that was perhaps the key to his victory last week. This group — and the rise of a new elite class of voters — is at the heart of the fast-paced changes in demographics affecting the political, sociological and economic landscape of the country. While there has been some inflation over the past 12 years, the exit poll demographics show that the fastest growing group of voters in America has been those making over $100,000 a year in income.’ Well, now, hell’s bells, folks! What does that tell you about all this rigmarole we’ve been hearing for six years about how rotten the economy is? We’ve been living in soup line America, they’ve been telling us. People are losing their jobs, having to choose between dog food, cat food, and real food; and medicine.
They’ve been talking recession, recession, recession for six years. They have been talking gas price up, people being laid off, people can’t afford to drive as much. You remember all these stories. It was relentless for six years, and yet, now, in the exit polling data, the fastest growing group of voters in America has been those making over a hundred thousand dollars a year. That is superb news, and it’s happened in the Bush economy. ‘We gotta change these policies,’ Obama says. ‘We gotta get rid of these policies.’ ‘The failed policies of the past eight years,’ they say. Yet look at all of this increase in income. Get this: ‘In 1996, only 9 percent of the electorate said their family income was that high. Last week it had grown to 26 percent — more than one in four voters. And those making over $75,000 are up to 15 percent from 9 percent. Put another way, more than 40 percent of those voting earned over $75,000, making this the highest-income electorate in history.’
Now, speaking for myself, this is fabulous. I love hearing this. This is great news, and I’m not surprised. The Bush economy, like the Reagan economy: lowering people’s taxes was superb for people, and the economy was roaring for this to be the case. We kept hearing about the failed Bush policies of the last eight years and how we gotta go in there and change all of this, ‘And by God, we’re going to change it and these numbers of people growing their income…’ It ain’t going to happen. Those people now are going to face Obama’s new tax increases, folks. This is going to be choked off; this is going to be shut down. ‘The poorest segment of the electorate, those making under $15,000, has shrunk from 11 percent to 6 percent over the past dozen years. And those making $15,000 to $30,000 annually — the working poor — also shrunk from 23 percent to 12 percent of the electorate.’ Do you realize the magnitude of these numbers? The poor got richer, everybody got richer, but they were ‘the failed policies of the last eight years.’ The failed policies of the last eight years, and the media jumping right along, trying to convince you while you were doing great — while you were doing well, while you were upwardly mobile — that somehow it wasn’t real. It wasn’t happening because not everybody was and you had to be feeling guilty about it.
Journalistic malpractice mouthing the talking points of the Democrat Party, smearing the president, smearing the economy, smearing the military, smearing the United States of America for six years. But I have one more observation about this, and then we’ll take a break and get to your phone calls. This group, the rise of the new elite class of voters, all these people now making more than 75, all these people now making more than a hundred, this would seem, ladies and gentlemen — I say this happily so — to undermine the pseudo-intellectual conservatives on our side who are arguing that all conservative appeals must be to the middle class. Rebuilding the conservative movement, the Republican Party is going to be a challenge. It’s going to be an epic battle and we’ve got people on our side who think we have missed the boat because we’re not targeting Hispanics; we’re not targeting Wal-Mart voters. We’re not targeting the middle class, and we’re not targeting them the right way. We actually have people calling themselves conservatives who say what we need to do is just be like Democrats but not as bad. We need to go to these voters and tell them what we, running government, are going to do for them, middle class voters — Wal-Mart voters, whatever the categorizations these intellectuals on our side are talking about. When in fact, everybody is more upwardly mobile than anybody knew!
This whole business of class politics, it gets confusing. You know, it makes me want to just abandon all this class politics. I hate identity politics and I hate class politics, because we are all Americans. I don’t like, ‘We gotta go out and get the Hispanics, though, Rush.’ There’s a way to get Hispanics. We can get African-Americans. We can get women. We can get everybody with a set of core principles that we do not abandon that benefit everybody regardless the damned color of their skin or their gender! We’re all Americans, for crying out loud. And now we got people on our side who want to get into class politics and identity politics and come up with a portion of our agenda that targets this group (say it’s Hispanics) or this group (say it’s the working poor) or gotta go get this group: one-armed amputees on West 14th Street in The Village. I mean, however they want to get this down pat, we gotta go do it. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Broad principles that apply across the board: conservatism, liberty, capitalism, free markets, property rights, national security.
It’s not tough. But I’ll tell you, until a leader emerges in the arena of electoral politics, we’re going to have all these pseudo-intellectuals on our side wandering all over the countryside telling us they’ve got the brilliant answer to what went wrong — and let me tell you something.
They got that campaign, and we saw what happened to it — and the tragic thing is we could have beaten Obama. Obama could have been beat. You look at the percentage of Republicans who stayed home. Have you seen that in the exit polls? There’s so much to mine from these exit polls. Twenty percent of conservatives voted Obama. The same percentage of Republicans, but a lot of Republicans just stayed home. This was not a record-turnout election. We had people calling here throughout the campaign, ‘I don’t care what you say, Rush, I’m staying home. I’m so mad; I’m not voting for any of them. I can’t vote for Obama. I’m not voting for the Republicans,’ and they stayed home. Which is tragic. Obama could have been beaten. None of this need have happened.