RUSH: This is Dan in Delaware, Ohio. It’s great to have you on the program, sir. Glad you waited. It’s your turn.
CALLER: All right. Thank you, Rush. Padron Aniversario Maduro wrapper dittos to you, sir.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: I’ve been listening since 1990, I love you your show. What I’m calling about, your caller from Texas yesterday really got me agitated, the one that was maligning the Tea Party. And what I told the call screener was that I agreed with you, that we don’t win by losing, I understand that. If we don’t vote against the Democrats, then we definitely lose. But I have to tell you, I’m getting to the point where I don’t see us winning with Republicans. I just don’t see how that helps the conservative cause.
And I’m not sure what to do, you know, casting a protest vote maybe doesn’t help us, but sorry, I mean, how do we improve the situation where we have Mitch McConnell and Boehner leading the party? Even if we win the Senate, I don’t see anything changing. I just do not see them ever challenging Obama and making any inroads or retracting anything he’s done. No one’s talking about smaller government anymore. No one’s talking about repealing Obamacare, and I’m in the health care industry, I can tell you the disaster that’s coming.
RUSH: Well, now, wait just a second on this repealing Obamacare. In fact, in my election news Stack today, it turns out that the vast majority of Republicans running in this election, House and Senate both, are all running against Obamacare. Now, that doesn’t mean if they win they’re gonna do anything, but it is out there.
CALLER: Well, that’s good. That’s good to hear.
RUSH: You’re right, the Republican Party’s got no such national message. I understand all that. The way I look at this is, you have to make an honest assessment of the status quo at the very moment you’re about to go do something, and in this case, vote. There’s no question that this election, the attitude you have that you’re forced with the lesser-of-evils question, but that can be an important question.
I think at this point, for me, since what you say, these guys, the current Republican leaders are not conservative, they’re not gonna articulate it, that’s true. But they’re not Obama, either. No matter what you want to say, they’re not Obama, and they’re not gonna be and do what Obama does. They may not stand up to Obama, but that’s not who they are. He is who he is, and he’s got to be stopped somehow.
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RUSH: If you think this election’s not about Obama, why are so many Democrats running as far away from the guy as they can?
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We had a caller a moment ago who asked me to be careful in talking about a landslide ’cause he’s worried, “What if it isn’t? Oh, no! It’s horrible, and even if we win, what have we won because McConnell and Boehner are worthless. McConnell and Boehner, they’re no different than Obama. They’re not gonna try to stop Obama.
“They’re just gonna try to be placeholders for a while, maybe help get immigration. What’s it gonna do?” I said to him, “They’re not Obama.” Now, if anyone wants to disagree with me on that, have at it. If there’s no difference, then you may as well do what you can to punish ’em, if that’s what you want to do. If that’s your modus operandi, go ahead and keep Democrats in power. I don’t know what to tell you.
None of us control what Boehner does. None of us control what McConnell does. We know they’re not conservatives. We know they try to convince people they are whenever they think it’s useful, but we know they’re not conservatives. I do not think that it’s the end of the Tea Party, by the way, if the Republicans win. I know a lot of people do. I can’t tell you why.
It’s just a gut feeling. I don’t have any brilliant, on-site analysis as to why it’s not the end of the Tea Party, but I don’t think it is. The Tea Party’s comprised of too many people that care too much. All I know is that the Democrats running for reelection are running as far away from Barack Obama as they can. They have run as far away from Obama as possible.
They have denied voting for him, they claim they never supported his policies, yet we’re told this isn’t an election about Obama and his policies, and it clearly is. We have people trying to tell us it’s an election about incumbents; the voters are simply fed up with incumbents and want all of ’em gone. And that analysis is done to protect Obama.
But the Democrat Party is telling us how toxic Obama is, even in the Washington Post today. “Where Did Obama Go Wrong?” One of the things that they’re worried about here is he just got a terrible hand dealt to him by the world. (sobbing) It’s just ISIS and all this stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s more than any president should have to put up with, it isn’t fair, he was dealt such a bad hand by the world!
What do you mean, dealt a bad hand by the world? He told everybody he was gonna heal world. He told everybody the world was gonna love America once he was elected. He wasn’t even gonna have to even do anything! He got the Nobel Peace Prize for showing up! He didn’t have to do anything to get the peace prize. This was a guy that was elected totally on the come, and all he has done is wreak havoc.
Every Democrat on the ballot is doing their best to convince voters they have nothing to do with Obama. They won’t even admit — some won’t even admit voting for him. They’re all running away from him. None of them want him in town to campaign for them. At the same time, he’s out there getting back at them by saying, “Hey, these are my buddies. They voted for every one of my policies. They made what I’m doing possible.”
All is not well on the Democrat side of the aisle. Now, as to Obamacare. There are individual candidates running ads and so forth in their campaigns telling voters that their intention is to do what they can to repeal it. I don’t know whether they mean it or not. I don’t know whether they’re out there just saying this because they think the voters want to hear it.
McConnell is all over the place on repealing Obamacare. One time he said he was going to. Recently he said we can’t. We’re gonna need 60 votes, and even if we get 60 votes the president’s gonna veto whatever we do. There’s no way. So what we can do is cherry-pick, maybe get rid of this or that, maybe little bits of the bill and then send that to him.
But the fact is they don’t need 60 votes. Obamacare happened via budget reconciliation. They had to play all kinds of tricks to get Obamacare passed. Getting Obamacare passed was one of the biggest sleights of hand that we’ve ever seen. I think it would be truly ironic to repeal Obamacare via budget reconciliation! You only need 51 votes for that. You don’t need 60 votes for that.
That’s how it was passed in the first place. It wasn’t passed with 60 votes. They had to play all kinds of games. They lied to people like Bart Stupak and all kinds of people. Now, whether McConnell is gonna do that, I haven’t the slightest idea. All I know is — and please forgive me if this offends anybody. I’m not speaking to anybody here, but I don’t like to go through every day perpetually pissed off.
I don’t like living that way. I don’t like living perpetually in a depression. I don’t like living fatalistically. I just don’t. I am always gonna try to find the positive. I’m not gonna lie to myself about it, but I’m always gonna try to enjoy life. We only get one life, and I don’t intend to live it mad at everybody all the time. I don’t intend to live it fatalistically.
I don’t intend to live my life telling myself what I believe never has a chance. I’m not gonna do that. Sorry. I’m not speaking to anybody specifically. I’m not reacting to a caller or anything. I just… I’m just sharing a little bit about me with you. I am the mayor of Realville, and a phrase that has become a cliche is something I profoundly believe in: “It is what it is.”
I don’t pretend that things aren’t the way they are and that they are the way I wish they were, but I try to make them that way if they aren’t. I know Mitch McConnell is a sad disappointment to people. I know Boehner is a disappointment. But we know who the Republican establishment is.
We know what the Washington establishment is, and it’s into self-preservation. They don’t want limited government; they feed off of it. It needs to be as big as possible for everybody in that town. There’s no way anybody living and working in that town wants to reduce government. There are a few exceptions, of course, but I’m talking about the establishment.
They all derive everything meaningful in their lives, personally and professionally, from how big government is, how massive it is, how far its tentacles reach. That’s how they all survive. Any talk of shrinking it and reducing its size and getting it out of people’s lives is the same thing as them being threatened with being fired and having their livelihood taken away. They’re not gonna support it. They’re gonna have to be beaten. They can’t be reasoned with. They can’t be persuaded. It’s like the media. We’re never gonna convince them that they’re wrong. We’re never gonna convince them to be fair to us.
Those are just some realities. I mean, my life has told me that. I know some of you are new and getting into this and you’re holding out hope. I’m not trying to be a downer about any of this. I just believe in accepting what is and dealing with it as best we can at the time. I see Democrats running away from Barack Obama. I see a giant Republican mandate. But as I’ve been saying, I don’t know that they even want it.
If you’ll check the archives of this program you will find me saying in the recent months that have passed that I have said I’m not even sure the Republicans want to win control of Congress because that carries with it a responsibility they may not want with an African-American president in office. They may forever feel powerless and their hands tied no matter what, because of that single fact, that that’s something they can’t win or overcome simply by virtue of our culture and the way it is.
I have no way of knowing. I’m like you; I have to guess. The only thing I know for sure is that people who live, breathe, their total existence depends on Big Government, are never gonna stand for anything that reduces its size. Therefore, there is no compromise with them. There is no persuading them. All there is left to do is to defeat them, and I don’t think at the same time voting Democrat or voting Libertarian in order to teach a lesson, send a message, accomplishes anything other than perpetuating the status quo, which is something we all oppose.
If I thought there were no difference in Republicans and Democrats, I’d be the first to tell you. If I thought that, I’d tell you, furthermore, I don’t think it matters whether you vote, if that’s what I really believed, that’s what I would tell you. But I don’t think that at all. I think the American people are telling everybody, and are going to tell everybody, at the end of the day what they want. That’s what elections do. It’s why sometimes when you lose ’em you get really depressed, because you think you’ve lost the American people. But it’s clear, the Democrat Party doesn’t even want to be around this guy at the moment of truth. The people of this country who vote today are going to vote — maybe it is partially anti-incumbent, but why is it anti-incumbent?
Who’s running everything? As far as any ordinary American citizen is concerned, who’s running this country? It clearly isn’t McConnell. It’s not Boehner. It’s Obama. So even if it is an anti-incumbent vote, it’s an anti-Obama vote. It’s an anti-Harry Reid, anti-Democrat vote. They may not know the names of Harry Reid or Pelosi. They know Obama. Poll after poll after poll shows how fed up with the direction this country is going people are. Poll after poll after poll shows how disappointed and opposed to the direction this country’s going people are. I believe that’s real.
I believe it may be more real than the polling data we’re seeing indicates. And I believe, therefore, that the people who show up and vote today are voting for one thing: to stop it. I don’t think people want to lose their country. I don’t think they want their country transformed. I don’t think people who are engaged and paying attention have the slightest desire for any more of this to happen, and they’re going to be doing the only thing they know how to do to stop it, and that’s vote against who’s in power. The Republicans, we have to admit, they don’t have an agenda. They haven’t told people what they’re gonna do in a national message of any kind, so the vote is totally anti today. It’s a protest vote.
The danger of this is, as again we’ve been talking about — don’t forget, we had eight years of what many of us believe was the greatest lesson citizens could have about conservatism versus liberalism. The eighties and Reagan. And yet it wasn’t long that they decided, “You know what? It’s safe to go back to the Democrat Party.” Even after those eight years of prosperity that we hadn’t seen in 20 or 30 years prior, abundance everywhere. The Berlin came down, American dominance and prominence everywhere, eight years of Ronald Reagan, and four years after that what did the voters do? Right back to Bill Clinton. Why? Because it was perceived the economy was in the tank, worst economy the last 50 years, they were running around saying. But it wasn’t.
But people thought for some reason it was safe to go back to the Democrats, I guess. I don’t know. It frustrates me that people don’t learn from living through success what they have to do to perpetuate it, i.e., vote conservative. I’m as frustrated by that as you are. I don’t know what to do about it. All I know is this is gonna be one of those times which is an opportunity. The people are gonna show up and once again express their total opposition to what’s happening now. It’s an opportunity, and that’s where I think the Republican mandate comes from. This is a mandate. They’re gonna have a bigger mandate than they realize, maybe a bigger mandate than they want, and my eyes are gonna be all over ’em.
The American people, if all of this pre-election hype, if all the polls, if all this stuff we’re hearing turns out to be right, if it’s a catastrophe, even if it’s not a catastrophe loss, even if it’s just a big loss, it’s still gonna be a loss, and it’s still gonna be people saying they want it stopped and that is why the Republicans are gonna end up winning. They’re not gonna win it because of immigration They’re not gonna win it for the Chamber of Commerce. They’re not gonna win it for whatever they’re gonna win it for. They’re gonna win it because the American people want somebody to stop this.
Now, if they don’t pick up that ball and run with it, I can’t tell you beyond that, but that’s what the election’s going to mean to me, and that’s how I’m gonna analyze it ’cause that’s what I think it means. And therefore, to me, it’s gonna be pressure. There’s gonna be pressure on the Republican Party to do the bidding of the American people who want this stopped. It may be pressure the Republican Party doesn’t want; I don’t know. But it’s still gonna be there.
People expect their vote to mean something. They expect their vote to matter, particularly now. And it’s gonna carry all the way to 2016. The expectations are gonna carry through right to 2016 as well. Repealing Obamacare would be really hard because the guy whose name is on it is sitting up on Pennsylvania Avenue, and he’s gonna veto any effort to make it happen, and even if he does, he’s still got executive orders he can do whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to because he doesn’t care about the Constitution.
That’s a whole other matter, too, what these next two years portend no matter who wins this today, or tonight. But the Republicans have signaled to Obama that they’re not gonna stop him. When they took impeachment off the table, they signaled that they’re not gonna stop him. So what is to stop him? The honor system? Reverence and respect for the Constitution? That doesn’t exist.
These are tough times. I don’t know. There’s nothing in my makeup that says vote for the guys creating the problems or do anything that keeps them in power. You have to start somewhere. And if that means stopping what’s happening, then that’s the objective that has to take place. Yeah, look, I can’t give you substantive A, B, C, D, E, F, G reasons for my optimism, it’s just the way I am. And I’ll admit there’s a little — I want to be optimistic. I want for there to be good things to happen. This is our country.
I want good things to happen for everybody. That’s what we conservatives want. We love everybody. We want the best for everybody. We want them to be able to procure the best for themselves.