RUSH: Let me now, without any interruptions — well, I can’t say that because this stuff fires synapses in my fertile gray cells, and we’re off and running. But I’ll do my best here to stay focused and finish the highlights of the Pat Caddell supervised poll, the People’s Poll conducted by EMC Research. We left off with 23% of Republican voters are confident that future generations of Americans will have a higher standard of living and better lives than we do today.
That’s an incredibly low number. That’s as low as I’ve ever seen it. That does not constitute, “Hey, we’re in a good mood out here.” When only 23% of Republicans think that their kids and anybody’s kids are gonna do better than people are doing today. That used to be the essence of the American dream, that your kids would do better. It was part of the uniqueness of this country. People believed it, and therefore they made it happen. And when you don’t believe it, you don’t live it. It’s not good.
Nineteen percent of Republicans say the government’s working for the best interests of the people. That’s probably at an all-time low, too. That means 71% think the government is not working for the best interests of the people. And clearly what’s happened here, the government today is not the government of when I was growing up. The government today has become — I want to say “combination,” but it’s actually more than that. But the government’s not the government anymore. The government is an association of the powerful, in finance, in industry, and in politics. And they are all working to benefit each other.
That’s why you get a number, 19% of Republicans say the government’s working for the best interests of the people. It isn’t. It’s working for the best interests of itself. Stands to reason. That’s where all the money gets collected. It’s where all the money is. It’s where you go if you want to get your fist in the pile. And the way you get your fist in the pile of money in Washington is to buddy up with whoever is running the show, Republican or Democrat. Sell your soul for a piece of action. And the political parties today have much more allegiance to those arrangements than they do their voters.
It really isn’t any more complicated than that. You call it corporate cronyism, crony socialism, crony capitalism, whatever you want to call it, the powerful have gotten together and have basically taken over Washington and are using the power that is Washington to take care of themselves. And then every two or four years when it’s time to campaign the voters are told, “Hey, we’re looking out for you. Hey, we love you. Hey, we’re gonna do this and this and that and that,” and creates landslides like we just had. And then immediately after a landslide victory like we just had, the winners began sounding just like the people they beat. It’s interesting.
On leadership, only one in four Republican voters want both Boehner and McConnell to be reelected as top leaders. Only 16% want both Boehner and McConnell as leaders. This is a poll of Republican voters. This is not Republicans in the House and Senate. This is a poll of Republicans outside Washington. Fifty-three percent of these voters want an entirely new leadership team. Sixty percent of Republican voters want Boehner replaced as Speaker. Boehner’s favorable rating among Republican voters, 43%. A full 64% of Republican voters think that Boehner has been ineffective in fighting Obama’s agenda. And the reason they think that is that nobody’s fighting Obama. They’re giving lip service to it, but nobody’s fighting Obama’s agenda.
That’s my point. Obama’s agenda is not just Obama’s. Obama’s agenda is the agenda of Wall Street, of the Chamber of Commerce, two constituencies people have always assumed to be Republican, at least mostly. It works this way. When you have somebody like Obama, liberal Democrat who despises capitalism and gets elected, the people in industry, media, finance, look at the situation and say, “You know, it’s not worth fighting the guy. We better get on board with where he’s going so we can stay viable and stay rich, stay successful,” whatever. And that’s the difference.
There isn’t anybody fighting this agenda in Washington. Nobody. They give lip service to it, but nobody’s really fighting it. Look, there are exceptions. I’m not trying to diminish the importance of people like the conservatives in the House who are fighting it, or Ted Cruz, but they’re still a minority. The point is that there is no political party in opposition to Obama’s agenda. And this is now inarguably clear. Both parties seek the same thing on immigration reform. Both parties seek the same thing on Obamacare.
One party tells its voters they’re gonna repeal and replace, but they never really do anything. They have fake votes, faux votes. At the end of the process, Obamacare gets fully enacted, fully funded, and they even capitulate on the budget. They had a chance here to write their own budget for this remainder of the fiscal year; they punted that. They let the Democrats write it in a lame duck. They let the losers write the budget, because they fundamentally don’t disagree with the government getting bigger. They fundamentally don’t disagree with the government spending more money.
I don’t know when it happened. It certainly was in my lifetime. I don’t know when it happened, but the traditional private sector opponents of this kind of thing gave up and threw in and abandoned all pretense of ideological disagreement or difference. And now everybody — not everybody. But, I mean, the vast majority of what is called the establishment inside the Beltway is all on the same page. Business, for example, has found it’s easier to let government wipe out your competitors than it is in direct competition.
If you’re, say, a major big-box retailer and you are swimming in money, and the leader comes along and wants to raise the minimum wage, you, in your gut, in your mind, in your heart, you know it’s wrong, you know it’s bad, you know it doesn’t create jobs, you know that it does not lift people up economically, but what if supporting it will put your competitor out of business ’cause he can’t afford it? You just joined the whole process and you punt what you believe on the minimum wage. You throw in with the guys who want to raise it because your big-box competitors go by the wayside. Ditto supporting Obamacare.
In the old days, there’s no way private sector businesses would turn all of this over, the regulatory, the funding, everything, to government. But at some point they decided it’s not worth the fight, that they were gonna lose it, and so if it will help put your competitors out of business, you throw in with the powers that be and you sign up supporting government-run health care. It’s a faster way of putting your competitors out of business than actually building a better product, providing a better service. And this is what happened. It coincides with the election of Obama, frankly, and it might even predate that, with Clinton.
But all it took was a genuine socialist, big government liberal winning the day and everybody threw in with him. Remember O’Sullivan’s law. Any organization that is not actively conservative will become liberal. And conservatism’s been so demonized by the media. What conservatism? Racism, bigotry, sexism, homophobia. Why fight that? If you run major corporation C, why sign on to be a conservative and have to deal with that crap? Just throw in with the other side. It’s easier. Pay off Al Sharpton to leave you alone. That way you don’t have to worry about your company being called racist or whatever. You don’t have to worry about Al Sharpton protesting or arranging protests.
And that’s what’s happened, folks. Conservatives sat around and let themselves be demonized without fighting back to the point that many people think, you know, it’s not worth fighting to try to reject all this; we’ll just join the enemy here and be rid of the strife. We’ll have a frictionless life, and so forth. It’ll all come back to bite ’em someday. It always does. Because eventually Obama’s ideas are gonna destroy everything, even the people that threw in with him. But until such time as that, we’re left to fight it ourselves.
Sixty-four percent, again, of Republican voters think that Boehner has been ineffective in fighting Obama’s agenda. Only 44% of Republican voters think that Boehner puts the best interests of the public above special interests. That’s what we’ve been talking about. Forty-eight percent of Republican voters want McConnell replaced. Sixty percent want Boehner replaced. Most Republican voters — and don’t forget what McConnell says. McConnell said that the main goal for the Republican Party, in a new Senate, is to not scare anybody.
What do you think that means? That means throwing in with the Democrats. That means not opposing the Democrats. That’s all that means. Don’t want to be scary. We don’t want to be seen as extremist kooks. Remember, all you have to do to be seen as an extremist kook is to oppose Obama, pure and simple, no matter how principled your opposition is, no matter how factual it is, doesn’t matter. It’s easier to think “hands up, don’t shoot” happened than to try to tell people the truth that it didn’t. It’s no more complicated than that. It’s easier to fall in with Eric Garner was killed by a chokehold rather than died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, of a heart attack. It’s just easier, folks. It’s just easier not to oppose these guys. It’s just easier to throw in with them, and you get some goodies thrown back your way.
Why people voted Republican in the last election. Eighty-one percent said they voted to stop Obamacare. Eighty-one percent. Seventy-five percent said they voted Republican to stop amnesty for illegals. Seventy-one percent say they voted Republican to stop all of Obama’s agenda. It’s exactly what I thought. This poll has confirmed precisely how I read the election results: Stop Obama. That’s what this vote was about. The Republicans didn’t run on an agenda, so it can’t be said they were elected to do X, Y, and Z. Individual Republican candidates ran, particularly Senate candidates ran on opposing Obamacare, and they won big. But they Republican Party had a strategy, and that was to shut up and not say anything. And they still won.
The only conclusion can be this election had a singular meaning: Stop what Obama’s doing. But it’s easier to throw in with Obama. His race, by the way, is a clear factor in this. Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s much easier to throw in with the first African-American president than to oppose him because you know what’s gonna come. Even if you pay off Al Sharpton, you still might face allegations of racism and that you don’t want, people walking the aisles buying the Tide, you don’t want people thinking racism when they see the laundry detergent. So to avoid that you throw in with ’em. It’s gutless, but that’s where we are.
Tea Party support in this poll. Fifty-seven percent of Republican voters support the Tea Party. (interruption) That was surprising to you? Now, Snerdley is claiming that number surprised him because we keep hearing how the Tea Party is a bunch of ragtag, militia type hayseeds and hicks. They’re really just a minority of malcontents out there. And we do hear that. I mean, Republicans talk about it in that way. The media certainly does. The Democrats do.
But the way it needs to be looked at, the Democrats will always tell you what they fear by attacking it, by trying to destroy it. I mean, if the Tea Party were really as impotent and irrelevant as the media and the Democrats would have you believe, they wouldn’t even be thinking about it, much less talking about it, much less trying to destroy it. But the fact they’re trying to impugn the Tea Party, destroy the Tea Party, is all the evidence you need that they fear it.
Sixty-two percent of those described as strong Republicans support the Tea Party. Forty-eight percent of those described as weak Republicans support the Tea Party. And 56% of those described as, lean toward being Republicans but they’re not yet, support the Tea Party. The independents, support the Tea Party. In three out of four categories you have a minimum of 56% support of the Tea Party in the Republican Party. And if you think it’s just the Democrat Party trying to eliminate the Tea Party, you are mistaken. The Republican Party is right in on that effort, too.