RUSH: Scott Walker wowed them in Iowa at whatever this thing was, this Republican, slash, conservative, just wowed them. And you know me, folks, if you have spent any time listening to this program in the last two years, you know that I believe Scott Walker is the blueprint for the Republican Party if they are serious about beating the left. Scott Walker has shown how to do it. And apparently he showed up and he made a speech on Saturday that had people telling them it reminded them of the speech I gave at CPAC.

Now, if that’s true, that means that he went pedal-to-the-metal, wall-to-wall conservatism with charisma and bold ideas and solutions based on his own policies. We’re gonna review this because there are all kinds of people now, media types, conservative organizations are handicapping the Republican nomination race. And do you know that Scott Walker’s leading in one of these polls or handicap questionnaires, people asked, “Who do you give the greatest odds to getting the nom?” Scott Walker. He has come out of nowhere, and my point is he hasn’t come out of nowhere. He’s been front and center but unreported on. But Republicans and conservative voters and so forth know exactly who he is and what he stands for.

Here’s another. “Scott Walker Takes Iowa By Storm.” This is TheHill.com. The other story is in The Hill, too. But there’s a third one. Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a column in USA Today complaining in detail what we pointed out last year. Remember the 529 program we talked about, the education savings accounts that Obama’s now gonna start taxing when you withdraw for the express purpose of your kids’ education, supposed to be tax-free? More details on that. Meaning, Obama looking out for the little guy, is gonna raise taxes on the little guy, while making you think he’s gonna raise taxes on the rich.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Scott Walker. Let me jump to that right now. And I’m gonna do my best to squeeze all this stuff in here in the two hours of the program that we have here, folks, remaining. There was this thing in Iowa — hang on just a second. Here we go. All right. I was looking for pictures during the break, and stupid photo app.

“Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) delivered a fiery speech in Iowa on Saturday, wowing –” this is TheHill.com “– the conservative crowd with a passionate argument for small government and his own lengthy resume.”

Now, we’re constantly told — the Drive-By Media, and even some of the Republican establishment, try to portray Scott Walker as a totally colorless guy, when he’s not. But that’s the image that’s been set forth. Make no mistake. It’s so frustrating in a sense, folks.

Scott Walker has shown the Republican Party how to beat the left. Scott Walker has the blueprint for winning and winning consistently and winning big in a blue state with conservative principles that are offered with absolutely no excuses. The left, the Democrat Party, threw everything at Scott Walker trying to destroy him. They did everything they could. He not only withstood it all, he survived and triumphed over all of it. They broke rules. They got close to breaking laws. They were threatening his family personally, and he remained undeterred.

You know, there’s a companion story to Scott Walker’s success, and it is how union membership in America is at an all-time low. But even more importantly than that, the amount of money being raised by unions from dues is also plummeting. And that has the Democrat Party in a little bit of a panic, because that is so much, that’s such a great percentage of their campaign spending, is union dues, which make up significant union contributions. And Scott Walker is one of the men who has shown everybody how to defeat the unions and their policies, and it’s always been amazing to me that he, in terms of the party, has basically been operating in a bit of a bubble all by himself.

So to those of us who know him, to those of us who’ve heard him speak, to those of us who have studied his career and know how fearless he is and how successful he’s been, showing up in Iowa and giving a gangbuster performance is not a surprise. But it’s a shock, it’s an absolute shock to the media. And it’s an absolute shock to some even in the Republican establishment, so much so that they’re running around saying, “Where’d this guy go to get a charisma transplant?” Because they thought he was so dull. They thought he was so colorless that he has to have had a charisma transplant or bypass or something.

“The Wisconsin governor, in rolled-up shirtsleeves, paced the stage as he blasted big government and touted a long list of conservative reforms he’s pushed through in blue Wisconsin. The governor also showed a rhetorical flourish that’s largely been absent from his previous campaigns, drawing the crowd to its feet multiple times. ‘There’s a reason we take a day off to celebrate the 4th of July and not the 15th of April,’ he said, almost yelling as his voice grew hoarse. ‘Because in America we value our independence from the government, not our dependence on it.’ Walker’s speech had something for every element of the activist crowd.”

When was the last time you heard The Hill call the audience at a liberal event an activist crowd, but yet here we are in Iowa. Cokie Roberts thought this thing was so bad that she thinks the Republicans just ought to stay out of Iowa, no Hawkeye Cauci, no primaries, no going in there to get your feet wet and sample the political waters. You know why? Because something happens to Republicans when they go to Iowa. They become these fervent lunatic right wingers, and nobody’s gonna ever win as a lunatic right winger. That’s what Cokie Roberts says. Everybody knows the conservatives can’t possibly win.

Meanwhile, if you look at Republican presidential victories and losses in recent years you find that it is only Republican candidates who ran as conservative or who were, that won. The moderate, maybe even quasi-liberal Republican from the Northeast, from New England, doesn’t have a prayer. They never even come close. Or, if they happen to be from Arizona, but they never even come close. And yet, the word on the street is the Republicans better stay out of Iowa, ’cause, man, something happens to ’em. They go into Iowa and they become these extreme lunatic right wingers.

Here’s some sound bites, Scott Walker from his remarks Saturday. It was the Iowa Freedom Summit. That’s the name of it. I should have mentioned that at first. We have three sound bites. Here is number one.

WALKER: We weren’t afraid to go big and to go bold. Maybe that’s why I won the race for governor three times in the last four years. Three times, mind you, in a state that hasn’t gone Republican for president since I was in high school more than 30 years ago. You see, I think that sends a powerful message to Republicans in Washington and around the country. If you’re not afraid to go big and go bold, you can actually get results.

RUSH: You know, there’s a column today at one of the new conservative websites, Conservative Review, I believe it is, Daniel Horowitz, and he’s got a piece that makes all the sense in the world. It’s just common sense. We talk about it all the time here. How do you expect to fight something when you don’t believe in it? And his examples are, well, let’s take amnesty. Obama’s executive amnesty. We conservatives are out there, and we’re expecting the Republicans in the House and in the Senate to stand up to Obama. It’s what the election results were all about, stop Obama, and to fight for and be opposed to amnesty for illegals. And he says, but we’re stupid. Well, not stupid, but we’re shortsighted to think that.

They’re not going to fight it because they don’t believe it. And it leads to a rhetorical question: “How can you fight for anything if you don’t believe it?” Well, Scott Walker believes in it. That’s his point about going bold. That is his point about going big. You believe it. You’re passionate about it. You go for it. And you get results. But if you’re just going through the motions to try to convince voters or others that you really care about it, but you really don’t, it’s gonna show, and it is showing.

Now, this is a great bite because other Republicans are out there trying — you know this as well as I do — a lot of Republicans are trying to speak the language of the left, because they think that’s the language the people want to hear. So they talk about income inequality. But Scott Walker unabashedly makes the case for tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, and doesn’t even try to sound like a moderate, doesn’t even try to sound like a Democrat or a liberal.

WALKER: We’ve cut taxes. We reduced taxes by $2 billion for the hardworking taxpayers of our state. In fact, we lowered taxes on employers, on individuals, on property. Our property taxes are lower today in Wisconsin than they were four years ago. How many governors can say that? We’re gonna keep lowering taxes because we understand it’s the people’s money, not the government’s money. That’s the difference between the Wisconsin way and the Washington way. In Washington, they keep trying to find ways to take more of your money. In Wisconsin, we want to find ways to give more of the money back to the people who earned it.

RUSH: Yeah. You know, something he realizes here — you know, I have, as you know, I’ve struggled on the air with you thinking out loud, speaking while thinking out loud, why is it that people do not see government failure. This may not the best example, but here you have this thing with the Patriots, whatever it is. People think they cheated, and they’re just outraged by, and they want something done now. They want the NFL to investigate it and it’s such a big story the network newscasts give it a combined 11 minutes.

But yet when a particular party cheats all the time on voter fraud or violates the Constitution, it’s met with a ho-hum. No big deal. Government comes along, claims to want to fix a problem, they tackle the problem, they make it worse. They make it so much worse it needs to be fixed again. The same people come along and say we’re gonna fix it, same people who broke it, nobody has any outrage. They give government the benefit of the doubt. One of the reasons why is that government is seen as part of the community, which of course it isn’t.

But government, for so many people, is just as much a part of the community as the 7-Eleven store down on the corner. And of course the people in government who’ve succeeded in creating that impression milk it for all it’s worth, convince everybody that they’re out for them when it’s just the exact opposite. Scott Walker’s exactly right here. Washington has no intention of getting smaller. They have no intention of letting you keep more of your money. They have every intention of taking as much of your money as they can.

There’s no interest whatsoever in government shrinking. There’s no interest whatsoever in anything other than government growing. It’s just what happens to people in the establishment there. And if it’s become part of the community, why, what’s wrong with it at all, if it gets bigger, fine, we want government to be part of our community. But it’s not. Government is not part of the community. It wasn’t designed to be part of the community. It isn’t part of the community. I’m talking about the way people perceive it. Walker here, the way he’s addressing all of this, makes it clear.

Now, this is not a new Scott Walker; this is who he’s always been. But he’s appearing to be a surprise because there hasn’t been a whole lot of reporting on the guy outside of the state of Wisconsin. One more sound bite here from him.

WALKER: In America, it’s one of the few places left in the world where it doesn’t matter what class you were born into. It doesn’t matter what your parents did for a living. In America, the opportunity is equal for each and every one of us, but in America, the ultimate outcome is up to each and every one of us individually. You see, there’s a reason, there’s a reason why in America we take a day off to celebrate the Fourth of July and not the 15th of April, because in America we value our independence from the government, not our dependence on it.

RUSH: Now, what you need to know is — and he raised the roof in Iowa, and he came out, and many people’s lists even now, Walker is said to have the greatest odds of getting the Republican nomination. Can you imagine how people like Jeb Bush and Chris Christie and the people who have been pretty much — well, they’ve already been coronated in a sense as nominee, serious nominee contenders. They’ve already been coronated, “Well, it’s Jeb, and maybe Romney’s gonna.” Scott Walker’s name has not even come up, other than on this program. We’ve interviewed him in the newsletter. We’ve had him on the air here a couple of times.

And I, again, have to remind you, I can’t tell you how many times I have openly expressed my incredulity here that the Republican Party has not, as a national enterprise, attempted to incorporate Scott Walker’s blueprint. He’s shown how to beat the left. He has shown how to beat the unions. He has shown how to revive a state’s economy. He’s shown how to cut taxes and increase economic output. He has shown how to increase employment in the middle of an Obama economy. He has done all of this in a state like Wisconsin, big blue state.

It’s always been curious to me that Scott Walker has not been — I mean, he’s big at the Heritage Foundation, he’s big in some other conservative groups, but as far as the Republican Party establishment itself, second tier, looked on as second tier. I mean, they speak of him with respect and reverence, he’s one of the governors, but in terms of presidential politics, you never hear his name bandied about. But I’m gonna tell you the Democrats in Wisconsin are near hysterical over this. They’re near hysterical over what he’s done to them. They’re near hysterical over the accolades he’s getting as a result of his appearance in Iowa over the weekend on Saturday.

I really think that Scott Walker is the kind of guy the Republicans need to hoist on one of those chairs they used to take Caesar through the crowds with. What he’s done in the state of Wisconsin is phenomenal. Nobody knows about it, other than you in this audience.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: One other thing about Scott Walker: There’s a story in the Milwaukee Urinal-Sentinel out of Madison, and the headline is: “Walker Budget to Bar Drug Users From Food Stamps and Medicaid.” The Democrats in Wisconsin are just hysterical over this, and this is my exact point about Scott Walker: He takes these people on right between the eyes! You know, for every one of you who wish Boehner or McConnell would do X, Y, or Z, Scott Walker’s doing it.

Scott Walker has done it and he’s been doing it for years. And this is not an endorsement. I don’t want anybody to think it’s an endorsement. I’m just presenting you with information, fact-based information about who the guy is. I have been singing his praises for a long time. I’ve only met him once, at a Heritage Foundation event. I don’t know him. I’ve talked to him on the phone. I’ve interviewed him for the most widely read political newsletter of all time, the Limbaugh Letter. But he’s not a friend.

I haven’t met him in a social, civic setting at all. I just… I looked at what’s happened in Wisconsin. I looked at the opposition and everything they tried to do. Everything the Republican Party is afraid has happened to them has actually happened to Scott Walker, and he took it on, and he skunked ’em! Scott Walker shows that it can be done. Scott Walker demonstrates that you can win and win big by presenting a stark contrast between yourself and the American left.

He has demonstrated you can beat them, win, and win big by being the exact opposite of what they are. Which is, in fact, who we are. We are the exact opposite of the American left. He has not tried to be a little bit like them. He has not tried to steal some of their language and incorporate it so as to be less offensive. He took them on right between the eyes and beat ’em back. He has been fearless. Again, it’s important to emphasize.

He has been treated by the media in Wisconsin and the Democrat Party establishment and everybody associated with it, exactly as the Republicans in Washington are afraid they will be treated. You might be asking, “Well, what about the donors, Rush? What about them?” I don’t know where the Chamber of Commerce was with the guy, but I’m telling you, he triumphed. And he won on principle, core-belief principle.

He won on issues to the point that everybody is running around asking, “Where’d this guy go get a charisma? Where can I go shop for a charisma like that and pick one up where he did? I want to know where you do that.” And I think he’s always had one. Here’s the story on union membership from the Daily Signal: “Union Membership Rate Falls to 100-Year Low.” By the way, and this, it’s a companion story to Scott Walker. It’s one reason that what he did in Wisconsin to the unions is so awesome.

This story is a story in part because of Walker’s success in Wisconsin. This is a huge pot of money, folks, that used to be used against the GOP — well, it still is. “New information from the federal government suggests that workers’ interest in unions continues to plummet, with union membership reaching its lowest rate in 100 years. According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a government agency, the union membership rate fell to 11.1%.

“Only 14.5 million wage and salaried workers maintain membership.” So 11.1% of the workforce is unionized, 14 and a half million people. Yet look at the clout! Look at the clout they have with the Democrat Party, and that clout is simply because of money. With fewer members, there is less dues money to go around, siphoned and used to fund Democrat campaigns. “The rate of union membership’s been on a steady decline over the past 30 years, and in the last six years, it has experienced a rapid decline.”