RUSH: Everybody… Not everybody. A lot of people say that the Tea Partyites made a strategic miscalculation because they focused on the shutdown and all that, so the failure of the Obamacare rollout got unnoticed.
You may have heard that to. I heard it at dinner last night. “You know, Rush, these guys in the Tea Party, they went out there, and God bless ’em, but they’re so silly. They wasted all this time on something they knew couldn’t work. In the meantime, Obamacare’s rolling out. It’s a giant, dismal failure, and nobody knows!”
I said, “No, not true. Everybody knows.”
“What do you mean? How do they know?”
“‘Cause they’re living it! Everybody who’s tried to sign up has run into a brick wall.”
I think the truth of the matter is that fighting Obamacare — trying to defund it or delay it, whichever — and engaging in the shutdown heightened attention to the miserable failure Obamacare and this rollout is. I’m gonna tell you something, folks. I have an Obamacare Stack, and I’m gonna get into it in the program today, and I wouldn’t be surprised — I’m not gonna predict this but I wouldn’t be surprised — if before the end of the year… I mean, wait’ll you hear this.
There are two model states where the Obamacare rollout is supposed to be the glittering jewel of how it’s supposed to work, Maryland and Vermont, and they’re utter disasters. Maryland isn’t even gonna have its exchange ready until November, and Vermont is almost as bad — and they are the glittering jewels! They’re the crown jewels. This is where everybody’s supposed to go see how this brilliant thing is gonna work, and it’s an outright disaster.
I think they’re gonna have to do something before the end of the year to officially delay this, otherwise it’s gonna cream ’em. It is that bad, and there is nothing that Cruz or Mike Lee or anybody else in the Tea Party did to cover that up. It was not a strategic error, in the slightest. Jim DeMint, who runs the Heritage Foundation, had a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday — and there’s some great excerpts from it that I, of course, will share with you as the program continues to unfold.
But I just want to remind President Obama: Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, they did run for election, and they did win, and they campaigned on getting rid of Obamacare. So they went to Washington and they did exactly what they were elected to do. The people that elected Mike Lee and Ted Cruz are very happy. Finally, candidates who campaigned on an agenda went to work on it when they got to town. This is what’s expected of any candidate who gets elected on a specific platform.
In fact, I’m gonna move forward here to grab audio sound bites 10 and 11. This is fun. This is last night on CNN, Erin Burnett OutFront (as opposed to Erin Burnett OutBack), and she had as her guest Michael Grimm, a Republican congressman from New York, and they’re talking about me. I’m all over the sound bites today, Snerdley. That’s why I delayed playing ’em ’til now, so I don’t appear to be an ego freak by starting the show playing sound bites about myself. But I’m all over ’em, and Erin Burnett’s talking to Michael Grimm (R-NY), about me and my praise of Ted Cruz.
They had this little exchange about it all. I think there’s two bites here. Here’s the first one.
BURNETT: Here is Mr. Limbaugh…
RUSH ARCHIVE: We learned that one guy standing up can stop the status quo in its tracks. Can you imagine in this last five years, if we would’ve had five or ten Ted Cruzes? Can you imagine the difference? Can you imagine? If we had five or ten Ted Cruzes, we’d win a lot of debates. If we had 45 Ted Cruzes in the Senate, we’d come close to winning every vote…
BURNETT: You know, you got love Rush. He goes exponentially. He went from one to 45, 45 Cruzes. A good idea?
GRIMM: Laughing.
BURNETT: What do you think, Congressman Grimm?
GRIMM: That’s not a great idea. Unfortunately, the principles and the convictions may be correct, but you have to have some tactics, and you also have to have some respect for the fact that this is a big party.
RUSH: I don’t know what that means. Big party, I guess, equals big tent. I don’t know -what went wrong? Big party, big tent! The Tea Party’s in there; they fought for it. What it means is… I’ll tell you exactly what it means. What Mr. Grimm says is, “Look, we are big party. You have to have respect for that,” meaning you gotta: “Come in and kiss the moderate’s ass. You don’t just launch this strategy without telling the moderates about it. You just don’t launch this without telling anybody.
“You gotta tell us. You gotta let us know what you’re doing,” and really, that is one of the reasons upset with Ted Cruz. He launched into this, and we even asked him about it in a wide-ranging, stellar interview here earlier on this program some weeks ago, and he admits that he wasn’t totally up front, but he wasn’t totally in the dark, either. But I still don’t understand. “Principles, convictions may be correct, but…” There’s a “but” after that?
“Principles, convictions may be correct, but you have to have some tactics”? What that means is, “These guys knew that their objective wasn’t possible. It was simple math.” This is the lament. It was simple math. It was 51 versus 46. It was never gonna change. No way. They knew that. There was a different agenda going on here, called “educating the public.” It’s a long process. Grimm continued.
GRIMM: I think there are a lot of Reagan conservatives, which is what I consider myself, that are known for standing for our true values, but also being pragmatic and reasonable and working with others to come to a solution.
RUSH: Look, that’s just… You’ve heard it all before. What does that mean, “working with others to come to a solution”? That means caving in to the Democrats, in real life.