RUSH: Look at me. There is no more compromising with Democrats than you can compromise with the Taliban. Who in the hell thinks that this can be done? Mr. Issa, what are you thinking? Who are you talking to? What voters want us to compromise with the Democrats or with Obama? You don’t compromise with the Taliban. You don’t compromise with Castro. You don’t compromise with Lenin. You don’t compromise with Stalin, unless you want to starve to death. The lesson of 1994 is not the government shutdown. For crying out loud, these analogies amuse me. Here’s the lesson of 1994, and I’ll tell you exactly what it was, and I said this over and over again. The biggest mistake that was made after 1994 was that Newt and the boys believed that the country had gone conservative and they stopped teaching. They removed all ideology from what they did. When it came time to balance the budget or implement any new legislation, they didn’t say, ‘And this is because of X, Y, and Z, conservatism, what we believe.’ They just did it assuming that people knew. That assumption should never be made. The reasons for doing things must always be explained. It’s in the Constitution. It’s in the best interests of the people. We care about people. We care about the country. We need to fix what’s wrong. That’s the biggest lesson of 1994.
We quit. We quit educating. And we quit fighting, essentially. There was something else that happened in 1994, and this is key, too. I was made an honorary member of the freshman class of 1994, and I went to their freshman orientation at Camden Yards. I went there ’cause they asked me to stand up there and speak to them. And I said, ‘Do not think the media is happy you’re here. Do not expect Cokie Roberts to come bat her big eyelashes at you and say, ‘Let’s go to lunch.’ Cokie Roberts and the rest of the media are agitated that you are here. They’re not gonna treat you like the ruling-class Democrats. They’re gonna treat you as though you’re not the majority. You’re interlopers. They have no interest in dealing with you in a form of respect.’ I remember making that statement as plain as day, and I warned them that the idea that they were going to be the majority and have automatic respect as a result of that, not going to happen.
There’s a third lesson. For 40 years Republicans had been losers. For 40 years Republicans had been in the minority, and then one day they weren’t. There was nobody on the Republican side who knew what it was like to be in the majority. I’ve drawn the analogy, those of you who have had weight problems over the course of your life know exactly what I’m talking about. You lose a lot of weight but you still stop at every mirror to make sure it’s still gone. Every storefront, every piece of glass you still look, you turn sideways, ‘Am I gaining it back?’ You still are thinking fat. You still think you gotta turn a different way to get through a turnstile when you don’t anymore. You become accustomed to being what you are, and, all of a sudden, when you’re now the majority and leading and you have no experience at it, what do you do?
Well, that’s not going to happen this time because some of the same people who were there in 1994 had no clue what to do were in leadership roles. Some people who were not in leadership roles witnessed what happened back then and don’t want to repeat it. So the 1994 analogy here to 2010 is baseless in any number of ways. And, ladies and gentlemen, this is exactly what the media always does before an election if they think it’s gonna go bad for the Democrats. The headline story in the New York Times before the state primary there last month was: ‘New York Voters Are More Hopeless Than Angry.’ The upshot of that story was that it was a waste of time to vote since all the candidates were exactly the same. Mind you this is the primary that gave us Carl Paladino, who is not like anybody else. We have sound bites of that debate last night. This race coulda been something.
There was a story I had yesterday in the stack, I’d have to find it over there, New York voters fed up with Albany, New York voters fed up with the way things are going, and yet Andrew Cuomo is in the lead. He is Albany. Andrew Cuomo personifies what’s wrong. It coulda been different. If Paladino hadn’t gotten sidetracked on whether Cuomo had had an affair or not, hadn’t launched into an attack on Fred Dicker, just stuck to the issues of how screwed up the state is and needs to be fixed, it coulda been, hell, I don’t know, might still could be. But the media always does this. They try to tell you it’s pointless, it’s hopeless. The things that you expect to happen after you win, they’re not going to happen because the leaders of your party know you’re a bunch of doofuses.
One of the lessons of 1994, too, the GOP wins when they nationalize congressional elections. That was revolutionary for 1994. Nationalize the elections. You know, House races up ’til that point traditionally had to be run on local matters, how much pork had been brought home, who built the old folks’ home, who got the new wing on the old folks’ home, who built the new water treatment center, that kind of stuff. But in 1994 they nationalized the election. And they asked, ‘How will your guy do in defeating the Soviets? How will your guy do protecting the country? How will your guy do on the borders?’ Essentially when you nationalize the election you ask people to think about the good of the nation instead of whether Congressman Bloghorn brought home some bacon. Now, one mistake the elites in both parties are gonna make is that all they have to do from now on is get enough earmarks for their district or state, think they can still be bought off with earmarks. The people are realizing more and more that all that is coming out of their pockets, it’s just being redistributed. It’s being taken from them in the first place before it is being given back to them.