RUSH: Dave in Indianapolis. Hi. Great to have you. Welcome.
CALLER: Good Friday. I just wanted to talk about the history of the establishment is really a story of addiction when you think about it. Even if you go back to King George III who said something like, “A traitor is anyone who disagrees with me,” this kind of thing. So I’m relating this to the establishment and the Cantor result or loss, which is that, look at the response the establishment has had to the Cantor loss, which is little more than that of a belligerent drunk who doesn’t want to hear that last call is over at the bar. They don’t want to hear that there’s no more booze and it’s time to go home, the sun has come up and that it’s time for sobriety.
The Tea Party is really a movement about sobriety, about principled sobriety. And we are trying to reach these people in the establishment to do the job they said they could do. When they ran for office, they told us they were leaders. They told us they could lead the country. They told us they could provide a result. Well, the time is now, the time for putting up is right now. But we are not seeing — we’re hearing more claims and wrangling over positions of leadership, but we are not seeing leadership out of these people. They are not leaders.
RUSH: I don’t think you’ll get much argument on that. Your analogy is interesting to me, that the establishment leads to the same mind-set as addiction and that you and the Tea Party, you are sober, you have sobriety, meaning you take things seriously, and you want them to. Meanwhile, they are totally absorbed in their own survival, in their own needs, in satisfying their own whatever it is they want or need at whatever cost. Therefore they’ve become undependable, and you can’t count on them, and it’s not really sensible to invest leadership in them.
That’s pretty much what your analogy is saying. The only thing is, you describe their reaction as like those at a happy hour told the bar is closing. I think there’s some anger. There really is. I think that the establishment in both parties — and I used to think this is only true of Democrats and liberals, but I think it’s true of anybody in the establishment. You look at you and your supporters as the sober, in sobriety. They look at you as plebes. You don’t really know enough to understand how they do what they do, and therefore you just had a temper tantrum in throwing one of them out. You don’t really know what you’re doing.
I don’t think they’re at all scared. I think they’re angry over what happened. I’ve got my only analogy to these people. I ran it by the Official Program Observer this morning. You and I look at elections as one of the few vehicles we have to express our opinions and effect any kind of change. They, on the other hand, look at elections as a nuisance. It’s something they have to constantly raise money to do, and every two or four years they have to actually engage in it, but they resent having to do it. When you get up and go to work every day you have to drive or ride or somehow get there. But when you talk about your day and what’s gone on, you very seldom, unless traffic was outrageous, the drive to and from work, that’s not the big part of the day. That’s not substantive. And that’s the election to them.
The election is simply how they get there, but it has nothing to do with what they do when they get there. Just like the way you go to work has nothing to do with what you’re gonna do on the job once you arrive. What route you take, how long it took you doesn’t matter to how you do your job or what your job is. And I think elections are the same way to them. It’s just what they have to do to get to work, but once they get there, the election doesn’t matter a hill of beans, and what happened in it doesn’t matter a hill of beans. As long as they win it, and then they’ll put everything aside. The next election comes up and then they start paying attention.
I think this leads to disconnect and even a bit of cynicism about the role of elections in our process. The ruling class looks at ’em as nuisances. We look at them as one of the few vehicles, opportunities, chances that we have to effect any kind of change.
So your analogy is interesting, but there have been a number of shocks and surprises in elections just in the last 20 years, and they haven’t brought about any real change. Let me give you a real good example. The 2002 midterms. The Democrats, ’cause of polling data and any number of things, thought they had that election in the bag. They were gonna take back the House. They were gonna run everything.
Bush, they were still fuming over the Florida recount, and 9/11 had happened. The Wellstone memorial took place. They just were so cocksure that they were gonna win big, and they got shellacked in those midterms — and they got shellacked, according to the exit polling information, for things that had not even come up in the campaign. A: Values. It was striking!
These were national elections all across the country, midterm elections, and it was stunning. Exit polling data indicated that the number one issue people voted on were values. Morality, family values, this kind of stuff. The Democrats were totally shellacked. They were totally shocked. They were stunned, they couldn’t believe it, and for the two weeks following the election they’re all out there promising to get right on values and so forth.
That was a huge loss.
Has it changed the way the Democrats behave?
It has not.
I’m sure you can think probably yourself of other shocking election results. The Republicans winning the House for the first time in 40 years in 1994? Did that send a message to the Democrats that they’d better clean up, straighten up, and stop this Big Government stuff? No. What happened? The Republicans ended up becoming more like Democrats after a while. (interruption)
What you mean, “What’s the point?” The point is don’t think that the Eric Cantor defeat is gonna cause a massive reversal in direction of the Republican establishment. They’re not gonna look at the Cantor defeat and say, “Oh, oh, oh oh, my God. We better change. Oh, you know what? We better drop amnesty.” They’re not gonna do that at all. It’s not what happens. That’s why elections end up being so frustrating.
They’re the one thing we have, and sometimes even when they end up sending a huge message, sometimes it appears like the message isn’t received. That’s why this mess is not gonna be fixed in one election, even a presidential election. This kind of thing that happened on Tuesday night needs to happen over and over again. Not to depress you, but it just does.