RUSH: Did you see Bob Woodward on Face the Nation yesterday? Bob Woodward on Face the Nation yesterday said that he hears from Democrats, not just Republicans, who hate Obama as well. Bob Woodward said to Bob Schieffer, “ThatÂ’s absolutely true. You get the Democrats in private, and they are on fire! Because he wonÂ’t spend the time, because he wonÂ’t listen.”
I mean, “Democrats tell me privately they hate Obama, too.” This is Bob Woodward. Well, there’s a reason why. Dan Balz, of all people, in the Washington Post yesterday has a column or a story, and the headline is: “Two Midterm Elections have Hollowed Out the Democratic Party.” And that’s right on the money. Two elections, 2010 and 2014, have hollowed out this party and exposed this party for what it is. Jurassic Park. And by hanging on and holding on they have eliminated the evolution of a bench of young, energetic, charismatic Democrats.
All the Democrats that are out there are a bunch of old fossils like Pelosi, like Reid, like Boxer, like Feinstein, Mary Landrieu, I mean, you name it. Let me give you a couple pull quotes from this piece. “But a political party cannot be constructed around two individuals (Obama and Clinton), as Democrats seem to be today.”
It is a golden, shiny, fat pitch for the GOP to educate people on conservative ideas. That’s my — Balz didn’t write that. That’s exactly what this is! I say that very frustratedly because I don’t know that that’s the point of view held by Republicans. Man, what an opportunity this is, and 2010 was, too. Now, Dan Balz says: “None of this means that Democrats will lose the presidential election in 2016. The coalition that Obama assembled to win in 2008 and 2012, to the degree that it remains intact, gives them a head start in a national campaign. As does the electoral map. Those realities continue to worry many Republicans.”
But before he gets to that point, Dan Balz writes about how Obama and these two elections have literally hollowed out and destroyed the Democrat Party. And you will not hear this discussed on TV. You will not hear this discussed on cable news anywhere. You will not hear it. It doesn’t fit any soap opera script. All you’re gonna continue to read about is divisions in the Republican Party. You’re gonna continue to read about how Republicans want to do nothing about reviving Reaganism.
You’re gonna continue to read about this Republican or that conservative thinks, “Leave Reagan alone! It’s 20 years now!” You’re gonna end up thinking there’s no unity in the Republican side even after this big win, and you’re gonna end up thinking the Republicans are tearing themselves apart. What you’re not gonna hear is how devastated the Democrat Party is.
“The past two midterm elections have been cruel to Democrats, costing them control of the House and now the Senate, and producing a cumulative wipeout in the states,” and that’s another thing that’s not being discussed. There are 23 states where the Republicans hold the governorship and the legislature. Twenty-three! In only five states did the Democrats make that claim.
“The 2010 and 2014 elections saw the defeat of younger politicians — some in office, others seeking it — who might have become national leaders. As the post-Obama era nears, the DemocratsÂ’ best-known leaders in Washington are almost entirely from an older generation, from the vice presidency to most of the major leadership offices in the House and Senate. The generation-in-waiting will have to wait longer.”
Hillary Clinton is thrown in with the Jurassic Park crowd in this piece. I want to expand on this a little bit. But before I get there, one reminder from last week: The Democrat Party used to be a bunch of disparate coalitions that were united by a couple of things: The belief in Big Government and government control over as much of the country as possible and hatred for conservatives. That’s how you would have the feminists over here and the environmentalist wackos and the animal rights people and the civil rights coalition.
They all had competing interests, but when it came to the things they had in common, they were united in their belief that government should grow bigger and more powerful, and people should have less freedom, and taxes should go up and up and up, and the Republicans were the absolute modern incarnate of the devil. But the Democrat Party is different now. I don’t think Balz realizes how he gets so close to describing it. He doesn’t see it, I don’t think.
The Democrat Party’s now made up, I think, of two groups.
And I’ll explain what I mean when I get back from this obscene profit time-out.
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RUSH: Everybody asks me, and some of you have on this program, “When did the Democrat Party become so extremist leftist? When did it happen?” I always point back to the Kennedy assassination as the starting point for the modern evolution of the Democrat Party. In the old days, as I said, the Democrat Party was all these disparate coalitions unified by a couple of things. But I think it’s a different structure now. I even saw a piece (I forget where) last week on the Web that made this same point.
The Democrat Party now — with the arrival of Obama and groups like ACORN, the old Democrat Party, what Balz is writing here about being hollowed out — is typified by these aging Jurassic Park Democrats, including Bill and Hillary and Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, all of these names. They comprise what, for lack of a better term, I would call the Union-Thug Wing of the Democrat Party. These are the old party bosses, the Mayor Daley types that would use muscle and intimidation.
They would engage in fraud and cheat whenever they had to, and it was not a game. It was more than a way of life. It wasn’t even a blood sport. It was their reality. Winning elections was everything, the only thing that mattered. Winning elections was the only way the agenda could be advanced. But that group, while it still exists, is doing battle within another group of the Democrat Party.
That one’s typified by Obama, and that is this new — relatively new, at least publicly new — wacko, extreme left, progressive Democrat Party, which is made up of community organizers. ACORN. I mean, you name it. Groups like this and Obama. The point about them is, I mean, they’re just as left, or just as leftist as the Harry Reid and Pelosi wing. But they have a different agenda about moving forward. Winning elections to them is cool, but they don’t have to.
They don’t feel thwarted at all when they lose an election, because they’re working in parts of our society at various levels of the culture to advance their agenda regardless of elections. That group tends to be much younger than these old dinosaurs. The young progressive crowd is beginning to look at the Harry Reid and Clinton and all that era of the Democrat Party as the problem.
The old war horses, they’re the ones losing. They’re the ones being rejected. They’re the ones out of touch. They’re the ones that are not leftist enough, they’re not tough enough, they’re not smart enough, as evidenced by these last two elections. It’s that young progressive wing that I think poses the… They all pose a threat. It’s a minute difference in terms of which poses the greater.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: As usual, I checked the e-mail during the top-of-the-hour break. I always do. I give the e-mail address out. It would only be a nice thing and good manners to check these. So I always do. A couple caught my interest. “Why are you spending all this time talking about the Democrats? They lost! They lost! I don’t want to hear about the Democrats!”
It’s another great question, and I’ll tell you exactly why. If there’s one thing… No, I can’t say there’s one, because there’s many. One of the many things I would love to be able to nuke in the minds and attitudes of conservatives is this idea that the Democrat Party is omnipotent and infallible and never loses and is brilliant and is outsmarting us at every turn.
If I could dissuade people from believing that, I would, because that attitude leads to fatalism or defeatism, and that’s not what we need. It’s gonna take a lot of elections like we just had, and then after that it’s gonna take the implementation of the right agenda to not just stop what’s going on, but to turn the ship and get it going in the right direction.
I think it’s crucial, very important to have an honest understanding of who your opponents are, what their strengths and weaknesses are and what they’re capable of. But the idea they can’t be beat has been disproven here, big time, and in 2010 as well. Now, presidential years are a different animal, and there are demographic and electoral reasons for that. But they can be overcome, too, just like this was.
The great thing about this election was that the American people, when they found out what was going on, steadfastly said, “Stop it!” We would have stopped it in 2012 if some Republicans had shown up and voted. That 2012 election’s not the Republicans getting beat; it’s the Republicans not showing up. That illustrates its own set of problems on the Republican side. I’ll deal with that on another day.
This new Democrat Party, there was a piece on this last week, as it turns out, and this guy kind of dovetails with the way I think about it. His name is Daniel Greenfield, and it was at… What’s the website? (sigh) You know, Apple has this great feature in Safari called Reader. It just takes out every graphic, it takes out every picture, and all it does is print the text. But it doesn’t print the link. If the story does not have the source, it doesn’t print.
I think this is… Maybe it’s Commentary. It’s Front Page. It’s David Horowitz. That’s it. It’s Front Page Magazine. Right here it is. “There are really two Democratic parties. One is the old corrupt party of thieves and crooks. Its politicians, black and white, are the products of political machines. They believe in absolutely nothing.
“They can go from being Dixiecrats to crying racism, from running on family values to pushing gay marriage and the War on Women. They will say absolutely anything to get elected.” They will lie; they will cheat. It doesn’t matter. “[T]hey are able campaigners. Reformers underestimate them at their own peril because they are determined to win at all costs. The other Democrat Party…” This is the new one — relatively new — the real extreme leftists.
“The other Democratic Party is progressive. Its members are radical leftists working within the system,” and they’re disguised as bureaucrats. They’re disguised as college professors. They are disguised as community organizers. They’re disguised as news directors. They’re disguised as journalists. They are disguised as Hollywood producers.
“They are natural technocrats and their agendas are full of big projects. They function as community organizers, radicalizing and transforming…” They will not say something they don’t believe just to get elected, in all cases. They will push what they really believe, but they will do it in an unseen way. Winning is “a subset of their real agenda. Their agenda is to transform the country,” which is rooted in an active dislike for the way the country was founded.
They have no desire to game the system, to work within it to win. They want to wipe out the way the country was founded, and they want to transform it into a giant community organizer paradise and utopia. If they can do it by winning elections, they will, but if they don’t win elections, they don’t cry about it, and they don’t change anything.
They continue to work and undermine and subvert beneath the surface, disguised as average, ordinary bureaucrats or community organizers or civil rights coalition members or what have you. But they are some of the most partisan, angry, hate-filled people in this country. Those two different groups actually now compromise the Democrat Party. Some people say that there’s a “civil war” in the Democrat Party, and I don’t believe that.
I think for there to be a civil war in a party, the politicians of a party must be at war with its base voters. That’s what I consider to be a civil war within a party. The normal disagreement of factions within a party — one Democrat over here disagrees with another Democrat about strategy, procedure, objective — that’s not a civil war, and the Democrat Party’s not in one.
If the Democrat Party were in a civil war, the old dog, corrupt, union-led dinosaur group would be attempting to undermine and sabotage the progressive voters, because they would see them as a threat to their power. Now, under that, you could say that there is a civil war going on in the Republican Party. That civil war would be the establishment wing versus the Tea Party.
But the Tea Party can’t be wiped out. The Tea Party is organic. The Tea Party cannot be beaten. The Tea Party is made up of average, ordinary Americans who get involved in politics, and they vote and they raise money (when the IRS isn’t targeting them). There isn’t a singular leader, and there’s not a platform per se. It’s just, in many cases, unprofessional political people versus the professional political ones.
You know what else?
In terms of the Republican House makeup, there are gonna be many more Tea Party members in that Republican caucus than the Republicans might want to admit. The Tea Party was not wiped out (the Republicans would like you to think they have been), because you can’t get rid of grandma. You can’t get rid of grandma and the grandkids. There’s no way. You can’t, because you’re not gonna get rid of the American people.
So the Tea Party isn’t gonna go away, much to the chagrin of some in the establishment Republican Party. Now, let’s go back to Dan Balz’s piece where he accurately explains what has happened to the Democrat Party. Of course, this is all important for future elections. It’s important for the Republicans in strategizing an agenda. But it’s factually… It’s really more important in not…
See, I think one of the things that has held the Republicans back is their belief that the Democrat Party is loved and adored by the vast majority of the American people. I think they’ve got it all wrong, and I think it’s Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. I think it’s decades and decades of media hits. They think the Democrat Party is the New York Yankees of old; they never lose. That’s not true. And neither is Hillary.
You know, she puts her pants on one leg at a time like everybody else does.
It’s a mistake to hold these people up and say they’re unbeatable and infallible. People do because the media supports them constantly, but here’s the truth. “As the post-Obama era nears,” and it is fast approaching, “the DemocratsÂ’ best-known leaders in Washington are almost entirely from an older generation, from the vice presidency to most of the major leadership offices in the House and Senate.
“The generation-in-waiting will have to wait longer. Presidential campaigns and open nomination contests help bring new leaders to national prominence. That appears unlikely in 2016. For all her positive attributes, former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton is a suffocating presence when it comes to intraparty presidential competition.” That’s exactly right. She is “a suffocating presence.”
“Her command of the Democratic machinery, from fundraising to grassroots organizing, is so extensive that almost everyone else is understandably intimidated about even testing their talents against her.”
In other words, the presumption that Mrs. Clinton is the next nominee is destroying the Democrat Party and keeping it old and dinosaurish and preventing young players at AAA from moving up to the big leagues. I think this is a fear that they have in addition to being somewhat of a reality.
And Balz writes it this way. “Think of it this way: If Clinton were to win the presidency and serve two terms, the next opportunity for a new generation of Democrats to compete nationally would not come until 2024. The Democrats could go 16 years between competitive presidential nomination contests, wiping out opportunities for todayÂ’s younger generation to define or redefine the party apart from either the Obama or Clinton eras.
“The partyÂ’s national bench is so thin that Democrats count themselves lucky to have her available in 2016. If she were to decide not to run, the Democrats would have trouble identifying a field of candidates as extensive as Republicans are likely to put up in the coming presidential race.” And then Balz goes on to mention some names. But among them are Jerry Brown, just reelected governor of California, 76. He’s gonna be 80 years old when this term expires. This is happening to the Democrat Party all over the country. These aging dinosaurs stay in power.
Now, this assumes that Mrs. Clinton is gonna get the nomination and assumes that she’s gonna win and then assumes, if she wins in 2016, she wins again in 2020. And I don’t think any of that’s in the bag at all. But the point is still relevant: The Democrat Party has been hollowed out by these two losses. They are beatable now, eminently, as has just been demonstrated, and this attitude is necessary going forward. The days of being afraid — look, I don’t want hear any more calls about how the Democrats are infallible and everything they don’t is a giant, brilliant strategic trick designed to get us distracted or whatever while they secretly move the agenda. That is happening with Obama. But Obama is a different kind of Democrat than these guys we’re talking about, the Hillarys and the Harry Reids and you name it.
But they’re not anything to be afraid of, is my point. They’re nothing to be intimidated by. The Democrats are the ones who ought to be quaking in their boots. Look at what they had. They had Kay Hagan in North Carolina, $26 million spent on her. All of the free media time the Democrats always get, whatever that ends up being. They had 99% of the media with them, they have Hollywood with them, they have the pop culture with them, and look what happened to them. They lost 70 seats in Congress. And you add it up over the two years — well, 2010 and 2014, and it is dramatic what they’ve lost.
They’ve lost governorships. They’ve lost state legislatures. Twenty-three states now have Republican governors and Republican legislatures. The Democrats have five. The rest are divided or mixed. But, I mean, this shellacking goes all the way down to dogcatcher, and it was a repudiation. It was a rejection, an in-your-face rejection of everything they stand for. They are the ones who ought to be quaking in their boots. They are the ones who ought to be scared to death. They are the ones who ought to be writing stories about how maybe it’s time to give up on Bill Clinton instead of our guys writing about how it’s time to give up on Reagan.
They’re the ones who had better start figuring out that Clinton is not the future of the Democrat Party, Bill or Hillary. And they’re the ones that better figure out Obama’s not the future of the Democrat Party, and Charlie Rangel isn’t the future, and Harry Reid’s not the future. Going after the Koch brothers is not the future. Socialism is not the future. Socialist utopia is not. Everything they stand for has just been soundly repudiated and rejected, and the American people rose up and said, “Stop it.” And at the same time expressed a desire for something different.
We all know what that is, whether they would verbalize it or not. They want the opposite of this. They want economic growth. They want lower taxes. They want the free enterprise economy growing again. They want government out of their lives. They want conservatism, whether they know it or not. And it’s time to give it to ’em. They’ll love it.
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RUSH: Another reason why you cannot wipe out the Tea Party, and that is you can’t wipe out ideas. It’s just that simple. All right, back to the phones we go. This is Tom in Queens. It’s great to have you on the program, Tom. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, thank you, Rush. I gotta tell you, on hold listening to you I’m getting a thrill running up my leg.
RUSH: (laughing) I’ll take that under proper advisement.
CALLER: The main thing I’m calling about is I feel that the thumping that the Dems received would have been even worse had the polls not for weeks, if not months, predicted that it was gonna be a runaway for Republicans. Because I know I spoke to a lot of my friends, and I was trying to persuade everybody to vote, to get out and vote, and some of them were saying it’s a done deal already, the Republicans have it. It’s such a terrible attitude to hear, but that’s the feeling that they got. And this might have inspired Dems to go out —
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait. Did you say that polling was reporting a Republican rout?
CALLER: Yes. Yes.
RUSH: Where did you see that? I never once saw that. Every poll I saw the races were nip and tuck, too close to call, margin of error. It wasn’t until a couple days before that some polls began to talk about it being a wave, but that was just in the final week. The media never even got close to accurately portraying what was gonna happen.
CALLER: Well, maybe it’s just the talk radio shows that I listen to were making it sound like it was definitely gonna be a landslide for the Republicans. That’s the way I was hearing it.
RUSH: Well, we knew, but we’re not considered the media. So when you say the media, I think ABC, CBS, NBC, all of that.
CALLER: Oh, no. I don’t listen to that.
RUSH: That’s why I was confused. So you think if the media had reported it was gonna be a landslide, it would have been even bigger or not as big?
CALLER: No, I think if it wasn’t getting out that it was a done deal, the Republicans were gonna run away with this, I think it would have been even more of a landslide for them.
RUSH: Oh, I see. Okay. Well, I’m still a little confused, because I don’t remember anybody saying it was gonna be this big. The final take on the polls, I have to say I was wrong again. I gave them the benefit of the doubt this time, and I don’t think they earned it. You know, I thought you get a week or two weeks out and the polls, because of their own desire for credibility, would be closer to the truth and honestly projecting what they really thought would happen, and it wasn’t even close. No poll called what happened. That’s why everybody’s so shocked.
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