RUSH: This is Patrick in Syracuse. I’m glad you waited, sir. Great to have you on the EIB Network, the nation’s most listened to program. Make it count.
CALLER: Happy birthday, Rush. I hope you’re having a great day.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Hey, listen, I don’t think I can top that monkey story, so I’m just gonna get right to my own comments. I think something important has gotten lost in this whole discussion about how the Democrats are trying to delegitimize Trump’s presidency. They point to Russian hacking, but they’re still running around saying how Hillary won the popular vote. And what I find frustrating is that so many people seem to have forgotten that Gary Johnson was on the ballot, and, if you look at the Libertarian platform, you can sum it up in two words: less government.
So, even when you add Jill Stein’s votes to Hillary, Trump plus Johnson wins, and when you look at the platform, more people undeniably voted for less socialism, moving away from socialism than moving toward it. And so when people try to say that Trump’s agenda is not valid, I would encourage all of us on the right to continue to remind all of our friends on the left that more people voted for Trump’s agenda than for Hillary’s agenda.
RUSH: Well, that is a good point. This whole popular vote thing is nothing again but a distraction trying to claim that Trump doesn’t have a mandate, which he clearly does. And the reason that he does is undeniably this: Obama put his agenda on the ballot. You people on the left are gonna have to find a way past this. Obama went out and campaigned for Hillary, but he didn’t campaign for Hillary. He went out and begged people to vote for her to continue his great legacy. And they said (raspberry) that. And they repudiated.
This election was a repudiation. You could call it a repudiation of socialism. You could call it a repudiation of communism. You can call it a repudiation of incompetence. You can call it a repudiation of failure. For crying out loud, look at Obamacare. Obamacare was one lie after another. If you like your doctor, keep your doctor. If you like your plan, keep your plan. Your premium’s coming down $2,500 a year, lie after lie after lie. Not one thing promised with Obamacare happened.
The Dittocam’s still in zoom. I’m sorry. Why didn’t you tell me earlier? That’s not good. Let me zoom it back out. All right. There we go.
The thing about this whole business of the Obama agenda and whether you call it communism, socialism, or what have you, no question it was repudiated, no question it was voted down, but — this is key — I’m not so sure that Big Government was voted down. Obama’s version of it was, and Hillary Clinton’s potential control over it, no question, was. But Trump didn’t run… Trump didn’t talk about smaller government. I mean, Trump’s out there talking about his infrastructure and a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, and he’s talking rebuilding the Navy. Much of what Trump wants to do is going to cost a lot of money. And people voted for it.
This is what led me many occasions during the campaign to talk about, you know, what kind of conservatism here was actually triumphing, what of it was on the ballot. I mean, one of the central tenets of conservatism is that government should be small, unobtrusive, out of the way, perform a couple, three, four basic functions, but should not be the focal point of anybody’s life, and it has become that.
I mean, the left has done two things. They have impugned, taken potshots, they have done everything they can to destroy the whole concept of the private sector or the nation’s economy. And at the same time, they have been building up government as the greatest thing on earth. They even teach courses now, the Kennedy School of Government, the whole Ivy League is nothing more than a training ground for the future striped-pants crowd to get out of there and know how to administer, maintain, and grow government.
Now, Trump’s agenda includes — in fact, let me tell you something. Remember this. Sometime during the late nineties, maybe in the early 2000 Bush administration, there were a couple of well-known conservative magazine editors and David Brooks at the New York Times who said that the idea of conservatism meaning small, limited government is gone. That’s not what people want. They maintain that we lost that argument, that what people actually want is a large government doing a lot of things with a very active executive who is really smart doing it.
And these were people — Bill Kristol was one of them; David Brooks was another — who were advocating on the basis that in their view we’d lost the argument, that to continue to campaign on the idea of a smaller government was to lose. People don’t want a small government. People don’t want to depend solely on themselves. People have been conditioned after years of Big Government to like it, to depend on it. Their beef is that it’s done stupidly, inefficiently, and irresponsible, and what we need is somebody in charge who’s gonna do wise things, smart things, efficient things.
So I think that’s what people think they’ve done in electing Trump. I don’t see small government. Trump is not a Libertarian, even though you want to say he got the Libertarian vote or if you want to add the Libertarian vote to Trump’s vote in the game here of playing popular vote, popular vote winner, popular vote loser. But Hillary Clinton, look, the whole popular vote thing is meaningless, folks, because the election was determined by the Electoral College, and that determines the campaign.
Candidates went to states they knew they had to win in order to get the electoral votes in those states in order to win. If this had been a popular vote election, they wouldn’t have gone to North Carolina. They wouldn’t have gone to Wisconsin. They wouldn’t have gone to Iowa, none of that. If all this was was a popular vote election, the candidates would go to New York, California, and Texas, and maybe spend some time in Chicago. And that’s it. Well, yeah, now Florida, too, God’s waiting room. But aside from those four states — and that’s why there is the Electoral College, so that that wouldn’t happen. This whole popular vote thing with Hillary, it’s worthless.