RUSH: Let’s start with Indiana today and the Republican primary there. There’s a lot of teachable moments in this story. A piece here from The Daily Caller. “Why a Mourdock Win Could Ignite a Conservative Spark.” Now, it’s a headline, and let’s leave the headline alone for a second. I have a problem with the headline. I don’t think conservatism needs a spark. Other people might disagree with me, but I think conservatism is on fire. I think this spark business, everybody’s assuming here that the Tea Party is dormant because they didn’t have a candidate in the primaries. Romney’s the nominee, and that’s not Tea Party.
So everybody that’s not paying attention or doesn’t know how to analyze this thinks that the Tea Party’s defunct, and it’s not by any stretch of the imagination. Just the exact opposite. Mourdock running against Lugar for the chance to seek the Senate seat now held by Lugar in the general election, and the most recent polling data has Mourdock up by ten over Lugar, who has been begging Democrats and independents to cross the line and vote for him. And now Lugar, right out of the Democrat Party handbook, I want you to listen, grab audio sound bite number 13, Ed. This is a commercial on Lugar’s website, DickLugar.com. It’s an ad entitled, “Social Security,” targeting his challenger, Richard Mourdock. Here is the ad. The woman in this ad is a seasoned citizen by the name of Patricia Wood.
WOOD: He’s not thinking, is he? No idea of consequences, what this means to people. It’s gonna ruin people. I mean, some can’t get along without Social Security, every penny of it. I guess he wants to be as opposite as he can, believing that will get him votes. The scary thing is, what if it does? Heaven help us, because Mourdock won’t.
RUSH: So that is a commercial run by a Republican, Dick Lugar, against his conservative opponent, Richard Mourdock, claiming that Mourdock will take away Social Security from seasoned citizens. Right out of the Democrat Party handbook. That ad went up Thursday. Now that you have heard it and now that you know, you want to hear it again? Knowing that this is an ad bought and paid for, approved, scripted, so forth, by the Dick Lugar Republican, Indiana, campaign. Play it again, Ed.
WOOD: He’s not thinking, is he? No idea of consequences, what this means to people. It’s gonna ruin people. I mean, some can’t get along without Social Security, every penny of it. I guess he wants to be as opposite as he can, believing that will get him votes. The scary thing is, what if it does? Heaven help us, because Mourdock won’t.
RUSH: Heaven help us, because Mourdock won’t. That’s the incumbent, Richard Lugar, trying to save his seat, running an ad approved by every Democrat consultant that he could find. Back to the Daily Caller story. “Conventional wisdom says the tea party is all but over.” I’ve been discussing this for a week. Why do you think — by the way, I should point out one interesting thing. Lugar’s ad that you just heard, the claim that Mourdock wants to destroy Social Security, the ad is based on Mourdock’s support of Paul Ryan’s budget. So what you have in that ad is Dick Lugar, basically if you know the backstory, Dick Lugar claiming that supporting Paul Ryan is wanting to kill Social Security. That’s what that ad essentially says.
Now, I don’t know how many people in Indiana will know what that ad says, but you do now since I’m telling you. Lugar is criticizing Mourdock because Mourdock supports Paul Ryan’s budget. Paul Ryan’s budget is being mischaracterized. Paul Ryan does not cut anybody’s Social Security. He has made a point the last two budgets that he has presented of running around and making it clear to everybody that current seasoned citizen Social Security and Medicare recipients are not touched, and yet here is a Republican Senator running an ad accusing the Tea Party candidate of wanting to take away Social Security from old people because he supports Paul Ryan’s budget. And Lugar voted for Paul Ryan’s budget, by the way. Just so you know.
So this ad by Lugar, in a circuitous way, is attacking Paul Ryan’s budget for which Dick Lugar voted. Now, why is the conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is over? Because the conventional wisdom is made up of blind people. The Tea Party started as a protest movement. It has moved beyond that now. The Tea Party is not solely a protest movement. The Tea Party does not now make its primary focus going to town halls, for example, which is how it got started. And then it expanded beyond that to actually going to Washington to protest bill signings and so forth, such as Obamacare. The Tea Party is alive, it is vibrant. The best way that I can explain the Tea Party to you is to say this. When you were young and idealistic, what did you think politics was? You thought it was a contest of ideas, and whoever got the most votes won. And the winner always won because the ideas were judged by a majority of voters to be the best.
As you grow older, cynicism steps in because you realize that ideas often have nothing to do with who wins elections. Instead it’s about money, dirty tricks, all the things about politics that you end up hating. All the stuff about politics that makes you say, “I can’t stand this business! I don’t want any part of it,” and you tune out. Until a candidate who really excites you comes along (then you get back in temporarily), or until things get so bad that you have to get involved, which is what happened with the Tea Party people.
They saw the country being spent into oblivion. They saw the futures of themselves, their children, their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren going down the drain with the election of Barack Obama. And so people who had never been in politics before — people who had a distaste for it, people who didn’t like what politics really was all about — decided they had to get involved. That’s the Tea Party. They are the essence of grassroots. They are essence of unprofessional people, meaning untainted. The Tea Party is comprised of people to whom the idea is the only thing that matters.
The idea, the ideas, that’s what matters. It is sort of refreshing. It is… I don’t want to say “idealistic” because they’ve been around long enough to understand the realities of the political system and their involvement in it now. But these are people, for example, supporting Mourdock for two reasons. They like what Mourdock stands for. They oppose the Republican establishment, represented in this case by Lugar. They know the Republican establishment is embarrassed of them. They know the Republican establishment isn’t conservative.
They know the Republican establishment would rather be able to sweep the Tea Party and conservatives under the rug except for every four years when they need ’em to turn out and vote. They have become sophisticated, and they have moved way beyond a protest movement. They are now grassroots, and they’re getting people like Dick Mourdock on ballots, and then they’re getting people like Dick Mourdock elected. They did it in Utah.
A sitting Senator, Robert Bennett, was defeated by a Tea Party candidate. They don’t win every one, obviously. But they by no means have gone away. There are 46 or 47 different Tea Party organizations. There still is not a singular, titular or otherwise leader. It’s made up of just you, people just like us. They go on websites, and they find out who in their neighborhood are also Tea Party types. They have a website. It’s called a connector website.
They can find out — in every state, every neighborhood, every community — who lives closest to them is involved. They get together. All of this is happening under the radar, but it’s happening. The conventional wisdom authors don’t see it, so there must not be a Tea Party. If there isn’t a Tea Party, if the Tea Party’s all but over, then how did this guy Mourdock get on the ballot — and why is he ten points ahead in polling in Indiana? And why is Lugar running ads claiming that the Tea Party guy wants to take your Social Security away from you?
It’s happening because the Tea Party is real, the Tea Party exists. The Democrats, the Drive-By Media, are scared to death of the Tea Party. They created Occupy Wall Street. They tried to make everybody think Occupy Wall Street was an effervescent, bubbling up in reaction to the Tea Party, when it wasn’t. It was bought, paid for, organized, and planned out of the White House. And it is disorganized, and it’s not effective. But the media doesn’t report any of that.
They report the myth, the lie that it’s just like Tea Party only liberals. It isn’t anything close to the Tea Party. Now, continuing on with the story here from the Daily Caller: “Some conservatives are demoralized by Mitt RomneyÂ’s status as the presumptive Republican nominee — others are disappointed the crop of conservatives elected in 2010 werenÂ’t able to act quickly enough,” meaning freshman Republicans and so forth in the House. “But there is reason for optimism,” it says here. “Grassroots conservatives still have reason to believe the political realignment they worked so hard to achieve within the GOP is still underway.”
It is underway. I know that there is some “demoralization” because Romney’s the nominee. We’ve spoken about it. But they’re working in other areas. They’re working hard. I’ll tell you, you want to know one of the Tea Party’s primary focuses? It’s taking back the Senate. The White House race gonna take care of itself. The Tea Party is actively focused on a conservative Senate — holding the House, and getting a conservative Senate — so that if Obama wins, it’s an effective brake on Obama. If Romney wins and is not straight-down-the-line conservative, a conservative Senate can stop that.
That’s the theory, anyway.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Dick Lugar, I am sure, is a fine guy. He’s been in the Senate since 1977. He’s been there a long time — time for establishment characteristics to settle in if they had to. He might have been that from the get-go, been a moderate Republican. I tell you, I hope — I really hope — that Romney and his people are watching the Indiana primary, because they can learn a lot from it. Now, all of the mainstream media coverage about the problems that Lugar is encountering in his reelection…
All the mainstream media coverage says that Lugar is having problems because he is running a poor campaign. He sat on all of his money instead running ads early and often in the process. See, it never occurs to anybody in the news media that the Republicans in Indiana might just want a more conservative candidate. As far as the media’s concerned, there is no ideological factor in this primary. It’s always just a matter of strategy. When a media favorite has problems, when a candidate the media wants to win — and what does that tell you?
The media is behind Dick Lugar. What does that tell you all? We know the media doesn’t like conservatives and they don’t like Republicans, but they want Lugar. And when their favored candidate in any race is losing, notice it’s never about issues. It’s never about ideas. It’s always about the losing candidate employing a stupid, dumb strategy, which is what they’re saying about Lugar. “He was too confident. He sat on his money for too long. He didn’t take his opponent seriously.” It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that Mourdock has ideas that a majority of Indiana Republicans agree with and like.
Brief time-out again, folks. Time marches on faster here than anywhere else.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So, we’ll see. We’ll see what happens in Indiana today. I can make a couple of very easy predictions. If Mourdock wins, the Republican establishment is going to be torn. They’re going to think they are going to lose. To them, a conservative nominee for any seat — president, Senate, whatever — is gonna go the way of Barry Goldwater. Not Ronald Reagan. It’s the most amazing thing, folks. There are two electoral examples of conservatism prominently on the ballot.
One is Goldwater in a landslide loss, and then there’s Reagan with two landslide victories. The Republican establishment… And I’m not exaggerating this. I’m not making it up. The Republican establishment, for whatever reasons (and we’ve discussed most of them), genuinely believe that hardcore conservatives — and by that I mean unwavering, just solid conservatives — equal electoral landslide defeat. And they’re more interested in as many people in the Senate with a capital (R) by their name as opposed to the kind of ideological makeup in the Senate.
They want control of the committees; they want control of the money; they want to be able to write the regulations. It’s all about sharing power. With the Tea Party, it’s about ideas. What people thought politics always was about, was ideas. The best ideas. Winning. That’s what the Tea Party’s about. The Tea Party is not made up of career politicians, and it seems to have a distrust. The Tea Party seems to have a distrust of career politicians. And there’s a lot to be said for that. I think, in large part, we are in the trouble we’re in today because of career politicians.
Peggy Noonan, who people have a tremendous amount of respect for, wrote a column last Friday or Saturday (I forget which day it runs) in the Wall Street Journal, in which she advocated the reelection of Dick Lugar because we need adults in Washington right now, ’cause it’s really bad. It’s an interesting point of view. But you could also say that Dick Lugar has been of the political class that ran up all this debt, that voted for it all these years, that participated in the expansion of government. There are any number of ways to look at this.
I mean, Lugar is not known for opposing big spending. He’s not known for wanting to downsize government. He’s not known as that kind of Republican. And if you had any doubts about it, this commercial that he’s running now features a woman who barely sounds like she’s able to breathe, saying that Richard Mourdock wants to take away old people’s Social Security. That, to me, is unconscionable. For one Republican to say that about another, he is obviously desperate.