{"id":11104,"date":"2013-10-17T18:00:05","date_gmt":"2013-10-17T18:00:05","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2013-10-17T18:00:05","modified_gmt":"2013-10-17T18:00:05","slug":"why_can_t_republicans_focus_on_obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2013\/10\/17\/why_can_t_republicans_focus_on_obama\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Can\u2019t Republicans Focus on Obama?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Listen<\/a><\/p>\n

RUSH: We now go to Jerry. We have a trucker here on the way to Oakland. Jerry, I\u2019m glad you called. How are you, sir?<\/p>\n

CALLER: (road noise) I\u2019m doing great. My point was that the sequester put a spotlight on how incompetent back home is, and this last thing put a spotlight on how absolutely mean-spirited he is, that he would literally let people die to get his own way — and the people could see it, because we know who shut down government and who shut down the mall.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Jerry, thanks for the call. I appreciate it. A little bit of a bad line, so I\u2019m gonna continue talking to you here on the radio. This takes me back to then I said in the first of the program. What he\u2019s saying is we out here see what\u2019s going on. We see a guy who is incompetent talking about Obama. We see a guy literally letting people die to get his own way. He said, “We know who shut down the government — and it wasn\u2019t Ted Cruz and it wasn\u2019t the Republicans.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like I was sharing, and I interrupted myself. I\u2019m glad Jerry called and reminded me. At dinner last night, the conversation was typical, “Why don\u2019t the Republicans do X?” I can\u2019t avoid those discussions, and one of the guys at dinner said, “Look, they don\u2019t have to warn people that Obama\u2019s a socialist. They don\u2019t have to talk about Obama trashing the Constitution. Why don\u2019t they may not say the guy\u2019s incompetent and then point to Obamacare? We\u2019re right here in the middle of an absolute disaster of a rollout. <\/p>\n

“All they gotta do is say, ‘He doesn\u2019t know how to do this.\u2019 You know, even if you behave under the premise that Obama\u2019s serious, that he wants to do good and he\u2019s really trying, do it that way. ‘He\u2019s failing big time \u2019cause he doesn\u2019t know how.\u2019 Look at our foreign policy,” the guy said. “It\u2019s an absolute embarrassment, what has happened in Egypt, what\u2019s happened throughout the Middle East, what\u2019s happened in Syria, this reset with Russia. It is embarrassing! Obama\u2019s a national embarrassment, and he\u2019s incompetent. <\/p>\n

“Nothing that he has said he wants to do is working.” <\/p>\n

He said, “Why don\u2019t they go at it that way?” <\/p>\n

I gave him the usual answers that suffice every time the question is asked, and you know what they are. <\/line>BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/line><\/p>\n

RUSH: Once again, why I think conventional wisdom in Washington is missing it on Ted Cruz and Mike Lee<\/a>, and the shutdown. I don\u2019t mean to be picking on Ross Douthat here. He just happens to have a piece in the New York Times today<\/a> that fills the bill. So does John Podhoretz in the New York Post today<\/a>. This portion of a paragraph from Douthat today sums up well the inside-the-Beltway thinking about what just happened. In his opening paragraph he acknowledges that they\u2019re good and they\u2019re decent and they\u2019re nice and that you need to respect their philosophy and their strategy and thinking about what they\u2019re trying to do.<\/p>\n

But then after you do that, after you accord them the proper respect, then, “However you slice and dice the history, the strategery, and the underlying issues, the decision to live with a government shutdown for an extended period of time — inflicting modest-but-real harm on the economy, needlessly disrupting the lives and paychecks of many thousands of hardworking people,” who are now going to get a raise in January, “and further tarnishing the Republican Party\u00c2\u2019s already not-exactly-shiny image — in pursuit of obviously, obviously unattainable goals was not a normal political blunder by a normally-functioning political party.<\/p>\n

“It was an irresponsible, dysfunctional and deeply pointless act, carried out by a party that on the evidence of the last few weeks shouldn\u2019t be trusted with the management of a banana stand, let alone the House of Representatives.” That excerpt is fairly representative, I think, of — Mr. Douthat considers himself a conservative, by the way — the conservative thinking inside the Beltway, the New York\/Boston\/Washington corridor, if you will. <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

That establishment\u2019s thinking is exemplified here. Okay, look, we\u2019ve analyzed what you did, we\u2019ve listened to your explanation of it, but my God you guys are stupid, and you\u2019re not qualified to do anything, and don\u2019t you ever try this again. (That comes later in the piece.) Don\u2019t you ever do this again! As though you would speak to your kid who broke a window by accident at first, then did the second one on purpose, and that\u2019s when you took him seriously, and then you sat him down.<\/p>\n

“Don\u2019t you ever, ever do it again, Little Billy, or then I\u2019ll get really mad,” or whatever parents today say when their kids act like absolute reprobate heathens. I wouldn\u2019t know. Here\u2019s what they\u2019re missing: Not only did we in flyover land learn that one guy could bring all this to a screeching halt, one guy can get media coverage, one guy can draw attention, one guy can draw the media off of Obama — one guy could do it, the right guy, and then we said to ourselves, “What if there are five or 10 of \u2019em? What if there are 45 of these?” <\/p>\n

Now, makes the inside-the-Beltway types just shudder in fear, that concept, but we have not learned our lesson.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing. Mr. Douthat says if you read RedState — that\u2019s Erick Erickson — and talk radio… What\u2019s his actual line here? I didn\u2019t highlight it, so I\u2019m having… Ah, here it is. “The mentality that drove the shutdown — a toxic combination of tactical irrationality and the elevation of that irrationality into a True Conservative (TM) litmus test — may have less influence in next year\u2019s Beltway negotiations than it did this time around, thanks to the way this has ended for the defunders after John Boehner gave them pretty much all the rope that they\u00c2\u2019d been asking for.<\/p>\n

“But just turn on talk radio or browse RedState or look at Ted Cruz\u00c2\u2019s approval ratings with Tea Partiers and you\u00c2\u2019ll see how potent this mentality remains, how quickly it could resurface,” and that means: Yeah, they might not actually go away even we\u2019re telling them to go away! “[I]t could resurface, and how easily Republican politics and American governance alike could be warped by it in the future.”<\/p>\n

Mr. Douthat is typifying the Beltway thinking inside conservative mainstream: We respect you, we\u2019ve examined what you did, but you\u2019re fools. Don\u2019t ever do this again, but we know that you might — and then it\u2019s gonna be all over. Well, here\u2019s the truth — aand, yeah, I\u2019m on talk radio telling you this. I don\u2019t know about you, folks. I\u2019ll speak for myself, but I think I\u2019m speaking for a lot of you. What do you mean, “learn our lesson”? We haven\u2019t learned the lesson the establishment hopes that we have learned. <\/p>\n

The lesson they hope we have learned is that we are not qualified to play in this arena, that we really don\u2019t know what we\u2019re doing. We\u2019re not qualified to run a banana stand, much less the House, and we hope we\u2019ve learned that. They hope we\u2019ve seen what a mess we made. They hope we have seen how dangerously close to the end of the world we brought people, and they hope that we see this and we\u2019ll never, ever do it again, that we will leave this to the adults next time: Them.<\/p>\n

But instead of learning that lesson, what we have learned is, we\u2019ve got to come back stronger next time. We\u2019ve gotta come back with more than just one Ted Cruz. Instead of never, ever doing it again, the answer is coming back stronger. I sense, by the way, in talking to people that there\u2019s a mind-set for that, a positive mind-set. Speaking of Ted Cruz\u2019s poll numbers, how about Obama\u2019s? <\/p>\n

You know, with all due respect for those of you inside the Beltway, those of us out here don\u2019t understand why you look at Ted Cruz as your number one enemy and not Obama — and why you look at Mike Lee and Cruz and maybe even Sarah Palin or talk radio or RedState or whoever. Why are we the enemy? We\u2019re not doing anything. Barack Obama has got the wrecking ball. Why can\u2019t you people focus on Obama? <\/p>\n

That\u2019s the question we ask, like my friend at dinner said last night, “If for no other reason the guy\u2019s incompetent.” Can you not even say that? Can you not say he\u2019s incompetent because of his pedigree? “Well, he came from Harvard! He was Law Review. So you can\u2019t be incompetent.” Is that it? So the fact that he doesn\u2019t know what he\u2019s doing on foreign policy and is an abject embarrassment — the fact he has no clue about websites, building they will, maintaining them or operating health care? <\/line><\/p>\n

What else does this guy want to run that he\u2019s totally unqualified for? Are you not even prepared to go that route because, “Well, he\u2019s the first black president. We can\u2019t go after him. I mean, charges of racism would flow! Call the first black president incompetent? No way! We\u2019re not gonna do that. Besides, the guy went to Harvard. He\u2019s one of us. He\u2019s got the same pedigree and education we\u2019ve got. We\u2019re not incompetent, so how can he be?” But he is. <\/p>\n

In the real world. <\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t want to go after Obama on ideological grounds, go after him on the fact that he\u2019s simply overwhelmed by the job, outmatched by it, and hasn\u2019t the slightest clue. Now, I don\u2019t happen to believe that, but it would be a way to persuade people. I mean, we out here are wondering why you are so afraid of us and Ted Cruz, and you don\u2019t even get anywhere near criticizing Obama the way you do Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin and other upstarts. We scratch our heads over this, \u2019cause we don\u2019t look at ourselves as the enemy. <\/p>\n

We think we want the same things you do.<\/p>\n

Well, maybe we don\u2019t. <\/p>\n

Maybe you do want a big government with yourselves in charge. We don\u2019t. But, as I say, speaking of polling data, Ted Cruz\u2019s numbers? Yeah, whoopee! A Ted Cruz poll is irrelevant. For six weeks we get nothing but news stories, “Ted Cruz is an idiot! Ted Cruz is mean! Ted Cruz is selfish! Ted Cruz is dumb! Ted Cruz is anti-whatever,” and then we\u2019re gonna do a poll on Ted Cruz, and then the poll is gonna show that his approval numbers are way down. <\/p>\n

Well, big whoop. <\/p>\n

Why don\u2019t you do six weeks of anti-Obama news and then take a poll of him and see what you can do, instead of five years of fawning hero worship and even with five years of hero worshiper, five years of fawning, five years of being practically Obama groupies? In Obama\u2019s Gallup daily approval poll after the deal was reached, Obama dropped a point. He has forty-two percent approval rating in Gallup, their daily tracking poll, October 14th through the 16th.<\/p>\n

So it would include yesterday when the magic of the deal was done, and Obama\u2019s approval dropped a point, and they want to tell us what Ted Cruz\u2019s numbers did after they and everybody else in the media beat Ted Cruz up for six weeks or longer, and then take a poll and think you\u2019ve made news with it. This is news. You build up Obama, you fawn over Obama, you\u2019re a groupie over Obama, and you can\u2019t get him up a point instead of down a point, at 42% approval.<\/p>\n

What are mainstream media polls but echo chambers? You go out, you do six weeks of trashing Ted Cruz, and then you take a poll, and the poll says 27% like Cruz, the rest think he\u2019s an absolute, totally lunatic, insane. Then you publish the poll, oh, no, my God, Cruz is destroying the Republican Party. No, he\u2019s not. You guys are sittings around let the media do that for you. So obvious to those of you out here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RUSH: We now go to Jerry. We have a trucker here on the way to Oakland. Jerry, I\u2019m glad you called. How are you, sir? CALLER: (road noise) I\u2019m doing great. My point was that the sequester put a spotlight on how incompetent back home is, and this last thing put a spotlight on how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Can't Republicans Focus on Obama? - The Rush Limbaugh Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2013\/10\/17\/why_can_t_republicans_focus_on_obama\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Why Can't Republicans Focus on Obama? - The Rush Limbaugh Show\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"RUSH: We now go to Jerry. 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