RUSH: No, no, no. Hold it. You started off well but you took a fork in the road. Look, you know, we wouldn’t have been better off with Gore. I shudder to think, that’s pointless anyway. That could be hypothetical, we could construct, it would be fun to do. But let’s deal with two sets of reality, shall we? We got one reality. We had the Clinton presidency and we got the Bush presidency. Now, your original claim was that Clinton stole Republican ideas to get reelected. Yeah, one time and after two or three vetoes, yes, he signed the welfare reform bill. And then he went to the Democrat convention and said, ?Don’t worry about that, I had to do it, Dick Morris made me do it but I’m going to fix it.? And Jesse Jackson out there said you better fix it, and all the Democrats, you better fix it, nobody was for it, but he had to do it, because that’s where the country was headed.
By the same token, the country doesn’t want this prescription drug bill but they’re going to get it anyway it looks like. The country is not clamoring for it. There are huge differences between Republicans and Democrats, and the Clinton administration did everything it could – look at the judiciary, look at the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals, look at the judicial appointments – the Clinton administration did everything it could to move this country as far left as possible. Now, look what happened to the Democratic Party in the process? This is what is so frustrating. As the Democrats, as Bill Clinton, they lost Congress! The first time in 40 years. It makes no sense what the Republicans are doing here, is the bottom line. The Democrats are behaving as they always do. The Democrats are liberals; a tiger is a tiger; a snake is a snake; a liberal’s a liberal; they’re doing what they always do; and they did it during Clinton.
But they haven’t modernized. Look, ladies and gentlemen it’s time for Liberal Democrat 101. We do this periodically, but there’s a massive new tune-in factor here, and normally it takes six weeks for those of you new to this program, if you’re new and this is your first day or first week, and you’re sitting there, I don’t quite get it. Don’t worry, you’re not supposed to understand this in a week. It’s not possible. This program is too complex. It’s simple but for those of you new to it, it’s something. It takes six weeks of steady, regular listening to understand everything that might happen on this program to be able to put what you hear in one or two days in context.
In an effort to speed up the six-week process, let me share with you new people what the regular listeners here have known for 15 years, or ten, or five, however long they’ve been here. And as I say I’m going to call it Liberal Democrat 101. This is what the Democrats need to realize about themselves now, but the liberals in the Democratic Party will not let them. The first thing that’s happening to the Democratic Party is that their base is literally dying off. The worst news, if you look at political party as a business, the worst news any business could get is that their best customers are getting older, their loyal base is dying off and they’re not doing anything to attract a new customer base. That’s the first thing you have to understand about the modern Democrat Party today. It’s very bad news for business and it’s worse news in the business of politics, when your base starts dying off, and you’re not doing anything to recruit younger customers, voters, what have you. The Depression era Democrat is really aging. Anyone who is ten years old during the Great Depression, when the market crashed in 1929 is now over 80. And instead of trying to attract new users, what the left is doing is catering to this aging base because, well, just simply, that’s what they just cave in to their aging base.
Next question is, who is running the asylum here? The Democrats gained power back in the old days. After the market crashed and the New Deal, the Democrats gained power by drawing in small groups of special interests. They weren’t powerful special interests, they were weak. Teachers, laborers, minorities, and they joined the Democratic Party precisely because they had no power. They only had power by joining together as one party. But they were always a bunch of separate, unique constituency groups that had their own single issue interests, but there was an intersection of one of their interests with the overall Democrat interests, that’s big government, expand the government, socialism if you want. That’s what united them, but there was a lot that could disunite them as well.
The rallying cry that the Democrats gave to these small little groups was, you have no power alone. Give us the power and we’ll get you a new deal. And that’s been the promise. And you want an illustration? Take a look at the black population. The black population is one of these groups that joined the Democrats back in the New Deal era through the forties and fifties because they had no power, right? And they were discriminated against. They had all these problems. The Democrats said we will fix it for you, join us and you will have the power. Well, here it is 50 years later, and every time I hear a black civil rights leader open his mouth, he is still complaining about the same things they’ve been complaining about for 50 years. Democrats haven’t fixed anything. It’s a one-way street and it has been for a lot of these groups. But this worked. I mean, getting these powerless little constituency groups together into one party worked for years, and then, kablooey! All of these special interest groups, like labor, and the teachers, and the civil rights coalitions realized that with a divided nation, why, their little 2% or 5% of the Democratic Party could make the difference in an election. So they realized that they had the Democratic Party by what are commonly called in locker rooms the “short hairs.” So they began holding the party hostage. If you don’t give us this and do this then we’re not going to vote for you. So the Democratic leadership said, “Whatever it takes.” They would buy them off, they would give them positions of power, they would do anything for the leaders so that the leaders would go get the voters of these little powerless groups to vote in unison, giving the Democratic Party its power.
Now, remember, again, what’s happened is those people are now getting close to 80 years old and they’ve not done a good job of recruiting new members, as evidenced by the fact here you had a Hispanic and black judicial nominees by Bush, and the Democrats are out there opposing them. That would never happen, because when the Democrats were in power and running the show there wouldn’t have been a black conservative or a conservative Latino that would be comfortable joining the Republicans. But there are now, and the Democrats don’t know what to do about it, other than to destroy these people personally because they can’t figure out how these people got away from the fold. How did Janice Rogers Brown become a Republican? How did Miguel Estrada, he’s a Latino? How did he become a Republican, why, he’s dangerous. They don’t know how this happened. Yeah, people become investors rather than entitlement-mongers and the Democrats don’t understand that because they put down big business. That’s the market, they’re rich, a lot of people have gotten wealthy over the past 50 years, not wealthy, they’ve achieved a lot of things. Do you listen to Democrats today? They make the country sound like there’s still soup lines. They make it sound like people are still jumping out of Wall Street buildings, they make it sound like nobody’s got anything. They’re 50 years in the past. This is what you have to understand.
So, when these little interest groups figured out that in a divided nation their 2% could hold the Democratic Party hostage (gasping) like when the black leader said, “You don’t make us happy, I’m going to see to it that those people in my group are not voting for your candidates.” Well, that sort of changed the equation. Instead of the party telling their supporters what to do, the supporters are now demanding what the party has to do. These aging, generations-old people with, you know, set in-the-way thinking and mind-set and certain patterns, are now telling the Democrat Party what to do. And so to manifests itself this way. What’s good for labor may not be good for the environmentalist wackos who are also one of the Democratic constituency groups. Big labor wants all kinds of help to build cars, big labor wants to build SUVs, the environmentalist wackos are trying to get SUVs banned. The logging industry, which used to be unionized, they want trees to cut down. The environmentalist wackos say “No, you can’t cut down any trees, that tree is my God.” And the Democrats are out there trying to juggle all of this instead of having the power to say, “Shut up, do what we tell you, and you’ve got a seat at the table,” which is the way it used to be. Now the people are telling the people in Washington, “You shut up, do what we say or we’re abandoning you and we’re going to go to Ralph Nader,” or, you know, pick your far-out lefty kook that they will go to.
Now, contrary media reports, our nation is not 50-50; it’s not half liberal, and it’s not half conservative. It’s not half left; it’s not half right. Our nation, all of us, white, brown, black, green, and purple, the Minnesota Vikings, live our lives largely as conservatives. That’s how we live. We all don’t vote that way, folks, but that’s how we live. We save our money, try to. Now, there is the dependent class out there, the entitlement class, but I’m talking about the people who are working are basically trying to raise their kids the right way; they’re struggling doing it, but they’re not, you know, women are coming back to the home instead of staying in the corporate world – a little story on that coming up later – because they want to be moms, and they don’t like day care centers, all these things the liberals had set up, these little institutions are slowly but surely crumbling. So we don’t have a 50-50 nation left and right, conservative-liberal. Now, you might say, well, Rush, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Why is the voting split down the middle?
Well, see, now you get a little bit more complex because the answer is such things as the Democrats and liberals will throw the demagogue card or the race card or the kill-the-seniors card or the rascally Republicans card. The Democrats, in order to protect this crumbling little base that they’ve got for years, has been telling old people: The Republicans want to take your home, they want to take your Social Security, and they want to bury you. It wasn’t Khrushchev that wanted to bury your grandkids, it’s George Bush. The blacks are running all these commercials about how if Bush gets elected, your church is going to burn. Only Bill Clinton can put out the fire, blah, blah, blah. Well, these groups have been Democrats for so long, and if somebody says that to them they can’t trust that the Democrats are wrong. What if you’re a senior citizen and all you’ve got is your Social Security check and somebody you’ve trusted all your life comes along and says to you that Orrin Hatch wants to come to your house, take your Social Security card and burn it and then kick you out in a bonfire, you can’t afford maybe not to believe that, if that’s all you got. We’ve had calls from those people on this program. Remember Carolyn from Massachusetts? Grafton, Massachusetts. She a classic example.
So you have people living their lives in certain ways by voting differently. But do the math on this. If the Republicans would say just get 10% of the minority vote, 10% of the black vote from 92% to 82%, for the Democrats and then the Hispanics and all, it would be over. Republicans would win every election, national election in a landslide, not by taking all of these minority groups and special interests, just 10% of them. Get 10% of the environmental wackos, 10% of the seniors, 10% of the labor people, just get 10% of these groups and this little Democrat constituency. This amalgamation of little groups which is aging anyway not being replenished with young blood will fall apart and that’s the strategery of the Rovian White House, the Bush White House. So instead of 50-50 after all that, if this is successful, we’ll have 56-44, 60-40, and who knows, it could be huge. So you would end up with landslides. Oops, just noticed the official broadcast clock. A little long here, folks, but I’m not through with this. Liberal Democrat 101 will continue when we’ll come back.
Back now for our next installment of Liberal Democrat 101. I’ve gone through this and this is pretty much unassailable, folks, it’s unarguable, there will be people that will try, but I’m sure you have some questiona; “Well, Rush, if they’re falling apart, how come it looks like they’re still running things? If the base is falling apart and if the base is getting older and they’re not replenishing the younger blood, how come it looks like these people still run the show and they still think they’re happy and they got the country under their thumb and all that?” There is an answer. It’s a good question. We have often demonstrated here how liberal ideas usually accomplish the opposite of what they intend to accomplish.
For example, the war on poverty didn’t help the inner city family, it all but destroyed it. If you want to talk to some responsible black leaders, if you don’t want to believe me, they will tell you that the war on poverty, the Great Society, led to the highest incidence of illegitimacy and divorce in the black community in the history of the country – when liberals set out to help them. And, of course, when the liberals are asked about that, “Oh, come on, we just haven’t had enough time, we didn’t have sufficient funding, and then they’ll say don’t question the results, question our intentions. Our heart’s in the right place. At least we care. You cold-hearted conservatives, you are just cruel.” And, of course, the real compassion is owned by us. We’re the ones that want results. We look at what destruction has taken place by virtue of all these good liberal intentions, and we hurt. It’s painful. It’s painful to see what liberals do to people. Just as liberal ideas do more harm than good, so does liberal defense of liberal politicians.
There’s a term for this. It’s called enabling. And the media are the great enablers of today’s liberal Democrats. Liberal journalists never criticize the left to keep them honest. I mean, one of the things that criticism does is keep you honest. The liberal media never once questioned anything liberal Democrats said. So they were not sharpened for political combat, never sharpened into more practical ideas. The media lets them get away with blaming Republicans for everything, passing the buck, and the media even gets its own focus group lines that seem to get them off the hook. The whole job of the mainstream media is to protect the left. The whole job of the mainstream media is to keep them in power. That’s the natural order of things. They overlook every deficiency, they overlook every example I can give you where liberalism has been harmful, wrong, or damaging and play it up as successful and then blame conservatives for not even having the courage or the hearts to try. And if you want proof look nor further than Gray Davis.
The most recent example. Rather than help Gray Davis by helping to make him accountable so he could be recreated, the liberal media, in this case the LA Times and national media, enabled him as the victim of a right-wing attempt to take over the governorship when it was he’s spreading dirt on his opponent in conjunction with the media. Gray Davis was horrible. As a governor and as a leader, spent that state into debt with all kinds of chicanery and the media hold him accountable? No. What do we hear about, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a groper, that’s a movie star. We didn’t hear a thing. So we enable these liberals, the liberals in politics think they can get away with anything. Ted Kennedy, Chappaquiddick anybody? Get away with anything. Media is not going to rip them. Bill Clinton, is their hero after what he did. He’s their hero. So they are enablers, my friends. The Reagan story, look what they were going to do with that, show you how America has changed. It got cancelled. Media says a bunch of right-wing wackos did it. Nope, the American people know the truth about Reagan and didn’t want to see that fine man besmirched by Barbra Streisand and her husband in conjunction with CBS.
So the liberal Democrats don’t have to sharpen their message or go out and get younger voters because they don’t know they’re in trouble because they’re enabled by the mainstream media which continues to portray them as just, correct, right, and in charge. Media gives them a free pass. So we know what’s happening, don’t we?
