RUSH: George in East Hartford, Connecticut, nice to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Yeah, Rush, what I’m most hopeful out of the Scott Brown victory is the following and that is that my biggest fear in the 2010 elections were going to be the third party candidates, these tea party folks that I line up with because it’s a very conservative message, whether it’s the war on terror or the deficit or this health care debate, and Scott Brown mirrored that message perfectly. So now the message swings both days. The Democrats are ignoring the message of Scott Brown. The Republicans do need to take heed. All they have to do to keep these third-party candidates out, which I think favors the Republicans, is to march on the same blueprint that he did, conservatism, like you say, wins all the time. They take that message and run with it, Rush, we could take the third-party out.
RUSH: Okay, two things on this. And you know, I’m, again, grounded in reality here. I am Mr. Literal. And do not doubt me. The Republican Party is kind of like the libs in a way. Not nearly as bad, but they’re out there crowing about how happy they are, too. But believe me, the people in the party who consider themselves Rockefeller Republicans or liberal Republicans, they don’t want guys winning in pickup trucks. They dislike Sarah Palin for the same reason. Now, the Republican Party right now is going to embrace, and I hope the embrace continues, but my history with the Republican Party is that they’re not happy with conservatives. They really didn’t like Reagan. Of course they loved winning, and they put up with it, but Reagan, to the northeastern country club, blue-blood types Reagan was not the answer.
Now, this is why I spent so much time yesterday kicking back at these people. They’re the ones, it was Republicans — I played the sound bites of Chris Shays and Colin Powell. These are the people I’m talking about, the people that liberals think ought to be the leaders of our party ’cause they’ll take it down to the sewer. They’ll take it so low we will never win anything. We going to be a regional party, we’re only going to attract the votes of white Southerners. We’ll never elect anybody from New England. All of that’s out the window now with a basically conservative message.
Now, the third party people. Yeah, this probably puts a damper on third party stuff because Scott Brown won big-time as a Republican. He did not win as a third-party candidate. He did not disavow being a Republican. He did not disavow being a conservative. And so to the extent that people want a third party, Scott Brown has got a little bit in the way. It will be interesting to see their reaction to it if there is one. A third party on our side would only guarantee Democrat victory. It’s just a bad idea, especially upon reflection after this election on Tuesday of Scott Brown. We say take over the Republican Party. How do we do it? This is how you do it. You get candidates who can articulate conservatism, who understand what they’re running against. In Brown’s case he was running against elitism, he was running against the machine. Now, what is the machine?
Well, let’s go to Daniel Henninger’s piece because you have to hear this. Wall Street Journal today, it’s entitled: ‘The Fall of the House of Kennedy — The battle over who defines the work and institutions that make a nation thrive and grow. Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts will not endure unless Republicans clearly understand the meaning of ‘the machine’ that he ran against and defeated. Yes, it is about a general revulsion at government spending, what is sometimes called ‘the blob.’ But blobs are shapeless things, and in the days ahead we will see the Obama White House work hard to reshape the blob into a deficit hawk. Unless the facade is ripped away, the machine will survive. The revolt against the machine began with voters’ 2006 ouster of the Republican majority in Congress for making a mockery of fiscal rectitude. An angry electorate then swept Barack Obama into office. Now Mr. Obama is saying voters elected him on the same wave of anger that elected Scott Brown. Sorry, but Messrs. Obama and Brown are not surfing in the same political ocean.’
As an aside, except for what he said on spending, Scott Brown is George W. Bush. I believe George Bush would beat Obama today if the election were today, knowing what we know now. But back to Henninger: ‘The central battle in our time is over political primacy. It is a competition between the public sector and the private sector over who defines the work and the institutions that make a nation thrive and grow. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force. This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy’s order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities. This in turn led to the fantastic growth in membership of the public employee unions — The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the teachers’ National Education Association.
‘They broke the public’s bank. More than that, they entrenched a system of taking money from members’ dues and spending it on political campaigns. Over time, this transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency. They became different than the party of FDR, Truman, Meany and Reuther. That party was allied with the fading industrial unions, which in turn were tethered to a real world of profit and loss. The states in the North and on the coasts turned blue because blue is the color of the public-sector unions. This tax-and-spend milieu became the training ground for their politicians. Until the Obama exception, the only recent Democrats electable into the presidency had to be centrist Southerners little known to the country. Every post-Kennedy liberal who tried, failed, including Teddy. What an irony it is that in the same week the Kennedy labor legacy hit the wall in Massachusetts, the NEA approved a $1 million donation from the union’s contingency fund to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. It is this Kennedy legacy, the public union tax and spend machine, that drove blue Massachusetts into revolt Tuesday.’
That is the machine. That is the machine. The public union tax and spend machine. ‘Yes, health care was ground zero, but Massachusetts — like New Jersey, like California, like New York — has been building toward this explosion for years. According to a study done for the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, spending in specific public categories there skyrocketed the past 20 years (1987 to 2007). Public safety: up 139%; social services, 130%; education, 44%. And of course Medicaid Madness, up 163%, before MassCare kicked in more Medicaid obligations.
But here’s the party’s self-destroying kicker: Feeding the public unions’ wage demands starved other government responsibilities. It ruined our ability to have a useful debate about any other public functions. Massachusetts’ spending fell for mental health, the environment, housing and higher education. The physical infrastructure in blue states is literally falling apart. But look at those public wage and pension-related outlays. Ever upward.
‘Enter the Obama administration, the first one born and raised inside this public bubble, with zero private-sector Cabinet members. Act one: a $787 billion stimulus bill, which they brag mainly saved state and local jobs. Then came the six-month odyssey for Obama’s $1 trillion health-care bill, dripping with taxes. Independent voters felt like everything was being sucked into a public-sector vortex. This is why New Jersey’s Chris Christie won running on nothing. It’s why in California Carly Fiorina is within three points of Sen. Barbara Boxer. It’s why the party JFK enabled, ‘the machine,’ is hitting the wall. There’s no way out for these Democrats. They made a Faustian bargain 40 years ago with the public unions. For the outlays alone, they’ll get some version of the Obama health-care bill. They’ll also go to the same old ‘populist anger’ well. Scott Brown’s victory has given the GOP a rare, narrow chance to align itself with an electorate that understands its anger. Now the GOP has to find a way to disconnect from a political legacy that smothered governments at all levels and is now smothering the Democratic Party.’
In other words, the machine is all of the growth of the public sector: government, state, city, federal, growing, with public employee unions growing and wages growing, sucking money out of the private sector. This is why every one of these so-called conservative pundits who are the new intelligentsia who say we gotta get rid of Reagan, who say we have to realize the public wants more government, we have to realize the public understands that more government’s good, they want spending, we’ve gotta do it better, do not listen to them. They could not be more wrong. Scott Brown showed them how wrong they are. The machine is all of these people in Washington whose lives are oriented around the government growing and being involved in as much of everything as policy, from policy to infrastructure to whatever.
That’s the machine. The Republicans have got to get outta town. This is what being an outsider means. Being an outsider means you’re simply not a member of a union. You’re not a member of a public employees union, you live in the country, and you want the private sector to be the place where economic opportunity is. You don’t want it to be in government. You don’t want it to be in the public sector. You don’t want unions to be growing while everybody else is unemployed and starving. That’s the machine. Do not listen to a single conservative pundit living or breathing in the New York/Boston/Washington corridor who tells you that the American people want more government, that the era of tax cuts, that’s over, the era of Reagan, that’s over. One election has shown this.