RUSH: Well, looky here! Look what was just been brought to my attention. It’s Charles Krauthammer’s column today: “The Case Against Re-Election — Krauthammer encourages Romney to attack Obama’s ideology, not just his poor record.” It is about time! “There are two ways to run against Barack Obama: stewardship or ideology. You can run against his record or you can run against his ideas.
“The stewardship case is pretty straightforward: the worst recovery in US history, 42 consecutive months of 8-plus percent unemployment, declining economic growth — all achieved at a price of an additional $5 trillion of accumulated debt. The ideological case is also simple. Just play in toto (and therefore in context) Obama’s Roanoke riff telling small-business owners: ‘You didn’t build that.’ …
“Mitt Romney’s preferred argument, however, is stewardship. … The ideological case, on the other hand, is not just appealing to a center-right country with twice as many conservatives as liberals, it is also explanatory.” Thank God somebody has joined my refrain here, folks. Ah! I can’t… I can’t tell you how excited this makes me. I did not know this. Krauthammer is on board with going after the ideology! Finally, somebody besides me!
Oh, this makes my day!
“The ideological case, on the other hand, is not just appealing to a center-right country with twice as many conservatives as liberals, it is also explanatory.” Yes! “It underpins the stewardship argument. Obama’s ideology…” YES!!! (clapping) Folks, I’m …
I’m near orgasm time here! Do you know what it’s like to be all alone on this stuff? No, no, no. I know you understand. How many years have I been talking about this?
(interruption)
Snerdley is saying, “Everybody’s afraid to talk about his ideology.” It was his ideology that made me say I wanted him to fail. How else did I know that this was going to happen? How could I know? “How did you know, Rush?” His ideology! He’s a liberal! Liberalism means things. Words mean things. Ideas have consequences. Idea-ology! He’s a liberal. This was not hard to figure out. So you’re saying that people were simply afraid to say this?
(interruption)
Well, okay. Snerdley’s theory is there’s been a lot of fear to talk about Obama’s ideology because once you talk about his ideology, then you’ve got to talk about where he got it. And that means you have to talk about Reverend Wright and Frank Marshall Davis, I assume, and people don’t want to do that. You have to talk about all the stuff that people didn’t want to talk about regarding Obama, and still don’t want to. Okay. Well, I’m telling you, all there is to Obama IS his ideology.
The “stewardship” (i.e., the things he’s done) is explained by his ideology. He’s defined by it! He’s defined by liberalism or Marxism, socialism, whatever you want to call it. See, to me, folks, this has been… Don’t misunderstand me on this. It’s been simple, and I know it is for you too. You know what this cuts to? This actually… We can make a linkage to what I was talking about before the break at the bottom of the hour.
I really have been thinking about the difference between the Democrat Party and the Republican Party, just looking at it this way. And when Byron York asked me, “Why does everybody always surround Obama to protect him? Why do they circle the wagons? Why don’t the Republicans do it?” It’s because we’re not unified. We don’t have the same purpose. This is an illustration of the divide.
There are some Republicans who will simply refuse to look at Obama ideologically because, maybe, they’re not conservatives themselves. They’re RINOs or they’re moderates or what have you. And you and I have discussed, profoundly and deeply during the Republican primaries, how even members of the Republican establishment don’t like conservatives. They associate conservatism with Goldwater’s landslide defeat, not Reagan’s landslide victories.
But this is a “Hosanna!” moment.
Here’s more Krauthammer. “Second, radical reform of health care that would reduce its ruinously accelerating cost: ‘Put simply,’ he said, ‘our health-care problem is our deficit problem’ — a financial hemorrhage drowning us in debt. Except that Obamacare adds to spending. The Congressional Budget Office reports that Obamacare will incur $1.68 trillion of new expenditures in its first decade.
“To say nothing of the price of the uncertainty introduced by an impossibly complex remaking of one-sixth of the economy — discouraging hiring and expansion as trillions of investable private-sector dollars remain sidelined. The third part of Obama’s promised transformation was energy. His cap-and-trade federal takeover was rejected by his own Democratic Senate. So the war on fossil fuels has been conducted unilaterally by bureaucratic fiat.
“Regulations that will kill coal. A no-brainer pipeline (Keystone) rejected lest Canadian oil sands be burned. (China will burn them instead.) A drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico that a federal judge severely criticized as illegal. That was the program — now so unpopular that Obama barely mentions it. Obamacare got exactly two lines in this year’s State of the Union address. Seen any ads touting the stimulus? The drilling moratorium? Keystone?”
That’s exactly right. Take a look at that Obama’s “Romney Killed My Wife” ad. If Obama was proud of Obamacare, that would have been what they said in that ad, not “Romney killed my wife!” They would have said, “Obamacare would have saved her life,” if he was proud of it. But he can’t say Obamacare! He doesn’t want to mention Obamacare, because it’s unpopular. He doesn’t campaign on the Keystone pipeline. He doesn’t campaign on anything he’s done.
He’s a sitting duck, ideologically.
He’s a sitting duck.
He’s a landslide defeat waiting to happen, if we would just unify and go at him ideologically. Now, Krauthammer points out here that the Romney campaign decided they’re going to go after, “He’s a lousy president. He’s a lousy steward.” And Snerdley may have a point on that because it’s Romney who said, “I’m not going to call him a socialist. I’m going to call him a nice guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
Well, he’s not a nice guy, A; and, B, he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s an ideologue. He’s a liberal Marxist. He knows exactly what he’s doing. None of this is incompetent. None of it is an accident. It’s all on purpose, if you understand liberalism. Ah! This is a “Hosanna!” moment. I, El Rushbo, no longer feel stranded on an island. Now what’s going to happen is blogs will pick this up, Krauthammer’s thing, and it will spread. And maybe it will get linkage, traction, whatever, and take off.
I don’t care.
I just think it’s great that somebody has put two and two together here. But it’s still going to boil down to: “Will Romney do it? Will Romney give up this notion, ‘Eh, he’s not really a bad guy. He’s a nice guy; he just doesn’t understand. He’s incompetent. He’s not a socialist'”? I remember telling you back two summers ago, various potential Republican presidential candidates came knocking on the door. It was a kiss-the-ring kind of thing, and this is before most had announced.
It was before it really got ginned up, and I’m not going to mention any names because it won’t matter. Virtually every one of them that I spoke to said, “We gotta go after Obama’s policies, Rush! We can’t go after him. We have to go after his policies,” and that’s what Romney is doing. We’re going after his policies (as Krauthammer says, his “stewardship”), because — you’re, right, Snerdley — they were afraid (and still are) to go after Obama as what he really is.
They’re afraid to make the allegation, and every day the Democrats get up and thank whoever is their god that we leave it alone. I guarantee you they do, because that’s the one thing they’re scared to death of. And I think it may explain why they’re upset at Romney’s welfare ad, because it combines going after “stewardship” and also illustrates Obama’s ideology. Because it’s liberals who don’t like the work component in welfare.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I have been begging Romney to do this. I have been begging Romney to do this since he became the front-runner in the primaries. When I applauded Newt during the primaries, during the debates, it is because he went ideological. You remember one of the biggest events…? I think it was the South Carolina primary debate. Newt got one of the biggest standing Os, and the first one was when he explained the conservative view about work and how we don’t want anybody denied a job.
We want people to be able to go to schools to actually learn things, to be able to read the diploma, and come out and own the business. Remember how the place stood up? He got a couple of other standing Os afterwards. He went ideological. He talked about ideas. This is the foundation. When you learned about all this in junior high, Government 101 or Civics 101, whatever they called it, they covered this. The way it was taught to me, anyway — and it was naive, admittedly.
But it was the people with the best ideas who won elections. It had nothing to do with who ran the dirtiest campaign or had the most money or any of that. This is the idealistic stage when you’re being taught this stuff. But it still works. Ideas matter, ideas triumph, particularly when you believe them and can explain them. That’s when you become persuasive. I told Byron York… This did not make his cut, by the way, in the piece at the Washington Examiner.
I said, “All Romney has to do is to get some real conservatives as his spokespeople and this problem won’t happen anymore.” We don’t need the Etch A Sketch guy and we don’t need people who are not ideological. I’ve even used the word. I have begged Romney and the Republican Party at large: “Would you please say this is ideological? Would you please start thinking in terms of ideology?” Say “Democrats are liberals,” and that alone tells everybody all they need to know about what somebody in politics plans to do.