RUSH: I have a fascinating column that appears in the New York Post today by Mark Cunningham, and it’s entitled: “To Win in 2016: The Voters Republicans Forgot.” Now, this ties in directly with the points that I have made in the previous hour about the elite, exclusionary status of college graduates from Ivy League schools who end up in government work. And, by the way, government work can be as a lobbyist. It can be as a legislative aide. It doesn’t have to be an elected position. It can be a bureaucrat in one of the bureaucracies, one of the cabinet level departments or something.

I mean, there’s a lot of people that work in government. Ivy League churns out a lot of people, and they all have the same worldview. That’s this thing. It’s a cookie-cutter education. Everybody comes out thinking pretty much the same thing. There are some variations. Of course there are Republican graduates and Democrat graduates, but in terms of worldview — look at the immigration debate. You don’t see any party difference in the immigration debate. They’re all identical in the elites, in the establishment, Inside Washington, and it extends up to banking in New York, too, Republican, Democrat, doesn’t matter. They want amnesty for the illegals that are here. Party membership doesn’t matter there.

There is a singular worldview that attaches to people that go to these schools, but there are other aspects of that worldview, and this column by Mark Cunningham touches on it.
“The GOP 2016 pack is off on a 16-month war for the nomination, which means performing for the party’s base and the money men. Yet whoever comes out on top won’t take the White House unless he starts now on connecting with an entirely different class of people.

“They’re the voters who didn’t come out for John McCain in 2008, and mostly not for Mitt Romney in 2012: They’re middle- and working-class — mostly men and mostly white, though some minority voters and women will respond to the same appeal.
When these voters have come out for the GOP, it’s seen congressional landslides like 1994, 2010 and ’14 — but no national Republican since Ronald Reagan has fully drawn them in.”

This is so right on the money. You look at the midterms in 2010 and 2014, they were Republican landslides. And if you don’t want to look at it that way, they were landslide defeats for the Democrats. You had gazillions of people showing up, all voting, the vast majority, voting against everything the Democrat Party stands for. I phrase it that way because the Republican Party did not have, on purpose, they did not have an agenda. They did not announce an agenda. They didn’t want to be saddled with it so they don’t have a mandate. But the mandate is: stop the Democrats, stop Obama, which they’re ignoring, by the way.

But the point is, you know, when the 2012 presidential race came around, and I’m looking at the polling data and it shows Obama up five or up six, and I’m looking back at the 2010 turnout and I’m saying the pollsters are missing this. Why are they discounting the 2010 turnout? And I found out that presidential year turnout is a much different animal. I should have known it instinctively, and maybe I did instinctively, but it didn’t surface. The presidential year turnout’s a much different turnout, a much different group of people than for a midterm. A, the presidential turnout’s larger, but B, it’s even a different makeup, demographically and otherwise.

And, lo and behold, when 2012 came around, the people that made the 2010 midterm landslide possible stayed home. Remember those four to five million Republicans that did not vote in 2012? They did not show up for Romney. And in 2008 they did not show up for McCain. They show up in the midterms, they stay home. And that’s what this column is about. When these voters do come out for the GOP, the GOP wins in landslides.

Now, in 1994, the Democrats gave this group a name: angry white men. That’s what this group was named back in 1994. When this group of voters came out in droves and elected a Republican majority in the House for the first time in 40 years, the Democrats’ immediate response was to call them angry white men. Okay, but the anger is rooted in reality. Why were people angry in ’94? Why were they angry in 2010? Why were they angry last November?

There are many reasons, but among them these people have seen their ability to provide for a family under assault, for decades. They’re under assault by everything from economic changes to politics. They know, this group of people that do not show up in presidential years, when they do not have a Republican candidate they can get enthusiastic about, they know that they’re losing, not gaining ground, when the Democrats win and start talking about the redistribution of wealth, spreading the wealth around. They know they lose when that happens. They know the welfare state grows when that happens, and they want no part of it.

They need a reason to believe a Republican will fight for them. And that’s it, in a nutshell. Romney was not looked at as a fighter, and McCain was not looked at as a fighter, and they weren’t fighters. They were obsessed with cooperation and getting along and showing that Washington works and showing they could not criticize Obama and that they could cooperate. And that’s not what these voters want to hear.

These voters’ lives are lessening, their economic lives are getting worse year after year after year. They don’t care about getting along with the people whose policies are destroying their economic futures. Okay, so then the question is asked, why could Reagan talk to those voters? Why was he able to relate to ’em? The answer is he had talked to ’em.

Between 1954 and 1962, Ronald Reagan was the spokesman for General Electric, and he hosted the GE Theater on TV. But, in addition to that, part of his job was to give speeches at General Electric offices and plants all over the country. And he ate lunch every day with the people in the cafeteria, not in the executive suite. He talked to them and he listened to them and there were no cameras ’cause he wasn’t running for anything. There were no press gaggle with him, none of it was for show. He actually listened to them.

He got an earful on how they saw their work, on how they saw the country, on how they saw the world. I will guarantee you can count on two hands the number of people in Washington really doing that. I mean, it gives lip service all the time, but people who actually go out and mingle. The stuff that happens in Iowa doesn’t count. You got a press gaggle with you, you got cameras with you, all this stuff that happens at diners and the pancake joints, that’s all fake. Everybody knows you’re coming. Even the people that show up and wait to talk to you and tell you what’s on their mind. It’s all done for show. None of it’s done for real.

The people we’re talking about recognize when it’s for show. And when it’s for show, it doesn’t really matter. The objective of when it’s for show is how it looks for the candidate later on in the day. It’s not about actually communicating with people and finding out what’s on their mind. Inside the Beltway, the elite, the axis there, it’s probably safe to say that most people have no real idea. The unemployment rate inside the Beltway is 3%. The average income is way above average in the country. It’s just a fact that people there are not able to relate.

I just printed a story. It’s coming up. It makes a perfect example. The Democrat Party, the only party that voted for Obamacare — it’s an AP story — is said to be in a near panic because their voters are livid as they find out how much Obamacare’s gonna cost them with the IRS, either for real in the form of premiums and out-of-pocket or that fine. They didn’t know this was part of Obamacare. They heard all the PR. They heard keep your doctor, keep your policy. They heard premiums are gonna get cheaper. They heard free, they heard a number of things. They heard lies.

But now it’s tax season and they’re being confronted with the reality of how much it’s gonna cost. They don’t have it. And it’s the Democrats who are hearing from their people. The Republican voters in most parts are aware of it, because they have different sources of information. But I’ll get to that in just a second. I want to stick with this piece by Cunningham. His point is, no candidate today has time or makes time for real deep exposure to the people out there who are not showing up to vote but who make the country work.

He offers some tips for the candidates on how to get it done. I’m not gonna go through those ’cause they’re basic. You know, when you go to ask the CEO for a campaign contribution, also spend some time where people are actually working in that company and talk to them and don’t take the press with you and don’t take any note takers with you except your own. You know, make it real. These are obvious things that are not being done.

But the point is, there’s a reason why these millions of people who are denigrated in the American media every election, angry white men, or, you name it, there’s a new name given for this group of voters that doesn’t show up every four years. Angry white men is one. It’s all insults and put-downs. But the key is, they are the difference in Republican victory and defeat, and they’re totally ignored. They are all, or vast majority of them happen to be conservative, which mainstream party leadership isn’t.

I’ve gotta take a break here, but the piece goes on to talk about college degrees, college education, who has it, who doesn’t, and how that relates to these people that we’re talking about. I’ll share more details with you after I take this time-out. ‘Cause it’s fascinating. It dovetails with exactly what we are talking about today, so don’t go away. We’ll be back before you know it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, this guy’s writing his piece, Mr. Mark Cunningham, writing his piece to the potential Republican candidates as an advice piece on how to reach these voters that are staying home. He says, “You want to get America working again. Fracking has made us an energy superpower — and that should mean huge growth right here at home in industries and jobs making stuff. Not software or movies, but physical products.”

Make a big deal out of it, talk about it, amplify it.

“Wages are up enough in China that jobs are coming back home — but too slowly, even though the American workforce is vastly higher-quality than anything overseas. The politicians have made it too hard to open a new plant, to launch a new product, even to get the oil and gas to where it can fuel a US manufacturing revolution,” i.e., the Keystone XL pipeline. These voters know this stuff should not be this hard. These voters know that this doesn’t make any sense.

These same politicians have been bellyaching for 30 years about energy independence. Here’s fracking. We’ve got more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia now with the discovery of how to go get it. And we have politicians standing in the way of it, contradicting their own promises to get us out of this energy dependent cycle that we’re in.

And these voters, they’re tired of being lied to, they’re tired of being given the runaround because they know what’s necessary to get this country moving again. They just don’t see anybody anywhere talking about the things they know to be true. They don’t see anybody fighting for the things they believe in, and they don’t see any leadership per se on anything other than the agenda that is weakening this country. And it has them angry and perplexed.

The Democrat Party “panders to ignorant environmentalists. That is, to people who think the only folks who should be able to earn a living by getting their hands dirty are the guys who work the recycling truck and the mechanics who fix their Prius.” In other words, the Democrat Party impugns the farmer, the laborer, while apparently standing up for them, but they support people like the militant environmentalists who are harming a tradition and backbone of America.

Now, as a candidate, you’re “all for college, but you don’t think the only good-paying jobs should be for college grads. Too many Americans are stuck with a choice between getting work as a Wal-Mart greeter or seeing if they can make a disability claim stick.”
Boy, is that not the case? Look at what we’ve become. A get-rich-quick scheme in America is now figuring out how to defraud the federal government so you can get on disability when you’re really not disabled, because the opportunity for big bucks is better there than a job you can find tomorrow if you haven’t gone to college.

“About college: Something’s badly wrong there. We’re graduating too many kids with $100,000 in debt and no skills to earn enough to pay it back. While the rest of America is busy doing more with less, these schools keep on paying way too much money to way too many people who don’t even teach.” Yeah, teachers assistants, graduate assistants and so forth.