RUSH: The New York Times — let me get to this later, too. But I just want to tease you with it. They have a column here by Thomas B. Edsall. Now, that name might ring a bell. Thomas B. Edsall used to write at the Washington Post. Be “Warshington,” for those of you in Rio Linda. And after leaving the Washington Post and now writing opinion pieces now and then for the New York Times, he has been involved in, I think, the Obama campaign somehow. Not a direct paid participant, but there’s been a linkage there.

Anyway, he’s the guy in November of 2011 who had a column in the New York Times explaining how the Obama campaign was going to expressly ignore white working class family voters. They were in the process of losing them anyway, so they were just gonna write them off and make up the difference by going after minorities, such as intensifying the effort on Hispanics, African-Americans, women, lesbian, gay, transgenders and so forth. And what was noteworthy about it was here you had an incumbent president and somebody close to his campaign writing a piece acknowledging that the votes of white working-class people were of no interest to them anymore.

That alone, and that’s what it said, that was the point of the column. I was stunned. Not because of anything racial. Don’t misunderstand. Because that’s a large group of people. White working class, read blue-collar, however you define, traditional Democrat voters. White working-class families, these were the people, many of them had participated in the creation the Tea Party, they were ticked off at Obamacare and all of the debt and everything, and they were just being written off. And there were a lot of them.

Now, if you wanted to add the racial component to it, you could, and you can get even more interesting, but that was not my initial take. It was just a large number of people to just cast aside. And it was a tantamount admission, by the same token, that they’d lost them anyway. Many of those people had voted for Obama in 2008.

So, anyway, that’s who Thomas B. Edsall is. He had an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday, might have been posted last night, I’m not sure, but the headline is: “Has ObamaCare Turned Us Off Sharing Wealth?” Now, this is unbelievable, to see this in the New York Times. It’s a long piece, 750, maybe a thousand words. The whole premise is, Edsall is voicing concern felt by many on the left that the larger liberal agenda of the redistribution of wealth, the redistribution of income is in trouble because Obamacare is not working and in fact may be turning voters against the concept.

In other words, Obamacare is such a disaster, people on the left are worried that it is so prominent a failure and it’s so obviously a socialist plan and that it is failing so dramatically, it might turn the socialist or left-wing agenda, turn people against it.

“With the advent of the Affordable Care Act, the share of Americans convinced that health care is a right shrank from a majority to a minority. This shift in public opinion is a major victory for the Republican Party. It is part of a larger trend: a steady decline in support for redistributive government policies. Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at Berkeley and one of the nationÂ’s premier experts on inequality –” how in the world do you — are you kidding me? You have to be a college professor to be an expert on inequality?

Mr. Snerdley, how much money do you have in your pocket right now? Okay, I’ve got $500 in my pocket. I know that what you and I have is unequal, and I didn’t go to college. What is this, a professor at Berkeley who is an expert at inequality? That’s not what he’s an expert on. He’s an expert socialist. He’s an expert at hacking away at the well-to-do. That’s what this means. An expert on inequality is somebody who is expert and adept at defining policies to take money away from people who have it.

Anyway, they’re worried, and we’ll get into this in greater detail as the program unfolds when I finish this Hillary stuff, which frankly bores me. But we gotta do it. This is low-hanging fruit, this Hillary stuff, I cannot ignore this.

But health care as a right, you know who started that line of thinking, a guy named Harris Wofford, who was a senator from Pennsylvania. Back in the, I forget, eighties and during one of his reelection campaigns he ran around saying (paraphrasing), “If the Constitution provides you a lawyer because you are too destitute or too poor to afford one, well, then, by God, the Constitution will provide you health care if you get sick.” And of course low-information people all over the country cheered, got rabidly happy over such a premise.

They started polling it, and a majority of people originally supported the whole concept, that health care is a right. But with the advent of Obamacare and all of the inherent problems, that’s not now a majority point of view. A majority of Americans do not view it as a right, and when that’s the case, they are not going to support redistribution to make it happen. And when they don’t support redistribution, they’re not supporting liberalism, they’re not supporting socialism.

Now, I don’t expect that to stop Democrats. They’re governing against the will of the people even now. Democrats don’t care. I mean, ego-wise they’d love to have it, but it doesn’t stop them, public opinion doesn’t stop them. Let me remind you, case in point, 2014 midterms. Just as in 2010, the Democrat Party got shellacked. The Democrat Party lost seats, now combined with 2010, over 1,200 seats, electoral seats from the US Congress all the way down to local town council all over the country. It was a huge shellacking.

And you remember Mitch McConnell, shortly after the Republicans took control of the Senate, expressing his surprise that Obama had not moved to the center as a result. I’m sure you remember that. It was a ridiculous assumption. It’s rooted in the old days that politicians responded to public opinion. If the public rejected something that they truly believed, then in order to maintain public opinion and hope to be elected in the future, they had to moderate their views.

Here Obama was doubling down. Not only was he not moving to the center, he was moving further to the left, in utter defiance of the voters, and Mitch McConnell couldn’t understand it. The Republicans, when they think they lose and public opinion goes against them, they all of a sudden favor amnesty. They come out in favor of whatever it is the people that voted against them believe, ’cause that’s what you have to do in politics. But you see, folks, the Democrat Party doesn’t care about public opinion. They’d love to have it, but it doesn’t stop them if they don’t.

I maintain to you that Barack Obama and the Democrat Party have been governing against the will of the people for the past six years. I think Obama was elected under a false pretense. A lot of people thought they were getting something other than what they got. I don’t think the American people voted for this. They didn’t vote for this debacle called Obamacare. They didn’t vote for Iran to get nuclear weapons. The American people didn’t vote for the 30-hour workweek. The American people didn’t vote for an $18 trillion national debt. The American people didn’t vote for anything that they’re getting here.

Hasn’t stopped Obama, has it? Hasn’t stopped Democrat Party. So this New York Times piece said they’re worried that people are losing faith in the whole philosophy behind the redistribution of wealth. It’s interesting, but it isn’t gonna stop ’em. It’s just gonna make ’em angrier. “Oh, you don’t believe what we believe, huh? Well, you like tax increases? Here, take that.” Democrats do not react kindly to people who do not support them. And public opinion, necessary evil. If they can find a way to ignore it, they damn well will.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Harris Wofford, senator, Pennsylvania, was 1991 through 1995. Harris Wofford is the man responsible for the claim that health care was a right because you’re entitled to a lawyer. If you are accused of something and you can’t afford a lawyer, Constitution gives you a lawyer, should give you health care. “Yay, yay.” He was a senator from 1991 to 1995, one term, defeated by Rick Santorum. He was only in there because John Heinz died in office. A helicopter crash or collision between the airplane he was on and a helicopter. That freed up Teresa Heinz to marry the haughty John Kerry, who had served in Vietnam. He took his time on that, but plans were, you know, well laid.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: There was another salient point that I wanted to make about this, and it slipped my mind. Well, let me move on, ladies and gentlemen, to this New York Times op-ed that I previously touted by the name of Thomas B. Edsall. “Has Obamacare Turned Voters Against Sharing the Wealth?” Has Obamacare destroyed the whole notion of redistribution of wealth? The left is very concerned. That’s why there’s in op-ed piece in the New York Times by this guy Edsall, who used to write for the Washington Post.

To sum this up, the liberals are seeing a lot of red flags out there. They’re seeing popular support for Obamacare plummet. It never has been majority support, by the way. I don’t care what poll you take, and I don’t care when you took it, a majority of Americans have never supported Obamacare, as they have understood it to be. And it’s plummeting now, and there’s another specific element in polling data that has plummeted, and it is this: The share of Americans who are convinced that health care is a right, that did use to be a majority. People who thought health care was a right, just like a lawyer was a right, if you needed one, couldn’t afford one.

Well, now they don’t. A majority of Americans do not think health care is a right. The number of people who do is now the minority viewpoint. And that is red flag city for the left. When people think something is a right because they have no idea what rights are, and because they have no idea where they come from, you remember — may I make a brief departure here?

Go back to Ted Cruz announcing for the presidency. He’s at Liberty University. He proudly announces and confirms and affirms that our rights come from God. And he quotes the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. And this infobabe, who’s written for Yahoo, AP, New Republic, three or four name publications, young woman in her thirties, thought Ted Cruz was the biggest idiot on the face of the earth. Rights come from God? What about the Constitution? What about the amendments? Does he think God wrote those?

She was clueless. She was clueless because she had not been taught. See, this is one of the major problems with education. The basic tenets, the foundations, the history of this country and its founding are not taught. So this woman who is a prominent infobabe at major name publications, the idea that rights come from God totally escapes them. No concept of it. She’s perfectly content with the fact that rights come from the president.

Well, the Democrat Party has relied on that concept, that rights come from government. Your rights, what you can do, what we will permit you to do, without judging you, comes from government. It’s why they support government, liberal government. ‘Cause there’s no judgment. Do whatever you want to do. Just vote for us. Do whatever you want to do.

When they see, when the left sees that fewer and fewer people think that health care is a right, they get worried, because thinking it’s a right is the justification for taking money from some people and giving to others. If you’re if you’re an average, ordinary American and you think you have a right to health care, and somebody out there has more money than you do, and you have a right to health care and you don’t have it, it’s perfectly fine to go take money from that other person, give it to you so that your right can be established and maintained.

And so the left has constructed these scenarios where the average, ordinary American people supports taking money from some and giving it to others, if people have a right to it. So Edsall writing this piece is quite interesting.

“This shift in public opinion,” he writes, “is a major victory for the Republican Party. It is part of a larger trend: a steady decline in support for redistributive government policies. Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at Berkeley and one of the nationÂ’s premier experts on inequality –” now, stop and think of that. An economics professor, one of the nation’s premier experts on inequality? Inequality, as an elite college level course, inequality? Inequality is easy. It’s what is.

He is “a co-author of a study that confirms this trend, which has been developing over the last four decades. A separate study, ‘The Structure of Inequality and AmericansÂ’ Attitudes Toward Redistribution,’ found that as inequality increases, so does ideological conservatism in the electorate.” (gasping) Oh, no. As inequality increases, ideological conservatism increases, no, no, no, no, no. No. That’s why they’re panicking. It’s supposed to be just the opposite.

You see, when there’s inequality out there, liberalism is supposed to prosper. When there’s inequality out there, liberalism is supposed to rise and solve it. Liberalism redistributes wealth, takes care of the inequality. But what’s happening now — and I’m telling you, they know it, this piece is proof, they know it. They know they’re in the minority. They know they’re governing against the will of the people. They know the country is trending conservative just like many parts of the Westernized world are. You just don’t know it in this country because of the media and because the Republican Party is the last people to get the message.

But it is in terms of the way people are living their lives and all these kinds of things, they are in a panic at the Democrat Party and on the left, because as inequality increases, liberalism has always been seen as the answer, the redistribution of wealth. It’s been considered fair to raise taxes or confiscate the wealth of the rich and give it away to the poor. But now that’s not trending in public opinion.

“The erosion of the belief in health care as a government-protected right is perhaps the most dramatic reflection of these trends. In 2006, by a margin of more than two to one, 69-28, those surveyed by Gallup said that the federal government should guarantee health care coverage for all citizens of the United States. By late 2014, however, Gallup found that this percentage had fallen 24 points to 45 percent, while the percentage of respondents who said health care is not a federal responsibility nearly doubled to 52 percent.”

So in 2008 when Obama just starts on Obamacare, this dovetails exactly with the public opinion data that we had, 52% of the people opposed it then, and it’s only gotten worse for the Democrats. They are known for governing against the will of the people. The thing about this piece that I think is kind of misleading is, I mean, yeah, they’re concerned about it, but they would rather have the American people thinking liberalism is the salvation. They’d rather have people thinking that taking money from the rich and giving it to everybody else is the answer, they would rather public opinion support that; but if it doesn’t, it isn’t gonna stop them.

They’re not gonna stop being liberals, they’re not gonna stop being socialists because public opinion doesn’t support them. They will just continue governing against the will of the people, but it still alarms them. And what really alarms them, they elected the guy that was gonna lead them to liberal utopia. They elected the guy that was gonna get rid of conservatism forever. They elected the guy that was gonna convince everybody once and for all that liberalism was the one and only answer, and it’s gotten absolutely worse. And now they’re facing this falling public opinion, support of liberalism and health care as a right, after six and a half years of Obama. No wonder they are panicked.