Posted on 11/08/2006 4:50:12 PM PST by Aussie Dasher
Republicans lost control of the House, and perhaps the Senate, because they abandoned their conservative principles and in the end stood for nothing, Rush Limbaugh said today.
In his Wednesday broadcast, America’s top talker said that until Republicans begin asking themselves what’s wrong with themselves they are never going to fix their problems.
When things go wrong, Rush said, "you must look inward and ask first, ‘What did we do wrong? What could we have done better? What mistakes did we make?”
Commenting that although Republicans lost, "Conservatism did not lose, Republicanism lost last night. Republicanism, being a political party first, rather than an ideological movement, is what lost last night.”
The Democrats, he said "beat something last night with nothing. They advanced no agenda other than their usual anti-war position. They had no contract — they really never did get specific. Their message was one of ‘vote for us; the other guys have been in power too long.’”
Rush further admonished, "There was no dominating conservative message that came from the [Republican] top and filtered down throughout in this campaign.”
He added that if there was conservatism in the campaign, it was on the Democratic side: "There were conservative Democrats running for office in the House of Representatives and in a couple of Senate races won by Democrats yesterday.” He cited James Webb as an example.
He also said it was conservatism that won fairly big when it was tried yesterday, but it was Democrats who ran as conservatives and not their GOP rivals. He added that the Democratic leadership had gone out and recruited conservative candidates because they knew liberals could not win running against Republicans in red states.
Rush quoted Thomas Sowell as explaining that the latest example of election fraud is actually what the Democrats did — they nominated a bunch of moderate and conservative candidates for the express purpose of electing a far-left Democratic leadership.
"The Democrats could not have won the House, being liberals,” Rush said. "Liberalism didn’t win anything yesterday; Republicanism lost. Conservatism was nowhere to be found except on the Democratic side.”
The root of the problem, Rush said, is that "our side hungers for ideological leadership and we’re not getting it from the top. Conservatism was nowhere to be found in this campaign from the top. The Democrats beat something with nothing. They didn’t have to take a stand on anything other than their usual anti-war positions. They had no clear agenda and they didn’t dare offer one. Liberalism will still lose every time it’s offered.”
Republicans, Rush said, allowed themselves to be defined. "Without elected conservative leadership from the top Republicans in the House and Senate republicans are free to freelance and say the hell with party unity.”
That leads, Rush said, to the emergence of RINOs — Republicans in name only.
Republicans in Congress, Rush explained, were held captive by the party’s leadership in the White House. They were put into a position of having to endorse policies with which as conservatives they disagreed.
"The Democratic Party,” Rush went on to say, "is the party of entitlements; but the Republicans come up with this Medicare prescription drug plan that the polls said that the public didn’t want and was not interested in. That is not conservatism. Conservatives do not grow the government and offer entitlements as a means of buying votes. But that’s what the Republicans in Congress had to support in order to stay in line with the Party from the top.
"It is silly to blame the media; it is silly to blame the Democrats; it is silly to go out and try to find all these excuses,” Rush said. "We have proved that we can beat them … we have proved that we can withstand whatever we get from the drive-by media. Conservatism does that — conservatism properly applied, proudly, eagerly, with vigor and honesty will triumph over that nine times out of 10 in this current political and social environment. It just wasn’t utilized in this campaign.”
Rush also blamed the failure to embrace conservatism on Republican’s fear of being criticized from those in the so-called establishment. Republicans, he charged, go out of their way to avoid being criticized, fearing they will be characterized as extremists and kooks.
As a result conservatism gets watered down, and the GOP loses the support of the nation’s conservative majority Rush stated.
Anything can beat nothing, Rush concluded, "and it happened yesterday.”
Pennsylvania has an older population (second only to Florida I believe). Many have voted straight democratic all their lives and continue the routine year after year after year...
Because we have so many oldsters (who remember the good old days) they actually thought they were voting for Bob Casey (not Junior). The late Casey senior was a very popular governor...pro-life, pro-gun, Roman Catholic. So pro-life was he that the Clintonista's banished him from speaking at the 2nd Convention Coronation of Bill. A voter not paying attention wouldn't have noticed that it was the son not the father...Junior was pretty much in hiding that last weeks of the campaign.
Lastly, being pro-life and pro-Second Amendment, Casey offered a 'safe' alternative to Santorum and a vote against Santorum was seen as a vote against the President (Melissa Hart also suffered this fate...MoveOn.Org had really sleezy ads running the last week catching Hart (and by association Santorum) 'red handed' for voting with the President 90 some percent of the time.
Just my two cents...still too dazed here to be really coherent.
Sad to be tagged as,
PennsylvaniaMom
But but he didn't mention the EVIL LIBERTARIANS! [insert evil music]
Oh btw, the article was horribly written.
He's almost entirely wrong. The man who is so proud to have not graduated from college could stand to read some history to better ground himself for a macro analysis. Then he would do well to test his theory on every individual loss, where he would find that it wouldn't come close to explaining the majority.
Rush has no idea how to win an election. His single contribution to yesterdays results was inserting himself into the national news as a clown making fun of Fox.
Maybe true. Oddly enough, Frist's seat was the one closely-contested seat in the U.S. Senate that remained in GOP hands after yesterday.
Ken Blackwell lost by 23 points in a state that elected Voinovich by 30.
Anyone out there know just what happened to Mark Sanford in North Carolina?
He got slammed along with everyone else.
Do you have any links to polls that support that theory?
It's very important for you and everyone else to understand this critical point:
exit polls are NOT true scientific polls! They are certainly more accurate than an internet poll posted on a web site, but they aren't at all representative of a random, evenly distributed sample of people. They only measure people who actually went out to vote as opposed to people who stay home, and furthermore they don't take into account the significant biases of people who von't and don't want to answer the exit poll.
As a true gauge of the sentiment of the people, exit polls are only a little bit better than worthless.
Bad timing!
You don't understand what i mean...you are a freeper...you know about 1000 times more about the nuances of politics than the everyday joe in America...the pubs have held the power for a while now and IMO they squandered a lot of it and this led to a throw the bums out mentality...don't analyze it with a fine point...think Reagan and how he a got a general swell of confidence from the masses even though he was facing a monolithic media storm...Bush and the present pub leadership can't communicate well to them( be honest, Bush makes you nervous when he speaks)....sure us freepers know the game but how bout the great unwashed?
What? No attacks on the "LIBERAL-tarians" by El Rushbo that has been spewed by other FReepers ad nauseum?
"I always vote ... but I can sympathize with those who saw extraordinarily little reason to do so this year."
They are the reason we lost the Senate.
Republicans have tried to play "Leftist Lite" in a political ploy to try and garner more votes. They lost sight of what motivated the Reagan Democrats.
It was from the top down. Bush needs to take most of the blame. He had the hammer to veto spending bills, etc. His responsibility was to set the example. He flat failed us for 6 yrs.
Frist is just one of many reasons the GOP lost, but lack of leadership was the biggest reason IMO. Hagel, McCain and Graham have a lot to do with why the GOP lost. And the last minute balk by the GOP on the Patriot Act made W look like he had lost control of the party. GOP has a rebuilding job to do, do they have the horses to do it?
Hell, the fall will probably kill ya!
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