WHY THE PUBLIC ISN'T BUYING IT: LIBERALS OVERPLAYED THEIR HAND

Obama Will Overreach
News Max Email | 11/10/2008 | Ronald Kessler
http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/kessler_keene_obama/2008/11/10/149603.html
Posted on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 6:49:37 AM by IbJensen

As polls just before the election showed Barack Obama winning, Dave Keene, president of the American Conservative Union, paid a visit to columnist Robert Novak at his home. His longtime friend was chuckling, and Keene asked him why.

“Well, my Democratic friends think they’ve died and gone to heaven,” Novak said. “If they’d been around as long as I have, they’d realize that it isn’t heaven, and they don’t have a permanent invitation to stay anyway.”

In fact, Keene tells Newsmax, Obama did not win for the reasons he thinks he did, and he can be counted on to overreach, helping to return Republicans to power.

When it comes to astute political observers, Keene has few peers. A bulwark of the conservative movement, Keene has headed the American Conservative Union since 1984. With one million members, the ACU is the country’s oldest and largest conservative grassroots lobbying group. It runs the Conservative Political Action Committee’s (CPAC) annual conference in Washington and publishes an annual Rating of Congress, the gold standard for ideological assessments of members of Congress.

Keene notes that whenever Republicans lose, the press runs stories proclaiming the death of the party.

“This is only the third time in a half century that a Democratic presidential candidate has gotten 50 percent of the vote,” Keene says. “The last two times were 1964 and 1976. And following those Democratic victories, there was in each case more than a spate of stories and analyses saying the Republican party was a thing of the past and that conservatism was dead.”

Each time, Keene says, Republicans have picked themselves up and won major victories. This time, it will be more difficult because Democrats will try to rejigger the playing field. They are intent on passing so-called card check legislation, doing away with the secret ballot when employees decide whether to be represented by a union. If that legislation passes, unions will have a resurgence, and Democrats will garner more contributions.

The Democrats also want to restore the Fairness Doctrine, which would require broadcasters to give equal time to both conservatives and liberals. To date, few if any liberal talk shows have been commercially successful.

“A fairness doctrine will help shut up their opponents and cut off conservative communication,” Keene says. “I think they’ve concluded they can’t necessarily win a debate on issues. What they have to do is shut up the enemy because their arguments too often prevail.”

Democrats may also come up with an amnesty measure for illegal aliens.

“That will bring them in and make them citizens to enlarge the Democrats’ electoral pool and voter pool,” Keene says. “I would not be surprised if there was a very early move to make the District of Columbia a state, giving it full representation in Congress. That would give the Democrats two more safe Democratic senators.”

House Republicans also believe Democrats will move to change rules for considering legislation to make it harder for the minority party to influence bills.

Given human nature, Democrats can be counted on to overreach, Keene predicts.

“In 1994, some reporter asked Newt Gingrich whether he thought the Democrats were more corrupt than Republicans,” Keene recalls. “He said no, but they’re human beings, and they’ve been in power, and power corrupts. And he said the same thing could happen to Republicans, which it did more recently. You remove them and you start over. And you go back to basics and you retrieve your brand, put it together, and you come back. That’s happened before; it’ll happen again.”

Moreover, Keene says, “Winners always misread the reason for their victory. Winners always assume that voters voted for them for the reasons they wanted them to vote for them. They always assume that the voters were saying: Do what you want to do.”

While Obama may be too smart to fall into that trap, “The people around him and the pressure groups that exist as part of the Democratic base are going to say, okay, they’ve rejected free markets, they want capital gains taxed more, they want to go after the rich, they want us to as Barney Frank says cut the defense budget by 25 percent. Well,” Keene says, “if they voted for those things, they did so without knowing that that’s what they were voting for.”

In part because of that tendency to misinterpret the reasons for their victory, politicians tend to overreach, Keene says.

“Clinton overreached, Gingrich overreached,” he says. “And it’s one of the reasons why the pendulum starts to swing pretty quickly. Then if they’re there long enough, the kinds of things that happened to the Republicans and the Democrats for being in too long take hold. They become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.”

The other reason the pendulum swings back quickly is that each party promises that they’re “going to solve all your problems.” Yet, a few years later, people say, “God, I elected him, but I’ve still got all these problems.” Indeed, Keene was on National Public Radio when a caller said to him, “I feel now that we can cure cancer, because Obama won.”

Another problem for Obama is that he and his people really believe that they’ve transformed the political landscape.

“In fact, if you looked at exit polls and things, Obama ran, not as the socialist he may be and that McCain tried to describe him as, but as somebody that was opposed to national health insurance and ran saturation ads saying that he is the candidate most likely to cut your taxes,” Keane says. “And being a typical liberal, he doesn’t like the war we’re in. He wants a different war in Afghanistan or Pakistan, which he won’t like once he gets into it.”

Rather than transforming the political landscape, Obama actually won yet another close election. Until the plunge in the market, John McCain was ahead in the polls.

“So you’re a voter out there who just lost a third of your pension fund and a quarter of your house value,” Keene says. “It’ll all come back, but that is not the formula for a successful election. Yet they believed their own hype, and so do a lot of the Republicans, that there was going to be this huge turnout of new people that was going to swamp the Republicans.”

In fact, Keene says, “Young people didn’t turn out in any great numbers. The absolute vote was up from last time on both sides, but it’s not the highest turnout. You know they were saying it was the highest turnout since 1908, well it wasn’t true. Black turnout was higher, but only by a little bit.”

Keene believes Obama’s selection of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff is a sign that Obama will govern from the left. As outlined in the Nov. 7 Newsmax article Rahm Emanuel Is the Real Pit Bull, http://www.newsmax.com/kessler/emanuel_pit_bull/2008/11/07/148896.html the selection conflicts with Obama’s claim in his election night speech that he wants to put aside the “partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.”

“If you’re a unifier and a bridge builder, you don’t hire Rahm Emanuel to build your bridge,” Keene says. ”He after all is the guy who said Republicans can f-— themselves. And that’s in his kinder moments.”

Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com.

www.newsmax.com

“...I’m going to tell you how to get the country back. I’m going to tell you how it will happen, and I’m going to suggest what we might do when we get it back, because we will, ‘cause these people are going to overreach....” Rush Limbaugh 02/11/2009

Excerpted from:

Our Time Will Come, Liberals
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_021109/content/01125107.member.html

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I got an e-mail. This is from Susan in Virginia Beach. “Dear Rush: You are my professor. I am indebted to you for the knowledge that you have given me. You’ve always told us that you would tell us when it was time to panic. I’m starting to wonder how we are going to get our country back from these revolutionaries. Is it time to panic?” No. ‘Cause panic doesn’t accomplish anything. But when we come back from the break, I’m going to tell you how to get the country back. I’m going to tell you how it will happen, and I’m going to suggest what we might do when we get it back, because we will, ‘cause these people are going to overreach. They are not going to win every election from here on out unless they end elections, which I wouldn’t rule out they’re dreaming about doing.

[]So when we come back from the break I’ll tell you how we’re going to get our country back, and I’ll tell you what we’re going to do when we get our country back. I’ll give you a little hint. We’re going to treat them the same way they have been treating us for years. We are going to subject them to the same things they have subjected us to, and we are going to have a big and strong and powerful government to wield against them because they’re in the process of building it. And we’re going to win it back one day, and when we win this country back, and this government back, we are going to deploy government against them the way they have been deploying it against us, and let them find out what it’s like, and they’re not going to be able to stop it, because they will not have a power base anywhere that will let them stop it.

RUSH: Is it time to panic? No, my friends, it’s not time to panic, because nothing gets done in a panic. What we have to realize is this: the left, the Democrat Party, will not control the government forever. It just will not happen. They are going to overreach. They’re going to overreach pretty quickly. Polling data already shows that, in a generic race for Congress, it’s tied Republican and Democrat. Only when you put the names in... Nobody can believe this. Fifty-six percent of the American people now are in opposition to the stimulus in total or in part. By the way, about the negotiations: They’re trying to ram this through just like amnesty. They’re trying to ram this through, and they’re using the same tactics that they used with global warming. It’s a fear of crisis. We can’t wait; we gotta do it now. The conference negotiations are going on with not one Republican being permitted to participate.

Did you know that? Not one Republican from the House, not one Republican Senator is involved in the conference between the House and the Senate to come up with a bill that both support. Not one Republican in this new era of responsibility, not one Republican in this new era of bipartisanship. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have shut the Republicans out. This is from Mike Pence, congressman from Indiana. So, let ‘em go ahead with these tactics. We can’t stop them anyway. We lost the election. But they’re going to lose down the road. They will not control government forever, and when our turn comes, we are going to turn the power of government against the left. We are going to investigate them. We are going to hold public hearings. We are going to humiliate them. We’re going to nationalize their unions. We’re going to fund our groups for a change.
If they can give ACORN $4.1 billion then we can start paying our groups with federal money. We’re going to do exactly to them what they have done to us. We’re going to build and use the Big Government that they have built and turn it right against them. We are gonna turn the power of government against the left, and against Democrats in ways they cannot imagine. They will not know what hit them. They are using the law. They are using government to advance a cause that is un-American. We are going to use the power that the left is centralizing in the federal government to punish them, to break ‘em up, and to make them pay for this. It’s time for tit-for-tat. Nice guy playing by the rules when they don’t, is over. It’s time they got a taste of their own medicine, and it’s going to happen, folks, because they’re not going to hold power forever.

[]The left — you people, you Democrats — you are creating a monster that you will not be able to control forever. You will ultimately regret what you are doing just like the media will ultimately regret its sacrifice of reason, its abandonment of its primary purpose. The day is coming when the media will actually investigate a Democrat and find some problems and nobody’s going to believe them because they’ve lost all credibility. Nobody believes what the mainstream media says now anyway. Except the uneducated, the illiterate, and the uninformed — which, sadly, is a fairly large number. Well, we’ll deal with that. We are taking names. We are taking names now. We are monitoring who on the left is going to deserve payback, and it’s going to be hell. This much I promise you. This is just getting out of hand.

We’re gonna come after the left’s favorite corporations. We’re going to come after your favorite political constituents. We’re going to come after your favorite media outlets. You want to try the Fairness Doctrine? Fine. We’ll impose it on network television. We’ll impose it on newspapers. You want to try censorship? Fine! We will censor you when we get the control of the government back. We will reapportion districts using the Census to help conservatives. We’re going to turn the power of government against the Democrats and the left and weaken and you break you into little pieces. Because, my friends, the day has passed when we can become passive and be passive about what they are doing. We will use the political and the legal system as they have and are, and we will use it to promote our party and to diminish theirs. We will use the power of government and legal system to promote our movement and our agenda, just as they are.

If they are going to bastardize the American system, if they are going to make this government large and powerful and intrusive, someday they’re going to lose it. But they’re going to lose it after having amassed all this power. We will control it, and we’re going to turn it right back against them. We will build a massive army of patriots to counter ACORN. We will defund ACORN. We’ll defund the labor unions, and we will fund our own people to go out and zap ACORN. And we will do everything we can to enhance anti-union employment. We will make sure that when companies lose money, that the people that get canned are union people. We’re going to use the power of government just like the left is using the power of government. We’re going to use the Justice Department.
We’re going to go after big unions with the Justice Department. We’re going to find all of the criminal activity. We are going to find all the lack of ethics. We are going to find every bit of corruption we can, and we’re gonna sic the attorney general and the justice department and the US attorneys on you people just as you have been doing to the people of the right and the Republican Party for 50 years. And then we’re going to find George Soros and other concentrations of left-wing power and wealth. And we’re going to focus our attention on him, so that the American people will finally learn just who the hell paid for the bastardization of the United States, just who the hell paid for the destruction of the American way of life.

We have learned from you leftists. We have sat by, we have watched, and we’ve been too passive. We have sat on the sidelines as impotent observers, and we have trusted in the goodness and the decency of the American people. But you have even perverted them. It was a disgrace what was on display in Fort Myers, Florida, yesterday. It was an absolute saddening, shocking, depressing disgrace. And you have created that segment of America that has no faith in and of itself, no faith in this country, and thinks the only reason to talk to a president is to ask him for a kitchen, to ask him for a car. By the way, asking a president for a new car who hasn’t even given his brother who lives in a hut a welcome home mat! I don’t think he’s given his brother a pot, much less a pan.

[]His brother lives in a nine-square-foot hut in Nairobi. You’re asking the president of the United States...? God bless these people. What has this government done to them? What has the media in this country done to these people, depriving them of the very essence of humanity? No sense of self, no pride. This is what Democrats and the left do to people. They rob people of their humanity, of their goodness and their decency. They rob them of confidence. We are going to restore this. We are going to use the power of the government to tell people how good they can be, how important they are, and how much happier they will be if they’re not looking to our president for the next kitchen or the car or a job. We’re going to become activists. We’ll take back our government.

It’s going to be a bigger, more powerful, stronger government — and we’re going to turn it against the left in ways they could have never imagined. So, Sue in Virginia Beach, we can’t do any of this if we panic. I know some of you are saying, “Rush, it all sounds great, but who’s going to do this?” Well, folks, I admit that you look out on the horizon right now and you don’t see a single person in the political class willing to do this. But before these people on the left get through, there is going to be so much anger and outrage among the people who made this country work, who are now being targeted as the enemies. You who have jobs, you who have played by the rules, you who are not asking anybody for your next kitchen, you’re the enemy — and it isn’t going to be long before the people of this country get fed up enough that they’re going to want to turn the tables on the people who are trying to destroy America as we have always known it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Carol has been waiting awhile. I appreciate that, Carol. It’s nice to have you here on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: Rush, I wanted to tell you, this morning when you started off, you were just inspiring. I was getting so inspired. You were talking about how, when the Republicans come back, you know, they’re going to take this strong government that the Democrats have built and they’re going to turn it on them. And I was thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I was thinking — you know, it came to me — “Wait a minute,” you know? “What Republicans is he talking about?” The Republicans that I remember were always so careful to make sure they included the Democrats in everything they did. What makes you think they won’t do that again?

RUSH: Well, it’s a crapshoot. I agree. You have a very important observation. This is something, however, that I think we’re going to try to inspire. I think, you know, if the Democrats go as far as I think they’re going to go, it is going to cause anger and outrage like you can’t believe. But the point of that whole monologue was these people are using the power and the finances of the federal government to defeat political opposition, to build up this grand old socialist system that destroys capitalism in the process, or tries to. To me, I’m just getting fed up. You know, we play by the rules all the time, and we aim for the hearts and minds of the American people, the American voter — and these people are trying to dumb everybody down.

They want to talk about investigating George W. Bush for war crimes. Well, by God, I want to investigate Barney Frank! I want to investigate Chris Dodd! I want to investigate Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and all these things. I want the truth to get out, I want to use federal money to fund our groups and our organizations. I want to investigate George Soros and find out just exactly what his role has been in precipitating this economic decline we’re in for the political purposes of defeating Republicans and electing Democrats. I think that between now and then, hopefully there’s a battle that is raging within the conservative movement over what conservatism is and who is going to lead it, and the same thing is happening in the Republican Party. I’m hoping all this happens to coalesce. There will be efforts made to bring all this to bear. I know it sounds like it’s a long shot, but this is what we hope to inspire, because it’s payback time. It’s not enough just to beat these people in elections. It’s time to give them a dose (or multiple doses) of their own medicine, and it’s something I want to work toward and see to it that it happens. It’s not time to panic yet.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let me answer Carol from Spring, Texas, and her question again. She said, “You know, I loved that monologue you did, but then I thought, where are the Republicans that are going to engage in this kind of payback?” Carol, the simple answer is by the time we get to that point, those are the only kind of Republicans that have a chance of getting elected. That is how bad it is going to get. The only Republicans that are going to have a chance of getting elected or reelected are those that are outraged over what has been done to their country, and not only want to fix it, but they want to name names, they want people to know exactly who it was that destroyed the capitalist system for their own personal political gain.
END TRANSCRIPT
Read the Background Material...
• National Review: Centrists Are Over the Line
• American Spectator: Obama’s Failed and Tired Ideas From the Past
• Wall Street Journal: Reaganomics vs. Obamanomics

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