37 posts from Sunday, January 28, 2024

One thing I think the electorate is thinking about most often is how in the world will the next president impact my quality of life? How will America regain its standing in this world? They were better off under Trump, and they're looking for four more years of low inflation, low crime, low unemployment, and high enthusiasm for our country. We haven't had that in the last four years.

Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.

-Fact of the matter is, is that when President Trump was in the White House, he secured our border. He started building a wall. He had policies in place that didn't create the chaos that we're seeing today.

Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.

anything I've done or said. It really is an expression of free speech and it is a fantastic opportunity and I'm very grateful. Well as you know we had this election in New Hampshire and I think my friend David Brody summed it up best and I'm gonna tell you what he had to say because to me it was the best analysis that I've heard but then I want to put things in context because the narrative we were hearing all night after this historic Trump victory was but the moderates won't vote for him but the independents won't vote for him so he can't win. I was particularly hearing this from the left liberal Democrat analysts because they're you know they're looking to try and figure out how to get their man Joe Biden how to slip him back in the Oval Office without him actually having to say anything. So my man David Brody says more than half of primary voters were not Republicans. The electorate was more moderate and liberal this time compared to in 2016 by nine points and we know why because the Democrats had a concerted effort as did Nikki Haley to have independents who actually Democrats dressed up as independents not all but many to vote in the Republican primary. It's very sleazy. It's really a big dirty trick. It's been going on forever. That's my point. It's a sleazy big dirty trick to the Republican primary. 64% of primary voters said they were not MAGA. MAGA. Biden hates their MAGA. MAGA. Let's see make America great again. Biden has a problem with that. Well if you want to fundamentally transform America I guess you do have a problem with that. Just 24% of primary voters were very conservative compared to 52% in Iowa. Nikki Haley had the endorsement of the popular governor of New Hampshire not so popular Chris Sununu anymore. Big loser. Nikki Haley spent tons of time there and Nikki Haley had her two-person race on supposedly her type of political terrain and it goes on. It was a historic victory for Trump. Republicans don't get over 50% of the vote particularly when only 47% of those voting are Republicans. Trump got 70% of the Republican votes so if it had been an actual Republican primary he would have gotten 70% and Haley 28% a complete blowout. So he's won Iowa with a historic number that nobody else ever had over 50%. He won New Hampshire with a historic number nobody ever had despite all the attempts in Iowa and in New Hampshire by Haley, her supporters, the rhinos, the establishment, you know the long list, the Democrats, the billionaires to get Nikki Haley over the finish line. So she finishes third and second and basically declares victory. Nobody's buying that. We're not stupid. 13 seconds not first and I might add I thought her speech was very unclassy. Let me put it that way. Lack class. But why I'm here in this monologue to talk about, what I'm here to talk about, is this piece from 2016 of June 1 by a very liberal man Frank Rich who used to write for the New York Times, I don't know if he does or not, in New York Magazine. In fact I didn't even know if he was still with us. Apparently he is. Hello Frank. No fan of mine apparently. But I want to read something to you because as I said at the opening of the program, the narrative now on Trump is, and you know it's not a lot of thought that goes into media and some of this analysis, so they all repeat each other. Not all but too many. And it is Trump can't win suburban women. Trump can't win moderates. He can't even win people within his own party. Look at the polls. Look at the numbers. Check this out. The greatest vote-getter in Republican history is Ronald Reagan. Even in a three-man race in 1980, he got a majority, 51 percent. Then of course in 1984, he almost got 60 percent and he won 49 states. He almost won 50. Mondale state if he had 1,500 more votes. Those are modern-day landslides no matter how you count it. And he was a conservative. How did he do it? He reached out to these moderates and so forth. The same propaganda or wrong analysis or intentional effort to undermine Trump was used against Reagan. And that's the comparison I want to make. I don't agree with everything Frank Ritz says because he's a leftist Democrat, but stick with me. So he writes in 2016, before the 2016 election, Trump gets the nomination. He says to understand how Trump has advanced to where he is now and why he has been underestimated almost every step and why he has a shot at vanquishing Hillary Clinton, which he did, few roadmaps are more illuminating than Reagan's unlikely path to the White House. He says in addition, "I'm talking about Reagan the candidate." Obviously their personalities are different and their other differences, but the nub, the core of this is really very important to understand what's taking place. Reagan's and Trump's opposing styles belie their similarities of substance. Both have marketed the same brand of outrage to the same angry segments of the electorate. Again, forget about the cheap shots. Stick with me. Face the same jeering press. Yes. Attracted some of the same battle front allies. Yes. Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and the late great Phyllis Schlafly. Offended the same elites, including two generations of Bushes. Outmaneuvered similar political adversaries and espoused the same conservative populism. Craig Shelley, the expert on the Reagan presidency. A longtime Republican political consultant and Republican acolyte and historian has written authoritative books on the presidential campaigns of 1976 and 1980 that serve as correctives to the sentimental revisionist history that would have us believe that Reagan was cheered on as a conquering hero by GOP elites during his long climb to national power. To hear the rights triumphalism of recent years, you'd think that only smug Democrats were appalled by Reagan, while Republicans quickly recognized that their party decimated by Richard Nixon and Watergate had found its savior. I've said this over and over again, but it may ring even truer coming from a leftist. It rings absolutely true and shows you how so much the analysis is way off. He says grassroots Republicans whom Reagan had been courting for years with speeches, radio addresses, and opinion pieces beneath the mainstream media's radar were indeed in his camp. But aside from a lone operative, John Sears, Shelley wrote, "The other major GOP players, especially Easterners and moderates, thought Reagan was a certified Yahoo." By his death in 2004, Shirley says they would profess their love and devotion to Reagan and claimed they were there from the beginning in 1974, which is a load of horse manure. Even after his election in 1980, Shirley adds, Reagan was never much loved by his own party's leaders. If the GOP setbacks in the 1982 midterms, a Republican National Committee functionary taped a piece of paper to her door announcing the sign-up for the 1984 Bush for President campaign. Shirley's memories are corroborated by reportage contemporaneous with Reagan's last two presidential runs. A poll in 1976 found that 90% of Republican state chairman judged Reagan guilty of simplistic approaches with no depth in federal government administration, no experience in foreign affairs. It was a little different in January 1980 when a U.S. News and World Report survey of 475 national and state Republican chairman found they preferred George H.W. Bush to Ronald Reagan. One state chairman presumably spoke for many when he told the magazine that Reagan's intellect was thinner than spit on a slate rock. As Rick Perlstein writes in The Invisible Bridge, what he says is the third and largest volume of his epic chronicle, The Rise of Conservative Movement, "Both Nixon and Ford dismissed Reagan as a lightweight. Barry Goldwater endorsed Ford over Reagan in 1976, despite the fact that Reagan's legendary speech on behalf of Goldwater's presidential election," you may recall this speech to a time for choosing, "was the biggest boost that his so-called," he says, "Kamikaze candidacy received. Only a single Republican senator, Paul Laxalt of Nevada, signed on to Reagan's presidential quest from the start." Paul Laxalt was my political mentor and I was involved in the 76 and 80 campaigns. This is exactly 100% correct. What put off Reagan's fellow Republicans will sound very familiar. He proposed an economic program, 30% tax cuts, increased military spending, a balanced budget, whose math was voodoo, according to George Bush, of course, and then some. He prided himself on not being part of the Washington establishment, mock Capitol Hill's buddy system, and its collusion with the forces that have brought us our problems, the Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business, and big labor. Like Trump, but unlike most of his and Trump's political rivals, Reagan was accessible to the press in public. His spontaneity in given takes with reporters and voters played well. Republican leaders blasted Reagan as a trigger happy warmonger. So Reagan attacked Ford, the sitting Republican president he ran against in 1976 primary, and Henry Kissinger for what he said is their pursuit of bipartisan policies of detente and Chinese engagement. The sole benefit of detente, Reagan said, was to give America the right to sell Pepsi-Cola in Siberia. Pepsi-Cola in Siberia. For good measure, he stoked an international dispute by vowing to upend a treaty ceding American control over the Panama Canal. He said we bought it, we paid for it, it's ours, and we're going to keep it. You can hear Donald Trump would have said the same exact thing. The Republican elites of Reagan's day were as blindsided by him as their counterparts had been by Trump. The Reagan came close to toppling the incumbent president at the contested Kansas City Convention in 1976. The Ford forces didn't realize. They could lose until the devil was at the door. A President Ford committee campaign statement maintained that Reagan could not defeat any candidate the Democrats put up. Listen to this, because his constituency is much too narrow, even within the Republican Party, and because he lacked the critical national, the international experience the President Ford had gained through 25 years of public service. Ford dismissed him. They all dismissed him, and of course the press. Much of the press was slow to catch up to. He writes a typical liberal establishment take on Reagan could be found in Harper's, which called him Ronald Duck, the candidate from Disneyland. That he had come to be deemed a serious candidate for President the magazine in tone was a shame and embarrassment for the country. Why am I telling you this? Because you're getting the same propaganda, the same false analysis with Trump. The power of that appeal was underestimated by his Democrat foes in 1980, even though Carter too had run as a populist and attracted some Wallace voters when beating Ford in '76. By the time he was up for re-election, Carter was an unpopular incumbent. Ready? Presiding over the Iranian hostage crisis, gas shortages, a reeling economy, yet surely the Democrats were prevailed over Ronald Duck anyway. Well, a strategic memo by Carter's pollster Patrick Caddell, who became a big Trump supporter and an admirer of Reagan later, laid out the campaign against Reagan's obvious vulnerabilities with bullet points. Quote, "Is Reagan safe? Shoots from the hip, over his head, what are his solutions?" But it was the strategy of Caddell's counterpart in the Reagan camp, the great pollster Richard Wirthlin, that carried the day with the electorate. He said voters wanted to follow some authority figure, he theorized. A leader who can take charge with authority, return his sense of discipline to our government, and manifest the world power needed to get this country back on track. Or at least the leader from outside Washington, like Reagan, and now Trump, who projects that image, whether he has the ability to deliver it or not. And that's the final nail in the liberal moderate Rhino coffin. Trump not only has the ability, he did. He already served for four years. We, the American people, are quite familiar with him. And we are quite familiar with the people who are trying to undermine him and stop him within the Republican Party, and the press, and in the Democrat Party. They're the same people. They're the same institutions. Even though they go on TV and say, "I'm a Reagan Republican," Sununu, Christie, they were never near Reagan Republicans. They were never near Reagan. No, they're Ford, they're Bush. They are what they are. I'll be right back.

Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.

a hundred nine counties have voted and you've won two and one of those by a single vote well when do you start winning republicans

Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.