Editor’s note: Below is the video and transcript of the speech given by Monica Crowley at the Freedom Center’s 2013 Restoration Weekend. The event was held November 14th-17th at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Monica Crowley from DHFC on Vimeo.
Monica Crowley: I am really happy to be here today in a room full of fellow happy warriors and fellow freedom lovers. Very good for the soul.
(Applause)
I want to thank David Horowitz. He’s a good personal friend and also a fearless fighter for all of the things that we value and all of the gifts that the Founding Fathers gave to us. Every single day you’re out there fighting the fight, David. Thank you for this extraordinary weekend and for what you do 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
(Applause)
David is a real hero of this republic. I also want to thank Elizabeth Ruiz. I don’t know if she’s in the room, but this doesn’t come off without her. She puts the whole thing together, and she is a heroine in her own right. Thank you.
I also, again, want to thank [Moray] for that great introduction. Before I came here yesterday, I gave a speech in Ohio, and it was a corporate event, and the CEO was the one who introduced me. So he was reading from my biography, and he said, “Monica holds a Ph.D. in internal relations.”
(Laughter)
I swear, I’m not making this up. Internal relations. So, of course, when I got up, I had to correct him and say, “I have a Ph.D. in international relations.“ Then I thought about it, and I thought, damn it, damn it. Clearly, I chose the wrong path because internal relations sounds a whole hell of a lot more fun!
(Laughter)
One of the many reasons why I love to be at this Restoration Weekend every year is that all of us gather together and we do some serious and necessary truth telling. Sometimes it’s hard to do in this environment given all of the pressures that we’re under from the White House, the Congress, the media to do truth telling in a very serious and honest way, but that’s what we do every weekend here – every year here at Restoration Weekend. So let’s do some – let’s continue some serious truth telling here.
We are in a war. We’re in a war. It’s not a war that we chose, but it’s a war that’s been brought to our doorstep every single day for decades by the Left. They are chronically and constantly waging a war relentlessly against America, against the American Constitution, against the American free market economics, and against American values.
They never rest. I said that David, how he fights this battle 24 hours a day, seven days a week, thank God he’s doing it and others are doing it because the Left certainly never rests. They all sleep with their eyes open.
(Laughter)
But it’s not merely Leftism that we’re battling. We’re also battling the animating spirits of Leftism, which is the ideology of control. We talk a lot about freedom and liberty, but the other side talks in very clear terms. They dress it up. When they dress it up – let’s make no mistake about what we’re dealing with here – it is an ideology of control, and I don’t care if you’re talking about socialism, communism, fascism; any kind of totalitarian or authoritarian philosophy operates under a broader rubric of an ideology of control.
We have a president who – and I know it’s tough to believe that this president, who came out of the swamps of Chicago machine politics, who learned at the knee of the communist revolutionary Frank Marshall Davis, who studied under Marxist professors and by his own admission sought out fellow Marxist students as friends, who trained intensively in the revolutionary tactics of Saul Alinsky, who launched his political career in the living room of Marxist revolutionaries and domestic terrorists, who worked hand in glove with the socialists of ACORN and the thugs of the SEIU, who for two decades sat in the pews of the radical anti-American preacher, who tried desperately to bury that past, who spoke about the fundamental transformation of the nation, who demonized and punished his adversaries, who waged war on entire news organizations, Fox News, and who spent his firm term slamming into place radical wealth redistribution and socialized medicine. I know that it’s really tough to believe then that he and his administration would now be caught in a house of cards, and not the fun House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey –
(Laughter)
— but the real house of cards that he has built. This is a house of cards built on lies, corruption, cronyism, hypocrisy, surveillance of journalists, and a targeting and destroying of political opponents.
What I’m describing here is the classic tin-pot dictatorship. We never thought it could happen here, and yet, here it is. It’s taken a while. Those of us in this room knew what was going on from the beginning before he was even elected president, but now it’s starting to dawn on more and more people what is really happening here.
It took a catastrophe of socialized medicine to wake a lot of people up because it affects every single person in America, either directly or indirectly. That’s when you get people’s attention, when it directly affects them.
So even though you had all of these revelations of epic abuses of power – the Benghazi terror attacks and subsequent cover-up, the IRS scandal, which, in my opinion, is the most dangerous scandal in American history –
(Applause)
— and the reason the IRS scandal is the most dangerous scandal in US history is because in the past when presidents have abused their power with the IRS – JFK, Lyndon Johnson. Richard Nixon was accused of this, as well – it was always elites against elite. It was Lyndon Johnson against Richard Nixon. Elites against elites. This is the elite versus us. It’s the elites versus the American people. That’s what makes it so incredibly dangerous.
So we’ve had Benghazi, the IRS, we had the Department of Justice spying on journalists as a way to send a message to them and to anybody else to shut up or else, stop probing, stop reporting, as if they were doing that anyway, or else. The NSA domestic surveillance program, another way of spying on everybody in this room, but it’s another way of exercising intimidation against the American people. It’s a way of saying, “Shut up or else.”
Do you remember the arguments that the Left used against President Nixon when Watergate happened? They said, “Well, he may not have ordered the break-ins. He may not have known about the break-in, but certainly President Nixon encouraged an environment where the break-in could have taken place, where the break-in did take place, where it was going to be considered somewhat normal or even expected.“ That was the argument that the Left used on President Nixon.
There is no question in any of these cases that Barack Obama set the environment for this. I happen to believe he ordered all of these things, but that’s me. He certainly, at the very least, set the environment for all of these things to transpire. And, yet, it was only over the last couple of days where he pretended to be the ultimate stopper of the buck, at least on Obamacare.
But I need you to remember that none of these things are just merely a function of his thuggery. They’re also a function of this ideology of control that I mentioned. This is not simply incompetence or mismanagement. This is not simply naiveté or inexperience. This – and by this I mean all of this, everything that’s happened every single day in this presidency – is the logical result of the ideology of control.
Health reform was never about healthcare or health insurance for Obama and the Left, and let’s keep in mind that Obama and the Left, they are not your father’s and grandfather’s Democrats. Why some people, even some of our fellow conservatives or Republicans, why they are still continuing to treat him as if he is a normal president is beyond me. He is not normal. In a lot of ways, he’s not normal. But this presidency is not normal. He is not Jimmy Carter. He is not Bill Clinton. He’s a completely different ball of wax.
I had a conversation with one of my colleagues at Fox Business – this is a couple of months ago – and his wife is from Nicaragua, and she was there during the whole communist uprising and so on. And she said to him, and he reported this to me, that she knew from 2007 that Barack Obama was not a Democrat, he was not even merely a Leftist, and he was not even just a radical. She said he is a revolutionary; he’s a revolutionary. And that word has stuck with me ever since because there is no more apt description for him and for the far Left in revolutionary.
So for the revolutionaries, health reform was never about healthcare and health insurance; it was only and always about one thing – government power and control. Gun control was never about guns. It was only and always about government power and control. Immigration reform for the revolutionaries has nothing to do with immigration or securing the border; it’s only and always about government power and control.
Nothing for the Left, nothing the government does is ever about its superficial reason; it’s only and always about expanding government power and control over you. And so it is with all of these scandals that I mentioned, and so it is now with socialized medicine, the lies, the corruption, the cronyism, the targeting of political opponents and surveillance and hypocrisy, it all stems from an ideology of control.
And for those who are still trying to explain all of this away with mild-sounding descriptions like incompetence, I would encourage you to get over that really quick because this is the opposite of incompetence.
(Applause)
The Leftists always know exactly what they’re doing. Sometimes it doesn’t always pan out according to their timeline, which is what you’re now seeing with Obamacare, and I want to deal with this in just a moment.
But what you see now with this house of cards that may not be collapsing, maybe it’s collapsing, I don’t know yet – we’ll have to wait and see how this plays out – but what you’re seeing is the very logical consequence of a sick and destructive ideology of control. You see this across the board, as I mentioned, in all communist, socialist, fascist, totalitarian, authoritarian regimes, and now here it is right here in the United States.
I think a lot of us would do well to understand that these are not just the mere crimes of big government but that these are the Orwellian horrors of a nation that is under the [jack hood] of essentially and effectively totalitarian control.
One of the things that the media – and, listen, I work in the media, and I have had people who work in the mainstream media, fellow conservatives – and they’re few and far between – but I’ve had them pull me aside and say they’ve never seen it this bad.
I had a woman stop me in Rockefeller Center one day. This is before the election last year in October. I was walking through Rockefeller Center. I had my iPod in, minding my own business, and she flagged me down and she told me she worked for one of the Big Three networks on the evening newscast. She didn’t tell me which one, and I didn’t ask.
But she said, “Monica, I’ve been in this business for 30 years, and it’s always been biased. It’s always leaned to the Left, but I’ve never seen anything like this.“ And I said, “Well, what do you mean?“ She said, “Every morning at 10 AM, we have a staff meeting for what we’re going to do for the evening news that night, and people literally say out loud, “How do we protect Barack Obama today?”
One of the things that the press has not covered, and which they still aren’t covering, is the bigger picture. And I know a lot of us are out there in the trenches every day trying to deal with the minutia of Obamacare and the cancellations and everything else, and we are going to talk about that here in a second, but it’s very important for all of us not to lose the forest for the trees and to keep our eye on the bigger picture because Obama and the revolutionaries never take their eye off the bigger picture, ever.
Bigger picture is what Obama and his administration and his agenda are really all about. Do you remember in 2008 during the campaign, Obama used the same phrase over and over again, “the fundamental transformation of the nation.“ And part of his great genius was that he – as soon as he said that phrase, he took a step back and he let the American people supply their own meanings to what they thought he meant by that.
Some people thought, “Oh, well, we’re finally going to fix the economy,” or, “We’re finally going to get rid of that horrible cowboy, George W. Bush,” or, “We’re finally going to have the first black president.“ That’s what they thought he meant.
But now five years in, we have to say, “No, let’s think about what he meant by that phrase.“ And now we have five years of evidence as to exactly what he meant by the fundamental transformation of the nation. He meant moving America away from a nation built on individual liberty and economic freedom and toward a government dependency and welfare state, and to do it with all deliberate speed.
Remember that for decades, the Left has always had this grand project, and David Horowitz knows this better than anybody because he was on the inside. The grand project is three objectives, and they’re all interrelated.
The first one is grow government as fast and as widespread as possible. The objective of that is to lock as many people into dependency on that growing government as possible, and that’s an endless feedback loop because if you’re growing government, you’re expanding the pool of people dependent on government, and if you do that, then you’re constantly justifying the need for ever growing government.
And the ultimate objective of those three things is to acquire, to achieve a permanent Democrat voting majority so that you never again get a Ronald Reagan as president. You never even get a George W. Bush. It’s over. Why do you think they’re working so hard now to flip Texas? Because if Texas goes red to blue, it’s literally over. You will never get a Republican president again.
I have a friend who was at the Clinton Global Initiative last year, and on the stage was Hillary Clinton and somebody else, some moderator – I can’t remember who – and the actress Eva Longoria, a real favorite in this room, I know. She is pretty, though, but she is, you know–.
(Laughter)
So at some point – and it takes real courage, so you’ve got to give Eva her props on this – it takes real courage to interrupt Hillary Rodham Clinton, but what was reported to me was that Hillary was in the middle of some monologue about something and Eva Longoria jumped up, grabbed the microphone, and very passionately started talking about the need to make Texas into a blue state and they were going to do it through a whole variety of ways, not least of which is amnesty, which, of course, they’re continuing to push – amnesty, grass roots mobilization, trying to get the immigrant made legal so that they can then vote, and then you flip Texas, and then it really is over.
This is what they’re doing. This is what they have always done. This is their eye on the bigger prize. This is their grand project.
So when Obama becomes president, he sets the bow doing the fundamental transformation of the nation in order to effect that grand project, and the first thing he does is set out to immediately attack the four main pillars of American capitalism – the industrial base, the financial sector, the energy sector, and the healthcare sector.
You undermine those four main pillars of American capitalism, you undermine American capitalism, and if you do that, you undermine global capitalism. And that’s what all of this is about. Remember, they never take their eye off the bigger picture, and neither must we.
I want to focus for a second on the last one, the healthcare sector, because Obamacare, it is the defining issue of our time. Remember that as soon as Obama came into office and everybody was screaming about the economy – the economy was falling apart and people were screaming for jobs, and he had won for a lot of reasons, but in large part because he was campaigning on this idea that he would fix the economy. So he comes in and immediately turns to Nancy Pelosi and says, “Give me some sort of stimulus bill. I don’t even care what’s in it. Give me something.“ She takes about three to four weeks. Every special interest in the world loads on their goodies, nearly $1 trillion stimulus, signs into law, doesn’t read it. Nobody in Washington, except for our hero Louie Gohmert here, actually reads anything.
(Applause)
Louie, we respect and admire you so much. He’s another hero of this republic, Louie Gohmert. Doesn’t read it, but he gets it off of his desk to that the next – literally the next day, what can he focus on? Healthcare. Nobody was talking about healthcare reform in January and February of 2009. Everybody thought that the system needed reform. Nobody was saying it doesn’t need reform, but it wasn’t immediate, and it wasn’t urgent.
So why did he do it? Because when you look at the history of any regime that operates under an ideology of control, one of the very first things that they do when they come in and seize power is seize control of the healthcare system for one reason. If the government controls their healthcare, the government controls you.
Healthcare is the cornerstone of the socialist state. It is the crown jewel of the welfare state. And that’s why he went immediately to that within two months of being sworn in and spent the next year-and-a-half ramming it through. And now here we are.
They knew that healthcare was the biggest lever that they could use – the revolutionaries, I’m talking about – that they could use to effect that fundamental change, that fundamental transformation of America that they’d been waiting so long to be able to carry out. Healthcare reform was the biggest lever. That’s why they went at it. That’s why they were able to grab the brass ring and make that change.
Unfortunately for them, fundamental transformations have real and direct consequences on real people. People now are immediately suffering under this, and that’s the only reason you hear word one from the president about fixes and so on, which are all bogus, but unlike the IRS and Benghazi and the DOJ and everything else, healthcare does affect everybody. I’m not sure that they anticipated that. They may have and just didn’t care, or maybe they didn’t anticipate it. I don’t know. But what’s coming back at them now in terms of blowback is incredibly powerful and incredibly devastating.
I want to share with you a personal story. This is somebody I know in California who had a very grave childhood cancer. He’s now 20 years old, but at age eight, he was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, stage four, and the doctors didn’t think he would survive, but he did. And he’s now cancer-free, although he has a whole series of related issues that plague him every single day – tumors and all kinds of things. At least once every two weeks, he’s back in the hospital with something.
In California, he told me he’s covered by Kaiser. And here’s the e-mail that he sent to me two weeks ago. He wrote, “Monica, my friend just got her notice that her son’s health insurance is being cancelled. He has the same cancer I have. He has a special group of doctors, and they keep him going.
“My Kaiser sent me my renewal package. It went up another $300 a year. They say my plan was grandfathered in, so I hope that means I can keep it. Before they did that, I was looking at my plan going up to $1,800 a year. The past two years, it has shot up by $800.
“I went to the website to see what plan is in my range. It said I do not qualify and would have to go on straight Medicare, but I’m not eligible for Medicare because I’m only 20. I have a very specialized medical plan for my ongoing problems. It took them 10 years to find out that I suffered from two kinds of seizures. I take very special medicine. If I am dumped, the odds are a Medicare doctor would not spend the amount of time on me, constantly checking and adjusting my medicines. If they do not get it right, I will die quickly,” he wrote. And I want you to remember that phrase “die quickly.”
He continued, “Which is what I think Obamacare want. This is highly stressful. I just know that I’ll be getting a cancellation letter. There are not enough doctors and clinics to handle the amount of people getting dumped. More and more are opting out of treating patients on Medicare and Medicaid.”
This is a real person This is a real person in California named Raymond, who’s only 20 years old, and he fought stage-four cancer and survived, only now to have to fight Obamacare.
A couple of weeks ago, I’m sure you may have seen the story of another real-life Obamacare victim. This is the story of another cancer survivor. She published a piece in The Wall Street Journal on the editorial page, Edie Littlefield Sundby. And this was before we even knew the extent of these Obamacare horrors, and we’re only seeing the beginning of this now.
But she wrote about her stage-four gallbladder cancer in The Wall Street Journal, and she also talked about how her policy was being cancelled as of December 31st, and at the very end of her piece, she wrote what Raymond wrote. She wrote, “If I don’t have my doctors and I don’t have this care from people that have been treating me for all of this time, I may die.“ And at the very end she said, “Which may be the point.”
So now we have people coming up publicly who are really sick who are telling us these stories. This is painful and heart-wrenching stuff from people for whom the revolutionaries in the White House and their obsessive experiment with social engineering and socialized medicine. For them, this is a matter of life and death. This is not some philosophical fundamental transformation of the nation.
Dan Pfeiffer, who is one of President Obama’s top aides, he took to Twitter after Ms. Sundby’s piece ran and basically blamed her and blamed her insurance company, an insurance company, by the way – and we all know how easy it is to demonize them. This insurance company shelled out $1.2 million to keep her alive. She said she loved her insurance company and they were good to her. This is what Dan Pfeiffer tweeted, “United Healthcare dropped her coverage because they’ve struggled to compete in California’s individual healthcare market for years and didn’t want to pay for sicker patients like Ms. Sundby.”
So, in other words, sorry, Edie, but this is a Hunger Games-like competition now, and if you fall behind, you die. You know what that is? That’s death panels.
(Applause)
So it turns out that Governor Palin was right, like she’s right about mostly everything. Turns out she was right. She was roundly mocked and pounded into the ground for making those comments early on about death panels – 100% true.
You know who else is 100% true? Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.
(Applause)
Ted Cruz and Mike Lee didn’t shut down the government; Barack Obama and the revolutionaries shut down the government because they knew with a corrupt media that the Republicans would get blamed for it anyway.
Ted Cruz and Mike Lee got painted as villains in this story for shutting down everybody’s beloved government. Number one, they didn’t do that. But, number two, they did something else that doesn’t get – it doesn’t get aired, it doesn’t get spoken out loud, but I think it’s a very true fact. When they did what they did, leading into the government shutdown, Senator Cruz’s filibuster-like speech on the Senate floor and so on, when they led the charge, they centered it on Obamacare. It was all about defunding Obamacare and then later delaying Obamacare, which now a lot of Democrats are into, so, of course, Cruz and Lee were right all along.
But what they did in that period of time while they were getting pounded, they did something really important which the media will never tell you. They drew the public’s attention to Obamacare. They talked to us and focused everybody on the fact that Obamacare is socialized medicine, and it is a total calamity.
So when the actual calamity came a couple of weeks later, people were ready to hear that message. They had paved the way for the American people to understand this calamity, so when the calamity actually came down the pike, they saw it for real. That was a huge service that they performed by doing that.
(Applause)
Conservatives are always right about everything. We are. We are.
(Applause)
Sometimes it takes longer for the general public to see that come along, but we are always right, which is why the Left and the revolutionaries are constantly trying to demonize us, tarnish us, and try to marginalize us however they can.
When you are talking about Barack Obama and the far Left, the revolutionaries, you have to understand that you are dealing with very sophisticated Leftist psychology – this is something that David can talk to – very sophisticated Leftist psychology that they have been honing into an art and a science for decades.
I can give you one little example of this. Barack Obama is a master of projection. Projection is accusing somebody of what you, yourself, are guilty of doing. Yasser Arafat did this all the time, accusing the Israelis of what he, himself, was doing. Obama and Pelosi and Reid and the Democrats all the way down the line are so good at projecting onto conservatives, projecting onto Republicans what they themselves are doing right in front of everybody’s face.
When I used that phrase from Raymond’s e-mail, that “under Obamacare I will die quickly,” think about where you heard that phrase before. Congressman Alan Grayson, who lost, and unfortunately, now he’s back in Congress. Remember during the whole debate he stood on the House floor and said, “Republicans want you to die quickly.“ Again, what they want.
Yesterday on the House floor, Congressman Jim McDermott was railing against the Upton bill. “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.“ And he actually used the word socialism out loud. And I had to stop, and I said, “What did he just say?“ He said this, meaning the Upton bill, this is socialism. Again, I mean that’s blatant. That’s not even dressed-up projection, right? That’s like so blatant right out there. This is what they do to try to cover up what they’re doing and to try to deflect what they’re doing.
I want to talk a little bit about something that happened in Ohio when I was giving this speech on Thursday. It was to a healthcare group, and so they wanted me to focus solely on Obamacare, which I was happy to do. And during the Q&A, and everybody in this company based in Canton, Ohio, they were all conservatives and all anti-Obamacare, and they see their healthcare-related industries just falling apart.
But I was warned that there was at least one, maybe two liberals in the audience. That’s fine. I can handle anybody. So when I opened it up for Q&A, this woman came to the microphone and somebody before her had asked about the navigator program. Is James O’Keefe in the room anywhere? Is he still here? He’s gone? Okay. James O’Keefe is another hero of the Republic, doing the kind of journalism that mainstream journalists should do. Amazing.
(Applause)
And I was asked about the navigator program and I raised O’Keefe’s videos of the fraud and the encouraging people to lie to the federal government, all felonies, and this woman stood up after I had my answer about the navigator program and how it is ACORN, and she stood up and she said, “I take issue with that.“ Now, right away, I knew by her tone I was dealing with a liberal. “I take issue with that.”
(Laughter)
And I said, “Explain, ma’am. I’m all ears.“ And she said, “Well, I am a navigator in Ohio, and I can tell you that we are all just so faithful to this program, and none of us would ever engage in this kind of fraud and corruption. We would never do that. We are highly trained individuals.”
And I listened to her go on and on, and I said, “So is that true for across the board, in your experience, with what you’re doing?“ “Yes, absolutely.“ “Do you think it’s true across the board in Ohio?“ “Well, I can’t speak for the rest of the state, but every navigator I know, Ms. Crowley, is totally honest and wants this thing to work.”
So then I brought up the day before when Kathleen Sebelius – or two days before when Kathleen Sebelius was in front of the Senate Committee and Senator John Cornyn asked her about the navigator program and the fraud and corruption, and he said point blank, “So is there anything in this federal law, the Obamacare law, that requires these navigators to undergo a background check and a full vetting for security reasons?“ And she blathered on, but ultimately, her answer was no. So he said, “So it’s possible to have a convicted felon doing – acting as a navigator and doing this and having access to all of people’s intimate information?“ And she said, “Yes, it’s possible.”
So I raised it with this woman, and she said, “No, it is part of the federal law.“ I said, “Excuse me?“ She said, “It is part of the Obamacare law. I read it.”
(Laughter)
So I said, “Well, I’ve read the Obamacare law, too, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services says it’s not in there.“ And she said, “Well, she’s wrong.“ And I said, “Secretary is wrong about a lot of things. I think that’s something you and I can agree on.”
This is what we’re dealing with here. Again, it gets back to this ideology of control that I was talking about. The navigators are ACORN. They’re the extension of ACORN. President Obama was trained by ACORN. This is corruption at the grass roots level. That’s what the Left does. That’s what they need to get to get these things done and get them through and get them at least semi-operational.
So those navigators that you see in the James O’Keefe (inaudible), these are the same people from ACORN. This is the same corruption. This is the same revolution you have seen for decades in America on the Left.
The reason that the president now is going to do everything he can to salvage this – and the Upton bill passed yesterday, and the Landrieu bill is floating around the Senate – Obama threatened to veto any legislation, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.“ Again, you get back to this reality, this truism that he never takes his eye off the bigger prize. Even if that means losing Democrats, he will happily do that.
Would he like to have big majorities of Democrats in the Congress like he did his first two years? Absolutely. Then he could go straight to Congress instead of having to deal with the hassle of doing everything himself lawlessly, unconstitutionally, illegally through the bureaucracy, through executive orders, through this just waive parts of the law he doesn’t like. He could just go to Congress and do it. So would he prefer that? Of course. But if that means sacrificing his bigger picture, the fundamental transformation of the nation, he’s not willing to do that.
These Democrats who are running scared now, trying to flee the scene of the Obamacare accident, they’re more interested in self-preservation than in the fundamental transformation of the nation. But he’s not running again as far as we know.
(Laughter)
Never know with him. Never know. I don’t to make – I don’t want to get too presumptuous here. He’s not running again, so he doesn’t care. He doesn’t necessarily care about his own party. I’ll give you an example.
(In) 2010, before Obama signed Obamacare into law, Blanche Lincoln, who is one of the last remaining moderate Democrats from Arkansas, one of the last ones left in the Senate, she requested a meeting with President Obama, and he gave it to her.
So she went to the White House, and she begged him – and I mean begged him – not to do it this way. She said, “Please, Mr. President. Let’s break this apart. Let’s do this in a piecemeal way. Let’s get Republican buy-in. Let’s try to get some public support for this. We don’t have either one.”
And he heard her out and then he looked at her, and he essentially said, “Blanche, you’re out of luck.“ And she said, “Well, if we do it this way, I’m going to lose reelection in Arkansas.“ “Sorry, I can’t help you out there. This is more important.”
More important than her, more important than her seat, more important than the party. She lost re-election. The entire blue dog Democrat coalition for the most part got wiped out in 2010 all over socialized medicine.
Now you have a situation where you move out of theory, you’re in practice, real people like Raymond and Edie getting hurt by this thing, Democrats running wild. So Obama comes out last 48 hours, mea culpa, doesn’t really mean it. Here’s a little fix, the constitutionality of which is deeply under question. Can’t really do what he’s doing as far as I know. Does it anyway. Trying to stop the bleeding on the Democratic side just so that he doesn’t have to hear them yammering in his ear. He doesn’t care about them per se; he only cares about salvaging this because without this, the whole house of cards falls apart.
This is the most massive wealth redistribution scheme in American history. Think about it this way. Before Obamacare, nobody said that the system was perfect. People realized across the board that it needed reform. The question was what kind of reform. But before Obamacare, 70% of the American people were happy with their health insurance. 80% were happy with their healthcare.
So why do you need to go and nationalize about one-sixth of the US economy? You do it because you’re operating with an ideology of control. You do it because you want the fundamental transformation of the nation.
So now we’ve got there and they’re going to start demonizing the insurance companies once again, making them the bad guys. They’re going to try to demonize the state insurance commissioners because they’re trying to kick it back to the states. So far on the record, you have two state commissioners saying, “We’re not going to do this.“ They’re both Democrats – Washington State and Arkansas. Very tough to demonize them.
It’s all now coming apart so far, but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here because what I think is happening, and I could be wrong about this, but what I think you’re seeing is a controlled explosion.
Now, there may be parts of the explosion that they didn’t necessarily anticipate, like the website. I don’t think that they thought the website would be this screwed up, although I just saw a report this morning that said the flags were up in July saying this is not going to be ready and they went ahead anyway. There may be other parts that are outpacing their overall plan for this, but I think what you’re seeing is a controlled explosion.
Remember that President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Kathleen Sebelius, Tom Harkin, all of the revolutionaries, are all on record over the last several years talking about how Obamacare is simply a way station on the way to single payer.
All these things were built into the cake. It was supposed to unfold this way, again, maybe not as chaotically or as fast. Maybe they’re caught off guard by how things seem to be sliding from beyond their control. But I still think for the most part that what you’re seeing is what they want ultimately. Maybe they feel a little panicked because they can’t control the politics of it to the extent that they could, but again, eyes on the bigger picture. If they’re trying to get us there, then this needs to happen.
Talking about consequences, I see some folks, even on our side, still talking about unintended consequences of Obamacare. Most, if not everything, you are seeing, is intended. Let’s take the cancellations. Give you one specific example of intended consequences. The cancellation notices. January of 2010, before the bill was even signed into law, Eric Cantor goes to the President and starts asking about this, and on tape, the President says, “Well, yes, it’s possible that millions of people could lose their plans.“ Of course he knew.
And then the policy people and the political people started to have an internal debate in the White House. “Well, do we let the President go out and say, “If you like your plan, you can keep it,” because that’s not really accurate, said the policy people. And the political people said, “Well, we’re never going to get this if we go out with the truth. If we go full-out socialist, forget it. We’ll never get it done.”
The policy people lost that argument to the political people. So we know – we have evidence that, of course, this president knew. He designed the thing. I’m so tired of people trying to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. He designed the thing. Socialized medicine has been the 100-year dream of the Left, and they’re not going to just let it go.
The controlled explosion is going to continue, and we’re going to see this unravel in various kinds of ways, some of which they probably think they can control; other ways, they probably can’t. But I will say that I think the next step after the individual market cancellations, you’re going to get the employer market, which is going to be affected. I just got a letter uncovered with employer coverage not through Fox but a different employer. I got a letter two weeks ago from United Healthcare saying, “No changes now, but we can’t guarantee your plan is going to be in existence as of 2014,” next year. That’s going to be the next wave, and that’s tens of millions of people who are going to be affected by this.
So what you’re going to see in this controlled explosion is that the Left – they’re going to argue that now we need to grow the number of people who are going to be eligible for the subsidies. That’s going to be their next argument because people now, especially in the middle class that Obama’s always claiming he loves and wants to protect in advance, and he’s doing the exact opposite, they make too much to qualify for the subsidies, but they don’t make enough now to meet their premiums that are doubling and tripling.
So you’re going to see now Obama and his team come out and say, “Well, now, we can’t leave these people stranded. So now we’re going to up the baseline of people who are qualified for subsidies, and they’re going to continue to up it until pretty soon George Soros is going to qualify for a subsidy. You’re going to have everybody in America and you’re going to have the effect of single payer by that point because everybody will kind of be in the same system.
That’s going to be the next step because, remember, their goal is single payer, full-on socialized medicine. They are not going to let anything stop them from doing it. Mark my words on this.
So what do we do about any of this? And then I’m happy to open it up to questions.
I don’t pretend to have the answers about how we tackle this because it’s so big and it’s so powerful and it’s coming at us nonstop here. But I have a couple of things that I want to throw out by way of solutions or by way of how we fight this battle.
The first is that we’ve got to make the moral case for the free market – moral case, not the economic case – the moral case for the free market. Very few people out there are doing it. Americans for Prosperity does it. David does it, obviously. Steve Forbes does it. But we need to get with the program to make the moral case for capitalism because you know what? We’ve been painted into a corner as evil, villainous capitalists, capitalists for a long time, and it’s time we fought back making the argument that capitalism is the most moral of all economic systems. That’s one thing because the Left never wastes a moment trying to make the moral case for class warfare and wealth redistribution, so we’ve got to make the moral case on our side.
Secondly, a couple of specific things we should be doing – messaging – and I know a lot of folks here over the weekend have been talking about messaging and languaging, how we get our message across in ways that people who aren’t attuned to politics every day will absorb and listen to. I think they’ve all been 100% right.
Remember that the Left argues in emotional terms because they don’t have anything else. They don’t have facts. They don’t have history. So they have to argue with emotion. So you get Grandma pushed off the cliff by Paul Ryan. You get Grandpa eating cat food. You get little Johnny drinking dirty water and having a bad education. They argue with emotion and they gain a lot of traction that way.
We tend to argue with cold, hard facts – right? – as conservatives because we have the facts on our side, so we talk about $17 trillion in debt or the unemployment rate or the deficit – cold, hard numbers, but they’re cold.
We have to learn to speak in more emotional terms about what we stand for. Technology, very important. (In) 2008, I remember when Twitter was new, the Obama campaign – and this is one of the great ironies of the Obamacare website falling apart because they made their name. They got the campaign off the ground. They won in large part because they had such a command of technology.
Barack Obama in 2008 was directing tweets to his followers to his supporters at Jay-Z concert. He was micro-targeting them, and John McCain, God love him, was campaigning with smoke signals, right?
(Laughter)
We still haven’t improved that much since then so technology and grass roots, which is what David – “True the Vote.“ I know Katherine Engelbrecht is here on election integrity. It’s all about mobilizing grass roots.
Remember, when you go back home to your communities, grass roots communication is so important. It is the most important thing. This is what the Left does so well. They’re the unions. That’s your ACORN and everything else.
You make a phone call to a person, it amplifies the message times three. If you talk to them face to face, it amplifies by eight. The Left knows this. That’s why they do it. We’ve got to do the same thing.
And, finally, reaching the millennials, the young folks, the “yute,” as Joe Pesci said in My Cousin Vinny, the “yute”.
(Laughter)
I’ll leave you with this because it’s an important point. Brand new [Quinnipiac] poll this week, they broke it down by age group, and what caught my eye was the “yute” – 18 to 29. They are now incredibly disillusioned with President Obama, give him a 54% job disapproval number, and on issue after issue, they are increasingly disagreeing with him, and even more surprisingly, given their Congress – sorry, Louie – has a 9% job approval, they now trust the Republicans in Congress to handle the big issues of the economy – jobs, the federal budget, healthcare – over the Democrats by two to five points.
That’s the group that we should be reaching and we should be doing everything we can to try to get to them because we have a real opening there.
I don’t think all is lost. I’m a happy warrior, very optimistic about America, and I think we owe it to the Founding Fathers and to, frankly, every generation that has fought so hard for freedom before ours and every generation to come that we fight this battle now. Our battle may not be on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, but I think this battle is just as historic because freedom is just as at stake. That’s why we fight. This is our fight.
Thank you. God bless you.
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