Rush Limbaugh Thinks American Voters Are Fools When He Attacks the Obama Plan

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Rush Limbaugh thinks the American voters are shortsighted, blindly selfish fools.

Here's what the radio talk show host recently told NRO's Byron York:

Obama's plan would buy votes for the Democrat Party, in the same way FDR's New Deal established majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule, and it would also simultaneously seriously damage any hope of future tax cuts. It would allow a majority of American voters to guarantee no taxes for themselves going forward. It would burden the private sector and put the public sector in permanent and firm control of the economy. Put simply, I believe his stimulus is aimed at re-establishing "eternal" power for the Democrat Party rather than stimulating the economy because anyone with a brain knows this is NOT how you stimulate the economy.

So the way Limbaugh sees the world, FDR used the New Deal to buy off the dullard voters for a half century; and now Obama is trying to replicate that feat. Apparently all it takes to win voter loyalty is boatloads of dough. If you've got the bucks, you can foist whatever sort of horrible policies you want on the electorate because they can't see far enough past their pocketbook to evaluate a political agenda. (This also explains the GOP obsession with tax cuts as a policy cure-all.)

Limbaugh's argument doesn't even have internal coherence. He is, for example, one of those arguing that Republicans got their collective behinds stomped because they spent too much and lost their conservative way. But given the way the GOP Congress and GOP president, presented with a budget surplus at the decade's start, spent, should they have bought some love from the money-grubbing voters? And more broadly, if the simpleton electorate can be so easily bought off, wouldn't a return to conservative principles of low spending be a losing formula?

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