Thursday, July 26, 2012

Obama's War on Suburbia

Sneak Peek: Stanley Kurtz's New Book Examines Obama's War on Suburbia
July 26, 2012

All Audio & Video » BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I got a note from Stanley Kurtz today. Stanley Kurtz has been one of the foremost researchers of "Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm! Mmm! Mmm!" and his radical ties throughout his whole life. He's got a new book coming out. The title of the book escapes me. More detail on it in the future, but let me just tell you basically what the premise is. The premise is that Obama and his band of radicals in the government despise suburbia.

They blame suburbia and suburbanites for what's happening in place like Detroit, for example, and other big cities that are in the midst of this decay. It is because people have moved out, and they have moved out to places where they can hang out together and be amongst people like them. (Do you see where this is going?) According to Mr. Kurtz, one of the fundamental aspects of dealing with Obama, one of the things to do in a campaign against Obama that could be very successful...

It's all tied in, by the way, to the Thomas B. Edsall stuff that we pointed out last November where they've abandoned white working-class voters. Obama wants nothing to do with them. Now they're running ads aimed at those people trying to dispirit them and depress them and to tell 'em that Romney hates them and Romney's not gonna care. They want to isolate them and make 'em think that they have no representation and nobody's looking out for 'em. They want to just try to depress 'em, suppress their vote, dispirit them to the point that they don't show up.

The bitter clingers, suburbanites.

Obama's never gonna use this terminology. He's never gonna say that he's angry at the suburbanites. He's going to say it in such a way that he'll convey that impression to the people who he wants to understand it. And I think that there's something to it. I'm just giving you the real sketch view. Kurtz has written a whole book about this that comes out soon. I think it's next week. More on it later. I'll print the story out and fill you in on some of the gaps here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Stanley Kurtz's book is Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. And Kurtz is a powerful, influential member of the media. Stanley sent me a note about his book, and he says the core revelations of his book focus on the fact that (and I'd like to be interested in your thoughts on this, folks) although no one knows it, "Obama is closely working from the White House with some of the original Alinskyite community organizers who first trained him in Chicago and other places."




He is personally working with these Alinskyites.





"It's a very ambitious plan to transform America by undercutting America's suburbs in order to redistribute suburban money back to the cities." Now, many people think that in the upcoming election, suburbs are the key. And I've seen some pollsters/consultants who are saying that the suburbs are the key swing constituency of this election. And Kurtz claims that his book will illustrate it. "Almost nobody realizes it, but Obama has had a lifelong hostility to the suburbs. His community-organizing mentors hated suburbs.

"They blame the suburbs for the problems of the cities. They believe that suburbanites were just greedy racists who didn't want to share their tax money with the urban poor." Now, again, folks, forget the intellectual aspect of this, whether it's right or wrong. We're talking about the way Obama was mentored. And the point is, if Obama was raised and trained by a bunch of Alinskyites who want explain the evils-of-America -- the inequities, the unfairness -- by saying, "Look, Barack!

"What happened was all these rich, white people fled the cities and they went out to suburbia. They're a bunch of racists and they don't like to hang around with people who live in the city. They don't like people like us, Barack!" Imagine how this happened. He's young, he's impressionable, and this is what he's being told. And these suburbs, that's where the bitter clingers are! That's suburbanites and people in rural areas. But you don't have bitter clingers in the inner city.

All these people have left the cities. They've taken their wealth, they've taken their businesses, they've taken their lives, and they've gotten away from what they don't like in the cities and they've left the cities in an absolute mess. Although it's not mentioned here in the little blurb, Detroit might be an example of this. And clearly there are other examples of big cities around the country where the inner city is decaying like crazy.

And Obama has been led to believe and has been taught that, basically because of racism, white people have left the cities for suburbia. So Obama is hell-bent on penalizing them, and that's what his campaign is all about. They believe the suburbanites are just a bunch of greedy racists. They didn't want to share their money, their tax money with the urban poor. This is what Kurtz's book is about. He claims to establish all of this as fact. Obama adopted their worldview and supported this movement.

Many of the leaders of this anti-suburban movement supported by Obama for years are now advising the regime on redistributive anti-suburban policies that few people know anything about. The bottom line, Kurtz believes that if the election is framed this way, that if enough people begin to look at this election through the prism of Obama and the radical left despising suburbia, that it will have a profound impact on the votes of people in suburbia. I take you back to the belief on the part of many that this election features suburbs as the key swing constituency of the election. In the swing states, for example, where are the swing votes?

And the theory is, the swing votes in the swing states are in suburbia. And if the suburban voters are made aware that they are the targets of this redistributive policy of the, "You didn't build that. You didn't do that on your own," that when Obama says things like that, he has suburbanites on the mind, he has people who fled the cities. They are a problem. They have committed an act for which they need to pay. The cities are in trouble because of racism. White people didn't want to live among blacks in the inner city and fled. All the way back to the fifties when the suburbs began to pop up. This is not something new. This has been an Alinskyite belief for years.

Now, you couple this with the fact, folks, the left, if you listen carefully, it isn't hard to believe the left has always had it in for the suburbs. The left believes that the suburbs is everything that's wrong with America. That's where all the cars are. That's where all the SUVs are. That's where all the malls are. You can't have mass transit in the suburbs. It's too spread out. You can't control everything. Cell phones, all this stuff, it's all part of suburbia. Environmentalists hate the suburbs because that's where all the environmental destruction takes place. That's where all the driving takes place. It's where all the gas stations are. It's where all the reasons people spend their money happen to be.

To buttress what Kurtz is saying, there is a report just out from the Brookings Institute. Its title, "Demographic Reversal: Cities Thrive, Suburbs Sputter -- Last year, for the first time in more than nine decades the major cities of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas grew faster than their combined suburbs. At least temporarily, this puts the brakes on a longstanding staple of American life -- the pervasive suburbanization of its population --which began with widespread automobile use in the 1920s to the present day when more than half the US population lives in the suburbs. This reversal is identified in an analysis of newly released Census Bureau data for 2010-2011 and can be attributed to a number of forces."


So Kurtz's book is going to make the case that the real Obama campaign, unstated, is an attack on suburban flight, suburban life and the people who are there. They are the real problem. They are these business owners. They are self-made. They are the people who have built factories. They are the people that use the roads and bridges and haven't paid anybody for it. They are the thieves. They are selfish, and they abandon people because of what they look like. The suburbs are the repository of evil. Well, not evil. The suburbs, that's where the real problem people in this country live, the people with whom we have to get even. And, by the way, the Brookings Institution, they call this move back to the cities the New American Dream. A bunch of libs at Brookings. So Kurtz could well be on to something here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Well, here is a potential bottom line. Let's say that the upcoming campaign suggestion for Romney... well, not Romney. He's not going about it this way anyway. Instead of appealing to undecided voters on ideological grounds, as I have always thought would be a winning thing to do, and I still do, there may yet still be some people that don't want to look at Obama or Romney ideologically. They just don't want to go there. They're not that political. But they live in suburbia, so you go to them and say, "This guy, Barack Obama, is upset with you. He doesn't like the suburbs."

If a campaign can be based around the fact, is Obama's real purpose to punish suburbanites, is that who he's talking about when he says, "You didn't build that. You didn't make that happen." Given the premise that the election in these swing states, the swing constituency is suburbanites, let them know that they are the target of Obama's destructive policies simply because of where they live. Not because they're Democrats, not because they're Republicans, not because they're liberals or conservatives or whatever, it's he doesn't like suburbs. The president of the United States has a problem with people who've left the cities. He thinks they're racist. He thinks they've run out on problems. He thinks they've exacerbated problems. They've taken their tax revenue and they've taken their wealth and they moved out and the cities are decaying. It isn't fair and he wants the money back. Interesting premise. We shall see.

In the meantime, Marianne in Roanoke, Virginia, I'm glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. First-time caller, long-time listener.

RUSH: Thank you very much.

CALLER: And I want to thank you for educating me. I've loved listening to you. You're absolutely fantastic. Here's my comment. There's two I want to make. First, suburbians, the evil ones, people that live in the slums or the projects or wherever they live, if their environment is not good, they want to get out of it. They want to move to a better environment. If they have the opportunity to move to suburbia, they take it, whether it's Section 8 housing or they start their own small businesses or they educate themselves, they move out.

RUSH: Let me tell you how the left thinks about this, since you bring that up. How many minority success stories have there been where they are told that they have abandoned the hood? The minute they score, they're out of there, too. And they have a duty to stay in the hood or they have to go back. Snerdley knows what I'm talking about.

CALLER: Right. Right.

RUSH: It's along the same lines, if your grades are too good, you're being too white.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: We heard that some years ago.

CALLER: Right. Well, speaking of that, Obama only knows the way he grew up, that people give you a hand up and help you. You can't go to high school and smoke dope, do blow and various other drugs and blow off high school and get into Occidental, get into Columbia, get into Harvard.

RUSH: Who says?

CALLER: Well, somebody is padding his grades, that's all I can say. I have three children who are --

RUSH: Now, wait a minute. Somebody that I am relatively familiar with admitted to playing around with cocaine and smoking marijuana and got into those places.

CALLER: In his high school years?

RUSH: Well, no, he's president now.

CALLER: No, I know. But did this person --

RUSH: Yeah, in his high school years.

CALLER: Okay, well, from what the --

RUSH: Even in his college years. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, in the cars, it was so smoke filled that you couldn't see the speedometer.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Lafayette, Louisiana. This is Richard. Thank you for the call, sir.

CALLER: Yes, sir. Question about the Roanoke speech. Obama was talking about the great system that created all these millionaires and what not, but he ran on "change." What's going on here?

RUSH: Okay, you're talking about the Roanoke speech?

CALLER: Right. Yes, sir.

RUSH: Grab audio sound bite 13. Let's listen. I think you may be on to something, but I want to listen to it again just to make sure.

OBAMA: Look, i-i-if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own.

FOLLOWERS: That's right!

OBAMA: You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, "Well, it must be because I was just so smart!"

FOLLOWERS: (laughing)

OBAMA: There are a lot of smart people out there. "It must be because I worked harder than everybody else." Let me tell you something. There are a whole bunch of hardworkin' people out there!

FOLLOWERS: (cheers and applause)

OBAMA: If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help!

FOLLOWERS: Yeaaaaaah!

OBAMA: There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.

FOLLOWERS: Yeaaaaaah!

OBAMA: Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.

RUSH: Stop the tape!

OBAMA: Somebody invested in roads and bridges!

RUSH: That must be where you're talking about: "Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system..." That's what you're talking about?

CALLER: Yes, sir.

RUSH: And so your question is: How can this be such a wonderful system if he wants to change it?

CALLER: Yes, sir.

RUSH: Well, you're not supposed to ask questions like that. See, this sound bite is filled with problems for Obama. You have just cited another one. He is running to change America. He says we gotta transform the country; it's unjust and it's unfair. What's the latest? He's talking to the Urban League. He's talking the Urban League and he talked about how "our union may not be perfect, but it is perfectible." That whole notion of "perfectible" is rooted again in liberalism or in the left. "Perfectible" is this whole stupid utopian pursuit of nature that they have.

Perfect it. We're less than perfect, but we are perfectible. So there's inherent problems in the founding. We're flawed. This country was unjust and immoral from the days of its founding. But with the right people in charge, we can perfect it. So he gets caught here. Now he has to talk about what a great system we have, "unbelievable American system." What he's doing is simply trying to relate to people who think of the country in ways that he doesn't. He's lying to them. He doesn't think this is an "unbelievable American system."

Well, actually he doesn't say great.

He does say "unbelievable," which is open to however you want to interpret it.

It could be "unbelievable" as in, "I can't believe how bad this is! I can't believe how flawed and imperfect this country it is." But he was clearly trying to tell them (impression), "We got a great country out here. It's a great country, but somebody made this country great and they left you out of it. Somebody made a great country here, and they left you behind. Somebody made a great country, and they did it on your back. And I'm here to take care of you." And this is getting under their skin. What are they working on now, their second response ad? Richard, thank you.

Chris in Memphis. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Thank you for having me, Mr. Limbaugh.

RUSH: You bet!

CALLER: It's an honor. I was calling about what you were speaking about in the last segment. I watched a documentary not too along on the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project in St. Louis.

RUSH: Oh-ho-ho. Yes, I remember Pruitt-Igoe.

CALLER: I'm sure you do.

RUSH: Bed-Stuy. Think Bed-Stuy.

CALLER: The entire documentary was... They started it speaking of the creation of the suburb and how St. Louis couldn't expand its borders and so it was losing tax revenue. And they blame the failure of the complex on the fact that they didn't have enough tax revenue to keep it up and things like that. And there were a lot of undertones of white racism.

RUSH: Yeah, "white flight," it was called. White flight to the suburbs from places like Pruitt-Igoe, which is a federal housing project. It became a slum. So they are trying to blame that on the flight from the city to suburbia? This is exactly what Stanley Kurtz is talking about in his book. Isn't it amazing? I bring this up, and you remember having seen this documentary.

CALLER: Yeah, I watched it just a few weeks ago, actually, and everything they said in that documentary is what it sounds like his book is about. They really try to paint a picture

RUSH: When you watched the documentary, do you remember what channel it was on?

CALLER: It was on Netflix.

RUSH: Netflix?

CALLER: Yeah. Most of the documentaries from Netflix are pretty liberal.

RUSH: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you had to order this?

CALLER: No, it was a watch-instantly. We got it hooked up through the Roku device to our television. That's kind of like Apple TV but a different brand.

RUSH: Yeah, but still you had to choose it. You had to be hunting for documentaries, right?

CALLER: Well, I was just cruising there late one night. My wife was sick and baby was asleep. So I was just cruising through and saw it looked interesting, so I checked it out.

RUSH: Okay, your wife was sick, the baby was asleep, and you thought, "I'm gonna watch a documentary?"

CALLER: Yeah, I guess I can be kind of boring sometimes.

RUSH: No, I didn't say that.

CALLER: (chuckling)

RUSH: No, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. I'm fascinated by what people choose to do to relax or focus themselves, whatever.

CALLER: Well, I like anything of a political nature and I saw that.

RUSH: Okay, so what was your reaction when you saw this, Chris? Forget what you've heard today. What was your reaction when you saw them try to construct the blame for Pruitt-Igoe?

CALLER: Well, it just blew my mind, because you have all these people -- you know, testimony from people that actually lived there -- and they would admit to how terrible the conditions were because of the people who lived in the place. But then they would blame it on, "Well, we didn't have the tax revenue for the maintenance."

RUSH: Exactly.

CALLER: Yeah. So even though they admit to destroying it, they blame it on somebody else.

RUSH: That is exactly right. Again, for those of you in New York, Pruitt-Igoe, just think Bed-Stuy. It's just a mess of a housing project. And the whole excuse for these housing projects failing, well, not the whole excuse, but one of the big excuses was white flight, suburbia, tax base fleeing, tax revenue fleeing, and, of course, that turned the people who live there into lives of crime. It was never their fault. And I'm telling you, this is what Kurtz's book is about, one of the premises of his book, is that Obama and his Alinskites harbor a profound resentment because of suburbia, suburban flight, white flight. They do think there's a racial component to suburbia. People see a housing project going up, "Oh, God, I don't want to live anywhere near that," and they leave. Obama says that's why these cities are in bad shape, 'cause racists decided they didn't want to live next to people that didn't look like them.

This what Alinsky teaches the community organizers to use as a rallying cry when you're organizing people to agitate 'em, to get 'em all worked up. (interruption) Well, no, I know. Snerdley is yelling at me, "Obama lives in a sweet spot next to Rezko. He doesn't live in the hood." But, see, liberals, Snerdley, you're forgetting, the rules are for everybody else. They're the elites. They're entitled to not have to live by the rules they require everybody else to live by. That's one of the perks of being in the elites. It's like being in the Politburo. You don't live in Moscow with the human debris. You got your place outside. It's the way liberals, elitists everywhere, have always been.

But still, the point here is that in running a campaign, if you tell people who live in -- forget that they're Republicans or Democrats. If you can run a campaign, if the swing voters in the swing states are genuinely -- if it's true that it's the suburban voter this election's gonna turn on, then it makes sense to try to tell 'em the truth. To t convince them, "Look, the president of the United States is a man who believes that this country is in the trouble it's in because you live in suburbia." Not that you're a Republican, not because you're this or that, but you abandoned. You're selfish. You took your tax revenue and your job and your small business or whatever, and you fled, and you left disaster behind.

So the point of Kurtz's book is to educate, inform the suburbanite swing voters exactly how they are in the crosshairs. It is their wealth Obama wants to come get. It is their lives he wants to transform. He holds them responsible, and not just Obama, but the Democrat Party. He holds them responsible for the plight of the inner city public schools. It wouldn't be that way if you hadn't left and taken your kids. Whatever, folks, if that were to persuade 'em, that's fine with me. And we've got a little assistance here. You got Obama talking about it, Roanoke, Virginia, on July 13th. (imitating Obama) "You didn't build that. You didn't make that happen. Somebody made the roads." That's who he's talking about.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Bob in Farmington Hills, Michigan, the suburbs. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. It's a pleasure after all these years to have a chance to talk with you.

RUSH: I'm glad you made it through.

CALLER: Me, too. I am I guess what you would call one of those evil suburbanite entrepreneurs. I had a successful business for ten years --

RUSH: Makes you an Obama target.

CALLER: I probably am, you're right. But what I wanted to say was, he didn't help me with any of my business activities like marketing or engineering or anything like that. But what the government does is they provide roads. Now, by providing that, I mean they provide the responsibility. They don't actually build the road, but they contract with a private company, a contractor to do that. And then what they do is they assess everyone who owns property along that road, the cost of the construction. And if it happens to be a main road, they not only assess the property owners along the road, but they assess people within maybe several hundred feet or a thousand feet or more.

RUSH: Right. They call those user fees.

CALLER: Yeah, well, it's an assessment, and basically what they're doing is they're passing the cost of that along to the people around it. So I sit here and I look out in front of my business, and I have a gravel road, no sidewalks, and we do not have water and sewer, because we're in kind of a semirural part of the city here. So if I wanted to upgrade to a paved road, to add sidewalks or in particular to put in water or sewer, they're gonna pass along those costs, and we --

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa. Is your business successful?

CALLER: Yes, absolutely.

RUSH: How can that be? You got a successful business, you don't have a road.

CALLER: (laughing) Well, I do have a road, but --

RUSH: Well, but it's a gravel road.

CALLER: It is.

RUSH: You don't have sewage, plumbing, and you got a success business, it's not possible. Obama says it's not possible.

CALLER: Well, I don't have a retail business. I don't have people coming into my shop. I do engineering, and so I serve my customers --

RUSH: Well, you still have to get there, and you got people that come there now and then. I mean, I'm sure you're not there all alone, you and your drumsticks.

CALLER: I'm a business manager, and that's the extent of it. It's a very small business, but my main point is that if I want to improve those services, I have to actually -- we've looked into this -- I'd have to actually pay the same amount as if I had done it privately.

RUSH: Exactly right.

CALLER: So what is the city really providing me? The government is not doing anything.

RUSH: That's an excellent point. That's exactly right. We all pay for the roads anyway. We all do. The false premise here is that these successful people have somehow managed to not pay for the roads, which is a crock.

END TRANSCRIPT
______________________________________

To read more from the Rush Limbaugh Show, click here.

No comments: