In this episode, we discuss the midterms, the tea party movement, and the impact of Rand Paul's win in the primary, as well as what the future holds for the conservative wing of the Republican Party.
00:00:30.340I think that we can lead the nation into the 21st century.
00:00:33.700Right. Yeah. Well, as you might guess, we're talking about the recent midterm election.
00:00:40.620And I would say that I made this joke about taking our country back, which is what conservatives seem to always believe whenever a Republican gets elected.
00:00:52.160But I would say this. I just in my lifetime and not even in that and just the past five years, I think there's been a kind of muting of conservatism and conservative politics.
00:01:06.120And what I mean by is this. I can remember 2010. And that was a very angry and maybe you could say radical, at the very least, you could say angry conservative election.
00:01:21.880I just remember these things. It was the Dale Peterson era when he would come on and be like, you know, who is my opponent? What a dummy.
00:01:30.420And he's like holding a rifle. Yeah. And you had Ted Kredo almost winning in a third party run and everything like that.
00:01:35.700Yeah. And there was a I remember there was this congresswoman in Arizona who her whole campaign ad was about her firing a machine gun.
00:01:43.160You know what I mean? It was like. And granted, we.
00:01:45.440To be fair, there's still a lot of candidates who that seems to be their campaign.
00:01:51.300Right. Joni Ernst talked about castrating pigs and we're going to make them squeal.
00:01:55.460So I think there was a little bit of the spirit of 2010. But I would say on the whole, it was a much more muted discontent election.
00:02:05.940I mean, midterms are almost always discontent elections and they are a chance for the opposition to gain some ground.
00:02:13.340But I think this one was pretty muted. This was almost the, you know, 2010 was the they don't give a rip about Alabama election.
00:02:20.160And 2014 was like, let's vote for Mitch McConnell so that we can stop Obama or something.
00:02:28.720A couple of a couple of things happened here. I mean, one, looking back at 2010, I mean, Dale Peterson, the guy you're bringing up, he didn't win.
00:03:55.280And I think the way what happened to him is sort of what happened to the Tea Party in general, where you had this kind of outsider coming in, taking on the establishment.
00:04:04.340I mean, keep in mind, he was like at Mitch McConnell's throat.
00:04:09.460And now this time at Rand Paul, I mean, Mitch McConnell, frankly, owes his Senate seat to Rand Paul getting out there and campaigning for him, even at Rand Paul's campaign manager for a while.
00:04:20.440So what's really happened is that the Tea Party—
00:05:26.060Um, it's just become another word for kind of the—the right—the Republican wing of the Republican Party, basically.
00:05:33.540Um, and the other thing going on with this election—but, I mean, let's break it down, what happened.
00:05:40.100I mean, the big story, I think, uh, first of all, it happened in Oregon, which is huge, where you had—it was the only immigration thing that was on the ballot.
00:06:00.680Uh, the no vote on 88 was greater than the vote for pot legalization, greater for the vote from the incumbent governor, greater for the vote than the senator.
00:06:10.620Uh, the Republican candidate, of course, took no position on the issue and got crushed in the election.
00:06:15.880Um, but more than—I think something like two-thirds of Oregon voters, uh, voted for no driver's licenses for illegals.
00:06:24.160Um, so that's an interesting development.
00:06:26.700Parallels what happened with the referendum in Montana, um, last time around, where, you know, you had, like, crushing defeats for the GOP ticket, and then this thing passes.
00:06:35.120So, while the GOP establishment got a number of things right this election, you know, they're not—they're still the GOP establishment, it's still the stupid party, and they managed to not even make a real race in elections where you could have done something, uh, especially in Oregon, and especially in Michigan, was just, like, an absolute disgrace.
00:06:55.860Well, yeah, but, Kevin, I—I think you—you—you—it's a—there's a danger in basically looking at one individual referendum about illegal immigrants and driver's licenses and then concluding that the whole population of that state is rabidly conservative or right-wing.
00:07:15.380But, I mean, if you—if you're going to put up a candidate, if you're going to put up a candidate who doesn't even take the position on it, and that candidate gets something, like, in the 30s, and then the thing—the controversial issue you didn't take the position on gets, like, two-thirds of the vote.
00:07:30.160And, like, even if you were—and let's take—you know, let's break it down in another state how this happened.
00:07:34.520Uh, Ed Gillespie in Virginia, who was widely considered to be, like, the great surprise, this is a race where he was down in double digits.
00:07:41.620I mean, like, comically down, like, 20 points or something against Warner.
00:08:04.520And what ends up happening, his Hail Mary play at the end of the campaign is to run ads bashing Warner for not defending the Washington Redskins' name.
00:08:13.680Which is, like, the kind of thing that, you know, GOP consultants would, like, lose their mind over.
00:08:19.620I mean, that's, like, the definition of, like, boob bait or whatever.
00:08:51.440And it's not like Ken, where you had, I mean, they're losing seats and you've got, like, intra-party fights and everything else.
00:08:57.180I mean, the fact is, when you've got Mitch McConnell, uh, now a Senate Majority Leader, and Rand Paul basically joined at the hip, you know, that's, that's significant.
00:09:08.200Uh, as an aside, it's funny that Ron Paul, Rand's dad, is sending out tweets to seem like, get ready for more war in Iraq now that the neocons are back in charge and stuff.
00:09:22.140Yeah, well, I would say a couple of things.
00:09:24.140I mean, one demographic aspect of all this that I think is very important is that the GOP voting base keeps getting older, and it also keeps getting whiter.
00:09:34.960Uh, there, there was actually some interesting stuff, um, uh, on, uh, on voter turnout, and, uh, I'll, I'll put this in the show notes, but this is just a 538, which is a kind of interesting, you know, number crunching site.
00:09:50.360But, I mean, Maine, 60% of the people in Maine vote, which is, you know, you know, almost 60% in Alaska and Colorado and Minnesota, and then you get down in these places like Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, uh, New York, Georgia, Alabama, and there's some outliers here.
00:10:08.840But, basically, what you have is these deep red southern states that are demographically, if you just looked at the demographics, you'd think that they would be strongly, uh, Democrat states in the sense of they've got a lot of blacks or a lot of Hispanics.
00:10:36.880And so, you have this weird, like, illusion where you think that Texas is like, oh, it just must be a bunch of white people out there, you know, voting for these hardcore Republicans, uh, on statewide offices.
00:10:51.000But, in a way, that's, that's, that's an illusion.
00:10:54.500And even if you look at, like, let's take Texas, I mean, that was going to be the great, you know, this is the year that Texas was going to go blue.
00:11:01.660And they had, uh, you know, what was it, Wendy Davis, who was going to, like, ride feminism and abortion rights to victory, you know, through the votes of Austin alone, apparently.
00:11:11.940And she lost the female vote in Texas.
00:11:18.540Like, it, it, it, I, I think it, I mean, it, it shows, it shows the power of the GOP, and it shows the racialization of parties, at least in, in places that are not, you know, like, the Pacific Northwest, where, you know, maybe this is actually changing.
00:11:34.080But in, in the Montana, places like this, you have a lot of Democrats, and these are generally pro-gun Democrats, and, and they're kind of like, they seem to me, at least, kind of like, backroom deal, let's bring in some money for the logging industry, unions, Democrats, which is, uh, fine.
00:11:50.860I would, I would, I would vote for, I, I'm, effectively, I'm a liberal, if you look at, like, the issues.
00:11:56.880If you, if you were talking about, like, uh, I mean, in a lot of these states, if you were, if you were in, um, you know, Montana, or one of these Western states, a lot of the GOP stuff is, let's hand the state over to mining interests or whatever else.
00:12:25.140Arkansas was, like, the one Southern state where you still had a certain remnant of the Democratic South, South.
00:12:32.320Now, every single congressman in Arkansas, I believe, is a Republican.
00:12:35.940And Tom Cotton, who, um, is being promoted as, like, you know, the next upcoming conservative star or whatever, he's pretty by-the-numbers guy, solid on immigration, but pretty interventionist as far as fall in policy goes.
00:13:04.580Uh, but if you look at the states where they struggled, North Carolina, um, Tillis was, you know, a horrible candidate, uh, Speaker of the House, very unpopular state legislature.
00:13:14.980And he ran, I mean, just, he was a political consultant, I mean, really kind of a, basically, Gillespie with, uh, Gillespie charisma, and that's not meant to be, you know, a compliment.
00:13:27.220Like, he was god-awful stances on all these things, uh, and even he was able to pull it out just by sheer inertia, it seems like.
00:13:35.580But, but also, just, I mean, the big one is Brown, I think, that's the one state where you've got to, like, take a step back and wonder what the hell happened.
00:13:43.300I mean, you could say, look, he's taking on an incumbent, he made it close, uh, but Brown, I think, was the most interesting run of the entire cycle.
00:13:53.580Because he's actually pretty good, he's good on immigration, and, and he's obviously, he's like, he's handsome, he's charismatic, and so on and so forth.
00:13:59.600Well, he's a moderate, he's kind of a, uh, think of, like, Pete Wilson, right?
00:14:04.340Where you have, Pete Wilson back in the day was, was somebody who was going to challenge kind of the pro-life, uh, plank on the Republican Party platform.
00:14:31.920But, Brown, Brown made it close, but had he won, he could have been kind of the return of this social moderate.
00:14:40.440You can't really peg him as some pro-life fanatic, or anti-gay, or whatever else, but we're going to have common sense stances on immigration and things like that.
00:17:48.000I mean, the, the bigger thing here is that, you know, the GOP, um, is actually, think of, think of where we were right after 2012, where the smart money was like, they have to pass amnesty.
00:18:14.060And when you had this time, if you had people talking about, you know, income inequality, you had people talking about immigration, you had people spending Wall Street.
00:18:21.620Uh, it's all rhetoric, of course, but this is what they ran on.
00:18:26.260In fact, they just kind of didn't pass anything.
00:18:28.780They just kind of held the line, um, the whole way.
00:18:31.640Well, I, I think, uh, this is what I would say, and this gets back to what I was saying before, in terms of, basically, the GOP, uh, their job is to channel and, and maybe fence in the hopes and dreams of older white Americans.
00:18:49.500I mean, that, that basically is its function.
00:18:52.360And, uh, you know, and so, and that's why even I say this.
00:19:11.740Uh, I don't resonate with them, uh, at all.
00:19:14.460And, um, I, I think they're just, it's not my party.
00:19:17.680I, I think I, uh, if I feel this way, I'm sure someone who's 26 or 16 feels this way intensely.
00:19:25.440Um, so I, I think also, you know, I mean, gosh, I, uh, I keep going off on these tangents, but I'll say one thing.
00:19:30.800I, I think, you know, you can't underestimate the degree to which, yes, something like immigration or going after affirmative action, that, that is a more powerful, that's a more popular issue than people imagine.
00:19:44.660And people imagine that it's controversial.
00:19:48.200That being said, I think people underestimate the degree to which conservatism, quote unquote, is deeply unpopular amongst people who are under the age of 50.
00:19:59.700Uh, I mean, no one wants, the, the idea of a kind of Bible thumping George Bush, let's go invade the world.
00:20:13.660And I think actually the big problem for people who are interested in immigration reform, I, I think their, their fundamental problem is not that the GOP is too wishy-washy or something.
00:20:27.920The problem is that immigration reform is associated with these, uh, Bible thumping lunatics.
00:20:33.500And so that, that's why that's, that was the Scott Brown thing.
00:20:37.260If Scott Brown had won, that would have changed that perception.
00:20:39.900Yeah, no, I, I think that would have been interesting.
00:20:42.160I mean, I, I think, uh, a liberal, like, you know, things like, again, I, I, I, I don't, all the gay rights stuff, I, I wish we would just get over that stuff.
00:20:51.220But anyway, you know, at the end of the day, most millennials want gay marriage.
00:20:55.440They, I think most millennials just want to get, get, they, they want to just pass by this whole saga and just get over it and say, yes, allow them gay marriage, stop talking about it, and let's move on.
00:21:07.560I, that is my impression of people, um, of their, their vision of, of gay rights.
00:21:12.780So, yeah, I think in a way, uh, the, the, the great hope for immigration reform would be a anti-Wall Street, anti-foreign intervention, anti-George Bush, pro-gay, and, uh, pro-gay social moderate who, yeah, I think that would, if, if you could associate immigration reform with stuff like that, uh, I think it would get so much further.
00:21:36.740Because now, I mean, we, you and I know that Ted Cruz and these type of people are bad on immigration, in fact, or Rick Perry.
00:21:44.720But the problem is, perception-wise, you know, when you think about immigration reform, you, you have all this baggage.
00:21:51.080This is who you associated there, yeah.
00:21:53.240I mean, who is the number one guy who's actually been talking about, who's actually connected the dots, don't give the masters of the universe they're in, amnesty and everything else, it's been Jeff Sessions.
00:22:07.640And, you know, Sessions, now, it's actually kind of funny, Sessions literally won with 100% of the vote because, you know, he ran on a vote, which is kind of funny.
00:22:16.900But, uh, the Saddam Hussein of American politics, I mean, that is a compliment.
00:22:31.160But, you know, if, to, to look at your critique, uh, let's say you put him up there in a debate, okay, he's running for president, he won't, but let's say he did.
00:22:42.220And then the debate comes, he talks about immigration, he hammers Wall Street, whatever else, and then the conversation turns to gay marriage, which is something that the electorate has kind of moved past, and he'll still be railing against, you know, this kind of stuff.
00:22:55.740Uh, and a thick Southern accent and everything else, and fair or unfair, that's going to be used against him.
00:23:02.540So, he's not, I mean, that was the thing, I think, I think the Brown defeat, uh, was as absurd as it sounds, I think that was, like, the most important thing that happened.
00:23:14.340Because he was the one, he was the one guy who could have actually been a new direction.
00:23:19.040And the thing is, like, um, and again, this is, this is what Peter Brimler said, you know, the ball just kind of bounced in the right direction.
00:23:25.640It wasn't, it wasn't a wave election the same way as, like, 94 or 10, where it's just kind of this crushing, you're crushing defeats, and people are just, like, losing their minds, and everybody's furious and everything else.
00:23:38.080I mean, you basically had a number of close elections break the right way, and you had a number of people win, you know, by a few percentage points.
00:23:49.040Um, and, and the real question, a lot of this is, like, what we're not talking about.
00:23:52.300I mean, you have, you had Ebola, you had the rise of the Islamic State, you had Barack Obama basically saying, no, we're just, we're just not going to enforce immigration laws with this, this surge of the, the, the so-called children who are, in fact, mostly adults coming from Central America.
00:24:07.740I mean, you had about a perfect, and you had Obamacare, nobody likes it.
00:24:11.580You had this, this perfect lineup of circumstances, and they couldn't even make a race of it in critical states.
00:24:17.940And, and also, California, I mean, it seems, we, we almost don't even talk about it, but, I mean, the state is essentially just lost.
00:24:25.100I mean, it's not even, it's, it'll never be competitive again.
00:24:28.260Uh, and that's, you know, the GOP, the, the racialization of the electorate that you pointed to is going to keep the GOP competitive for a few more cycles.
00:24:39.460But, you know, eventually you really do elect a new people.
00:24:43.220And in California, that's already happened, where the GOP put up, you know, their minority candidate, he's going to be young and vibrant, he's going to do all this stuff.
00:24:55.360I mean, I, I, we might disagree, excuse me, we might agree too much.
00:24:59.100Perhaps I'll take some crazy issue just so that we can have some debate in this podcast.
00:25:04.300But, yeah, no, I, I think you're absolutely right.
00:25:07.560I mean, I think what we might see is this, this transition where, you know, at the end of the day, the, having a party that is based around older white people, that is better.
00:25:19.920One older white person is, is the equivalent of 20 Hispanics or blacks, just in the sense of that older white person is going to vote regularly and reliably.
00:25:48.420Yeah, yeah, but one thing, I'm going to, I'm just, go ahead.
00:25:51.860Okay, let me finish real quick and then I'll let you riff on this.
00:25:54.000But I, I just think we're in this transition state where, you know, I think it's going to be very difficult, maybe impossible, for a, a, a white Protestant Republican to win the presidency again.
00:30:26.000And you say, okay, y'all, I'm a lame duck.
00:30:28.940They, they're, they've got, you know, uh, both houses and you got the house and the Senate.
00:30:34.760Uh, there's not much I can do as far as getting the policy initiative to through.
00:30:38.020There might even be some effort to screw around with Obamacare.
00:30:40.580What can I do to, to retake the offensive?
00:30:43.180You, you do this because all these moderate GOP senators and the Lindsey Grahams of the world and everything else.
00:30:51.160They'll, they'll quibble about the technicalities, but they're not going to quibble about the substance.
00:30:55.760And at the very least, you're going to create some sort of a compromise where they'll be like, oh, we'll pass a bill that will retroactively legalize 90% of what you just did.
00:31:13.880I look at it from a slightly different angle.
00:31:16.160I, I would say that I, my view of, uh, what Obama would want to do is to get the Republicans to put forth an immigration bill that they would like.
00:31:28.040Because remember, Obama, despite all of this rhetoric of Obama being this crazed third world communist, he, he's actually, he's actually a kind of accommodating president.
00:31:39.040I mean, he, he's, he's more realistic than people give him credit for.
00:31:42.600I mean, he, he didn't create socialized medicine.
00:31:45.980He created the Heritage Foundation's plan for, for, for immigration.
00:33:00.520So I, I think from one standpoint, an Obama strategy might be to just get the GOP to do it for him.
00:33:06.440But another strategy, if he wanted to be a little harder and a little more edgy, he could basically do a, do a, you know, a executive order amnesty.
00:33:18.600And he could kind of racialize politics.
00:33:21.820He could, because remember the GOP, they, they want to, you know, any company that you want to maintain repeat customers.
00:33:29.340Before you start outreach to new customers, you want to maintain customers.
00:33:33.940And just like the GOP, they're going to hold on to being an older white people party.
00:33:39.140They're going to be the kind of the Christian party in some generic vague sense.
00:33:44.020They're going to be the party of, you know, not against abortion and, and, and slightly against gays.
00:33:50.740You know, they're going to be the kind of the normal person's party.
00:33:53.460And that's how they're going to, they're going to, they need to do that to maintain their hold on this population.
00:33:58.460And I think in a way, Obama could kind of tempt them to become a little more racial.
00:34:03.500Like they, they, if he did an executive amnesty, which again, that's very much in the cards.
00:34:08.920Maybe it's even probable in the next, in the coming year after the election.
00:34:12.320If he did that, he would really racialize politics.
00:34:15.660And he would actually inspire all of these Latinos who don't vote to go out and vote Democrat.
00:34:21.900You know, I mean, it would be almost like maybe you need to kind of, you need to divide people a little bit.
00:34:26.540You need to, you need to polarize people in order to, to rile up your base.
00:34:36.160I mean, all it is right now is it's just this kind of, one thing that happened.
00:34:39.900And I think white males voted GOP like 65%, like nationally, just like some stupidly high margin.
00:34:46.860And, you know, for her whole country, basically.
00:34:49.280And the democratic, basically the democratic balancing act is their whole, their whole platform these days, or at least a media presence.
00:34:58.040It's just kind of this, this politics of resentment against white privilege or whatever else.
00:35:04.820But the problem is like, these people can still vote.
00:35:08.320And occasionally it just bleeds out into the, certainly in the media, that any election where, where white males or white people generally have an electoral impact is somehow automatically illegitimate.
00:35:21.700I think Amanda Marquette was basically saying something like that in, in Slate today.
00:35:25.780Like the revenge of the angry white male, as if like the real problem is that they're still allowed to vote.
00:35:30.760So, I mean, I think that, I mean, in the long run, in the long run, that is, in the long run, that is the problem.
00:35:38.860But what they're trying to do is, you know, in North Carolina, for example, I mean, it, it, if Tillis had lost, I mean, this would have been a big thing.
00:35:46.620And the fact that you didn't need an ID to, to vote, the fact that you had O'Keefe going in, James O'Keefe going in there showing, you know, voting 20 different times with all this kind of stuff.
00:35:57.620I mean, you got to imagine for every one of these things we find out about, there's like a hundred that we don't find out about.
00:36:03.260And, you know, every one person who does that undoes the vote of somebody else who obeys the law.
00:36:11.020So, I mean, at this point, the, the numbers game of American politics, the, just the very cynical head counting one tribe against the other tribe.
00:36:26.880And what's happening really, I mean, the critical thing about whether this will just be kind of a slow decline,
00:36:33.260of, of America from first world status, or whether you're going to see some kind of real shakeup in the years to come,
00:36:39.960like everybody on the right seems to predict, is whether whites start voting as a, the way, nationally, the way they do in the South.
00:36:50.400Where, you know, you'll still have people in the media and you'll still have the Lena Dunham's of the world, you know,
00:36:56.360campaigning against them and everything else.
00:36:58.240But when all is said and done, like the president of Singapore said, in multicultural societies, you don't vote your interest, you vote the group.
00:37:52.900I mean, if you, Lena Dunham is the greatest gift.
00:37:56.520For, for GOP, they just want to focus on this woman.
00:37:59.540Who, why, why do we, why are we thinking about this woman?
00:38:02.960Like, why, the more we think about her and criticize her and care about her stupid book, the more power she has.
00:38:10.920Just, I, I don't want, I don't want to have a life in which she takes up brain space.
00:38:16.380Anyway, they, they don't need to do it.
00:38:18.240They, they basically, they can, they have channeled this population successfully.
00:38:24.320And they've done it to, to a large extent through race baiting.
00:38:27.240I mean, I think it's just, the, the idea that you can, I don't think you can underestimate, uh, the degree to which the GOP race base, and, and the left are the only ones who, who point it out.
00:40:01.060And they're going to ride this horse, to mix a metaphor, until it drops.
00:40:06.040And, you know, if, if we're going to ever have an America that is based on European values and based on European traditions and so on and so forth,
00:40:15.460we, we have got to destroy the, the Republican Party.
00:43:39.200No, no, but, you know, no, I, I, again, I, I think it's a little bit of both.
00:43:44.460And I'm sure a lot of those Utahns, Mia Love, I'm sure she, she basically said all the right stuff.
00:43:50.600She was a down the line, said the kind of conservative talking points of the last 20 years.
00:43:55.760And, you know, and I think a lot of white Utahns kind of, they felt really, they had this gooey, sugary feeling in their little tummies after they left the voting booth.
00:44:07.540I just voted for a nice, good black woman.
00:44:10.860They, they felt, they felt morally righteous.
00:44:13.580When you see Twitter, it's, it's interesting how that is, where they, it's very aggressive, like throwing the pictures up and everything else.
00:44:24.120It's sort of like when you go to a, an evangelical Christian college.
00:44:28.700Back when I was working at, at Leadership Institute, when I go to Patrick Henry, when I go to Liberty, when I go to any of these places.
00:44:34.220The most racially integrated places in the country, the one place where you can literally say race really doesn't matter too much as far as how like ordinary people deal with each other, are in these evangelical Christian campuses.
00:44:47.740You see a lot more interracial dating.
00:44:49.560You see people sitting together, talking together, friends, you know.
00:44:52.780You don't see that at like the University of Michigan.
00:46:18.920But if you deal with the politicians, you deal with the activists, you deal with the type of person who, you know, defines their life by saying, I am a Republican Party activist, you actually are going to get a good bit of diversity in there.
00:46:31.040You actually, you actually are going to get a good spread of candidates.
00:46:33.800And because he wants to put up these people, just like any party does, it's not because they're necessarily more artificial than the Democrats or whatever else.
00:46:44.380The Democrats have their own little kind of quasi-affirmative action.
00:46:47.440They put Jim Webb up, you know, here's this Scotch-Irish guy who can appeal to the world whites, that kind of thing.
00:46:51.680They, they are going to have these candidates that they're going to put up.
00:46:58.320And, you know, the old joke about CPAC, what do you call the one black guy you see at CPAC?
00:47:05.680And that's, that's going to remain true for, it's going to remain more true as the decades go forward where I think the, the GOP electorate is just going to get whiter and whiter and whiter.
00:47:14.260Well, Kevin, should we put a bookmark in this conversation and come back to it?
00:47:21.960Or is there something we want to circle around?
00:47:23.800Before we go, let me, let me just get this, because you're, you're more tuned in to the immigration stuff than I am.
00:47:30.460Do you, do you think we're going to, in this window of the next, let's say the next three to maybe six months, you know, before everyone starts focusing on the presidential election, and before everything gets kind of set for, for that, do you, do you think we're going to see an executive amnesty?
00:47:53.100And you're not going to see the next 36 months, you'll see before the new year, if it's going to happen.
00:47:57.080Oh, you think it's going to happen really soon.
00:47:58.420The only, the only thing that, the only question I have is whether he's going to, he being the president, kind of lead the, makes the GOP come out with something.
00:48:13.020I mean, what he, what he's essentially going to do, and I'm sure he's already doing this, or at least he will after the Louisiana election gets settled, is he's going to put forward, this is what I'm going to do.
00:48:26.700This is the, the text of the executive, uh, amnesty for however many millions of people, however he chooses to define it.
00:48:33.980And the GOP is going to look at that and they're going to have the choice between either fighting that or coming back with a more limited amnesty.
00:48:42.740That will also be, you know, legal, that'll go through the Congress or wherever else.
00:48:47.380And then he'll be back, the ball will be back in Obama's court to decide whether, yes, I'm going to accept this or no, I'm going to go farther.
00:49:27.400Um, if Michelle wants to have a political career, I mean, you want to do it by, by setting up your, yourself as like the great, you know, continuing the great social justice crusade and whatever else.
00:49:38.160Uh, his, his replacement for Eric Holder at attorney general is, is much the same mold as everything else.
00:49:45.700So there's no sign to him backing down there.
00:49:57.820I mean, he's got, if he doesn't, if he doesn't do this, uh, he's going to have his own party sniping at him for the rest.
00:50:03.960Uh, that civil war, this is Gutierrez's phrase.
00:50:06.200You're going to have a civil war among Democrats and Obama's just not going to have anything to do because once you've lost the house and the Senate, I mean, in his words, I don't want to be president without the Senate.
00:50:17.500So, I mean, if Obama has one, uh, trait that's kind of defined the threat of life, that he just kind of jumps from one thing to another and doesn't stick with anything very long.
00:50:26.320He might do it out of like, uh, like Moadie even do it.
00:51:12.140Esoteric references to Dune while we talk about voting results.
00:51:17.060Uh, no, no, we, we should, we should do this again.
00:51:24.180Uh, Kevin, I definitely, I, I think we should, let's just put a bookmark in it.
00:51:28.120Cause I, I think there's more to discuss, but I think we've, uh, we, I think we've gotten a good 45 minutes in and I think that's a good place to stop.
00:51:50.460And I think also, you know, the next, if, if you are correct and you very well might be the next, uh, three months might be very interesting.
00:52:03.040Maybe also in a way, if, if Obama can take away that immigration issue, if he just forces it down their throat, maybe, maybe this will be a kind of opening for us to, to move on to something, you know, more, just to something bigger and more civilizational.
00:52:20.060Well, it's going to force the GOP, I mean, not to reopen it at the end, but I mean, once that you did see, uh, which we had neglected to mention is one thing that won a lot with a lot of these state things on the minimum wage.
00:52:34.180And if you're Obama, again, think of it from a completely cynical objective point of view, you do this immigration thing, you take that away.
00:52:42.800The GOP is propping at the mouth, but they're already like that.
00:52:45.420And then you start chipping away at their white support by going after white workers with things like minimum wage laws and all this kind of stuff.
00:52:54.640Now, of course, if you're going to have this immigration, you're screwing those people over anyway, but it's still going to be something to campaign on.
00:53:06.680It should also be noted in passing, uh, just for some of our things that, uh, here in Virginia where Gillespie lost, the reason he lost was a libertarian spoiler candidate.
00:53:14.860So, let it not be said that those, uh, third parties don't have an impact.