Karl Rove Nukes Josh Hawley’s Anti-Conservative Populism: Wants to Give His ‘Victim’ Constituents ‘Everything For Free’
Former Bush White House aide and current Fox News contributor, Karl Rove, joined the Wall Street Journal’s All Things with Kim Strassel podcast this week and pulled no punches in hammering the populists inside the GOP – including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO).
Host Kim Strassel, a columnist and member of the Journal’s editorial board, asked Rove, “Maybe you can explain something to me.”
“When you hear Senator Josh Hawley, obviously, he’s been a big critic of making any changes to Medicaid. He’s said that publicly, he’s pushing back against members of his own caucus in the Senate, and his arguments … And he’s been voicing these even more loudly recently as, ‘Any cuts to Medicaid are dumb.’ And behind this argument is, ‘Our new coalition includes people who are on Medicaid, and so we can no longer afford to cut it in any way.’ Now, I take some issue because I actually disagree,” Strassel continued, asking:
The way he’s framing this is the way Democrats would frame it, that you are cutting it rather than that you are reforming it in a way that able-bodied adults are no longer getting a program that was never meant for them in the first place. But what do you make of this argument, that some in the Republican party have, that given that they’re looking for new voters and that the Republicans become more of a working class party, you can’t afford to touch any of these entitlements anymore?
“Well, first of all, the ultimate responsibility to all Americans is to make certain that our country is prosperous and that our fiscal house is in order. It irritated the heck out of me when the Biden White House said, ‘We’re going to take a power that we do not have, the ability to wipe out the assets that are held by the American people in the form of the student loans that we’re supposed to get repaid, our government is supposed to get repaid on. We’re going to wipe those out because we’re worried about getting votes from the young voters,'” replied Rove.
Strassel agreed, “Right.”
“And so bread and circuses. Is this Rome again? Do we have this Caesar trying to appease the populace by giving them bread and circuses? And Bernie Sanders says this, “We can’t take anybody who’s on any one of these programs and toss them off even if they are illegal aliens, or even if they are able-bodied, or even if they are on there because of fraud.” Josh Hawley, please. And if you want to say, “I’m doing this because I think the American people and the Missourians that I represent who are on Medicaid, I don’t care whether they’re illegal or not, I don’t care whether they’re able-bodied or not, I don’t care if they’re covered by the law or not, they are my people.” Now, I read a book once. It was called Hillbilly Elegy,” Rove added, referring to Vice President JD Vance’s memoir.
“And it said that the Appalachian region and great parts of the Midwest, it had suffered because of the decline of the culture of personal responsibility and an understanding that work is liberating and work rises you up. Instead, people had fallen into a dependency on government, and now we have sort of the new thing is if you’re a populist, you’ve got to now turn that around to ‘all those people are victims,'” Rove continued, adding:
They’re victims of corporations, who have somehow ravaged their lives, and we’ve got to take care of them by giving them everything free. Forget it. That’s not what those people want, and it’s not what God decided that He wants them to be. It’s what they have decided themselves that they want to be. We need to work as a country on reigniting a culture of personal responsibility and saying, “We, as a country, are going to be compassionate to those who need our help, but if you’re able-bodied, by God, you got to take care of yourself, and we’ll help you, but we’re not going to give you lots of free things.”
Listen to the full conversation here.
