On MSNBC, after the State of the Union, asked whether there should be a social safety net:
"No. It's not in the Constitution."
On ABC News after voting for the House GOP's funding bill—the one about three times larger than the compromise that passed:
"Keep cutting, baby."
How come he's on TV more than any other freshman?
"I think it goes to this," he says. "A big freshman class comes to D.C., and here you've got one guy that said a lot of things during the campaign and he's doing everything he said. He's doing things that strike some people as unusual. Sleeps in the office. Turns down health benefits. Turns down pension benefits. Believes in term limits. Comes home all the time, holds more town halls than anybody. And then he's not at all afraid to talk about these things he believes in. So he's not afraid to go on MSNBC or CNN and get into a good jostling." He racks his brain for any more reasons he's on TV. "I mean, I'm a white male freshman congressman. There are a lot of those! I don't know."
If it seems like Joe Walsh is nothing more than a walking GOP talking point, that's his entire schtick. That's why he's been on TV weekly at this point, because he feels part of his job as a Congressman is to go on TV and spout the party line: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are welfare, and they're not promised to anyone. I'm here to cut trillions from government. Oh, but the real meat here is Walsh's opinion of the President.
If Walsh gets a few more lucky breaks, and he gets a district to campaign in next year, he'll have to confront another problem. President Obama will be on the ticket. Obama has never won less than a landslide in Illinois. He's always carried the Chicago suburbs. I ask Walsh why he thinks that's true.
"Look," he says, "I don't think this is complicated. He doesn't really have a history. I say all of this respectfully—he is the least well-known guy we have ever put in the presidency, and there's no one even close. He's probably got easily the lightest résumé of anybody we've elected."
Yes, despite the largest opposition research effort in political history, first by Hillary Clinton, then by the Republicans, an opposition research effort that laid to bare everyone he had ever talked to as "proof" he was a terrorist sympathizer and secret Kenyan communist, his life dissected literally from birth to the present moment, he's the "least well known guy we have ever put in the presidency."
That's patently false, of course. But why does Joe Walsh keep this facade that Obama is an unknown running? He has to to justify his next theory.
Walsh leans forward and taps me on the knee with a bumper sticker.
"Why was he elected? Again, it comes back to who he was. He was black, he was historic. And there's nothing racist about this. It is what it is. If he had been a dynamic, white, state senator elected to Congress he wouldn't have gotten in the game this fast. This is what made him different. That, combined with the fact that your profession"—another friendly tap of the bumper sticker—"not you, but your profession, was just absolutely compliant. They made up their minds early that they were in love with him. They were in love with him because they thought he was a good liberal guy and they were in love with him because he pushed that magical button: a black man who was articulate, liberal, the whole white guilt, all of that."
The only reason Barack Obama got elected was because of massive white liberal guilt and massive anti-white racism in America. Everyone who voted for him must be a racist, because we know "nothing about him. " His election was 100% the product of massive racism plied upon the American public by the evil liberal media. Do you see why Walsh needs the "mystery man" theory on the President now?
It's jarring to hear a congressman say that, but there are a lot of people who agree with him. Walsh has a gift for saying out loud things that many Republicans believe but won't say, and he says them because he's worried. He'd been hoping Mitch Daniels got into the race. He wanted someone who offered voters the complete opposite of what they'd gotten from Obama.
"I pity the candidate running against him, because it will continue," he says. "That profession will protect him, and they will crucify whoever the Republican nominee is."
No wonder Joe Walsh is on TV all the time. And if this sounds familiar, it's exactly what Shelby Steele said in the Wall Street Journal not more than a few days ago. And yes, Republicans are now officially playing the race card against Obama in 2012.
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