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Feb. 20, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:28
February 20, 2008, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Hang on a minute.
Cigar lighter wasn't attached.
Now we go.
Greetings, my friends, and welcome back.
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The Rush Limbaugh program, we are from the EIB Southern Command today at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
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I forgot.
Oh, bars.
There we go.
Sorry, didn't have cameras forgot to turn the bars off.
Thanks for reminding me, Brian.
I promise we had this guy, um, what was it?
Rick from Kansas City, who was the Huckabee guy.
He never got around to saying it's alchemy guy.
I remember the hockabee guy.
And he was he said he's agreed with Eagleberger that I am not the leader of the conservative movement, something I've never claimed to be in the first place.
There are intellectual conservatives inside the beltway who are all vying to be that.
Uh I've never claimed it and and don't seek it.
It's not the point, not the purpose here.
But anyway, Eagleberger, where was he?
Was on um DNC TV yesterday afternoon, uh, MSNBC and uh Andrea Mitchell was talking to Lawrence Eagleberger, former Secretary of State, good friend with Dr. Kissinger, and uh Andrew Mitchell said, What do you say to the conservatives who are really going after John McCain?
And by the way, we haven't gone after McCain in over a week on this program.
I don't know what's happening elsewhere, but but we haven't gone after McCain.
Pretty hot and heavy there for a while, but you know, things are what they are, and you move on, it is what it is.
Nevertheless, her question, what what do you say to the conservatives who are really going after McCain and saying he's not right wing enough?
I don't know who elected Rush Limbaugh or Hannity as the heads of this conservative movement.
They throw that word around as if it were theirs and theirs alone.
I thought I was a conservative, but that doesn't mean that I have to buy off on everything that these poo bars think that is what's necessary to be a conservative.
And in the end, from their point of view, at least, and certainly from mine, national security has to be a major consideration.
And how they can walk away from a McCain when they know perfectly well he is the only one of all of these candidates that has an experience in terms of national security.
They boggle my mind in terms of what it is they think they're doing.
The whole thing is so confusing to me and so illogical that I cannot understand what they have in their minds.
Well, let me help you, Dr. Eagleberger.
You don't know what we think we're doing.
You don't know.
You're confused, your mind is boggled.
You can't understand what we have in our minds.
Real simple.
We want to defeat liberals.
We want to win.
We don't want to become liberal like in order to win.
We want to win.
And we know how it's done.
It's been done in the past on numerous occasions, and we're not doing it the way it's been done in the past.
I want and I, you know, this leader of the conservative movement, nobody's suggesting you or anybody else, Dr. Eagleberger.
Uh, fall in line with what we're saying here.
By the way, how how large is Dr. Eagleberger's audience?
Well, he's asking who elected me.
Who elected him?
You know, these all of these guys that are running around and throwing these these shots uh uh aim my way and others are missing the target.
We're not the problem.
We are the solution.
And we are we are we're being treated in ways that that uh gonna make it really they want unity.
I mean, this is a strange way for these guys to go about it.
They need to be looking at Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton if they really are threatened here.
But one of the things that I'm I made mention of this in the first hour when analyzing where we are in the Democrat side of this, uh, and and just for the sake of discussion, although it's not the case now, we're we're gonna assume it's over and that the opponent is Obama.
What is McCain going to have to do, Dr. Eagleberger?
He's going to have to compare himself and contrast himself to Barack Obama or Hillary.
I don't care.
Take your pick, either one.
And it's going to be very difficult for him to do on some things.
On other things is not going to be hard.
But on some things, it's going to be very difficult for him to compare and contrast himself without being called a hypocrite, because if he starts if he goes into, you know, an assault on Obama on on a few specific things, uh, because Obama's too liberal or too pro-big government or what have you.
Obama's going to be able to come back.
Well, Senator McCain, I thought you were with us on that.
It's it's, you know, it's gonna it's gonna be a challenge for the McCain campaign to um to deal with this.
All this is about is winning.
This is this is this is about defeating liberalism.
Um this this Obama business.
You know, this is a this a clear-cut illustration of exactly why liberals need to be defeated.
And I'm talking about purely here in a political sense.
You know, this kind of movement that's based on cult-like status.
I mean, it Obama, remember what they said about Reagan in a Teflon president.
Obama's the same thing now.
You can't.
I mean, ever every every lob of criticism you throw at the guy bounces is right off backfires on whoever aims it, comes right back at them.
And all the criticism is doing is strengthening the bond between Obama's cultists and Obama.
And in the meantime, focusing on all that is obscuring the specifics of what an Obama presidency actually portends.
It portends none of this flowery vapid nothingness that gets people so worked up.
It is specific and it is leftist, it is socialist.
I mean, even uh uh Bob Samuelson in the Washington Post has uh has written about this today.
It is called the Obama delusion.
Let me just give you a pull quote here, what I would make a pull quote were I an editor.
The contrast between Obama's broad rhetoric and his narrow agenda is stark.
And yet the media, preoccupied with a political horse race, have treated his invocation of change as a serious idea rather than a shallow campaign slogan.
He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story.
He begins the piece this way.
Well, it's not hard to be dazzled by Barack Obama.
At the convention in TOF 2004, he visited with Newsweek reporters and editors, including me.
I came away deeply impressed with his intelligence, his forceful language, his apparent willingness to take positions that seem to rise above narrow partisanship.
Obama's become the Democrat presidential frontrunner precisely because countless millions have formed a similar opinion.
It is, I think, now mistaken, writes Mr. Samuelson.
As a journalist, I harbor serious doubt about each of the most likely nominees, but with Senators Clinton and McCain, feel like I'm dealing with known quantities.
They've been in the public arena for years.
Their views, values, temperaments have received enormous scrutiny.
By contrast, newcomer Obama is largely a stage presence defined mostly by his powerful rhetoric.
The trouble, at least for me, is the huge and deceptive gap between his captivating oratory and his actual views.
The subtext of Obama's campaign is that his own life narrative to become the first African American president, a huge milestone in the nation's journey from slavery, can serve as a metaphor for other political statements.
But on inspection, the metaphor is a mirage.
Repudiating racism is not a magic cure all for the nation's ills.
The task requires independent ideas, and Obama has few.
However, by his own moral standards, Obama fails.
Americans are tired of hearing promises made and ten-point plans proposed in the heat of a campaign only to have nothing change, he recently said.
Shortly thereafter, he outlined an economic plan of at least twelve points, among other things, would provide a $1,000 tax cut for most two family earners.
Uh two earner families, I'm sorry, create a $4,000 refundable tuition tax credit for every year of college, which is only going to cause tuition skyrocket, a little deal under the table between the libs and Congress and the Libs that run universities.
Expand the child care tax credit for people earning less than $50,000, double spending on quality after school programs, and enact an energy plan that would invest $150 billion in ten years to create a green energy sector.
And whatever one thinks of these ideas, they're standard.
They're standard goodie bag politics.
Something for everybody.
They're so similar to so many Clinton proposals that her campaign put out a news release accusing Obama of plagiarism.
A favorite Obama line is that he will tell the American people not just what they want to hear, but what we need to know.
Well, he hasn't done that so far.
Consider retiring baby boomers.
A truth telling Obama might say spending for retirees, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid is already nearly half the federal budget.
Unless we curb these costs, we're going to crush our kids with higher taxes.
Reflecting longer life expectancies.
We should gradually ri the look, I could go on reading this thing, but Samuelson's uh right right on the on the money.
Is that his is specifics?
Goody bag, I'm gonna give you this, I'm gonna give you this, I'm gonna make sure that doesn't happen.
Protect you from this, protect you from racism, protect you from being embarrassed, I'm gonna protect you from having your self-esteem crushed, I'm gonna do all these things.
And people, yeah, yeah, because they don't feel empowered to do them themselves for whatever uh reasons.
In in the in the meantime, uh all of these criticisms of Obama, speaking of Samuelson, but all these criticisms are simply strengthening the bond between these Obama cultists that you see on TV and Obama himself, because it doesn't matter what he says to them.
They don't even hear what he says.
In fact, if you listen to an Obama speech, if you actually take the time listen to it, it's possible your IQ would shrink by the time the speech were over.
I mean, you can feel like you're dumber because you said I just spent an hour here or 45, but what what what did I just hear?
You won't know.
And if you're actually paying attention, if you're not looking a speech for anything like that, then you walk away feeling like the greatest thing, and you have no clue why.
All you know is that you feel good and it doesn't matter, and anybody who makes you feel good, I don't care what they say about them, you're gonna love them.
And that's where Obama's positioned himself.
And he's done it with a guy named David Axerod.
I mean, when this all comes out, and I don't know if it's gonna be the Clintons are gonna do this, or if it's gonna have to be somebody like me, but the the the the real thing that needs to be looked at here is his authenticity, because the story coming up.
Some of these lines that Obama is uttering were uttered by John Edwards when he was running for vice president in 2004, because the same guy, David Axelrod, is in charge, was in charge of Edwards, is in charge of Obama, also was in charge of Devalpatrick, the governor of Massachusetts.
Now, what does that say?
Edwards is out articulating the same lines.
We can go back and look at them, veritably the same lines that Obama's using, and Edwards went nowhere.
And yet look where Obama is.
That's why this is the it's it's identity politics partially, but it's also this personality cult.
Uh, that is makes it in Edwards.
The lines are not what matters, folks.
So much it is who says them and how.
And this is why people are saying, is this a political movement?
Is this a presidential campaign, or is it a some inspirational tour led by Norman Vincent Peel?
Anyway, uh still have some audio soundbite left in your calls as well coming up now on EIB Extreme Profit Center timeout.
Uh be patient, my friends.
It won't be long.
We'll be right back.
Talent on loan from God.
Rush Limbaugh, middle of the week.
Wednesday, fastest three hours in media.
There are other things in the news.
There have been other things in the news for the last three weeks.
Other than the political races, but we've been preoccupied.
There are three things here I want to mention to you here before we get back to your phone calls.
A um Zogby Reuters poll released today, growing confidence in the future, and slightly warmer views of President Bush and the Congress.
Put Americans in a better mood this month.
The Reuters Zogby and how can this be?
Amidst the misery and the suffering.
The Reuters Zogby Index measures the mood of the country, rose sharply, unexpectedly, to 99.3 in February from last month's 94.2, putting it at the highest level since August.
You might be saying, Rush, it's only February 20th.
How can they say Well, it's a poll.
Don't ask.
You're not supposed to ask these questions.
Approval ratings for President Bush climbed to 34%, up from 31%.
Last month, positive ratings for Congress inched up 14% to 17%.
Bush doubles congressional popularity.
Oxford.
What was it that did it?
Well, let's see.
I didn't read the whole thing snertly.
I don't care what did it, because it I don't believe the country was in a depression in the first place.
No, it's not the stimulus bill.
Don't is it the stimulus bill?
Did you re- I didn't read the whole thing.
Oh, you want to know what it is.
Well, if you want to know what he's saying, well, hang on, let me scam this.
Concerns about personal finances, job security, safety, and the direction of the country all eased slightly in the last month, brightening the outlook for Americans who had slipped into a funk around the holidays.
There were some dark clouds, however, for those of you who like them.
For the first time, a majority of Americans, 54% expect a recession in the next.
Why?
Why do they extworks and the newspapers have been talking about a recession as though we're in one for two months already?
54% expect a recession, up from last month's 48%, as a housing downturn and credit crunch.
Take their tolls.
But despite worries about a recession, the number of Americans think the country is on the wrong track shrank to a still high 62% down from uh 68%.
Zogby said that people are adjusting their expectations.
They see a recession coming, but they still feel better about their future.
Must have polled listeners to this program.
I've been telling you people for 19 and a half years.
Let them have a recession, just don't participate.
You know, you don't have to get lemming-like or sheep like with all this.
This is self-fulfilling prophecy.
I still, I, you know, I I still sit here and I marvel, and I understand why.
I wish there were something that could be done to change attitudes in a mass way on this.
This is the greatest country in the history of civilization.
Our economy at its worst is the best in the world.
At our worst, when we're in a dip, there is more opportunity.
There is more excitement, there is more affluence and prosperity than anywhere else in the world.
For everybody, the opportunity at our worst.
Of course, everybody gets conditioned and most people haven't traveled to genuine areas of poverty and just absolute destitution.
And so the expectations measured against their own lives in this country.
And I'm not trying to be parent here and say, hey, you know, they're starving in China, eat everything on your plate, little kid.
Uh but it it all of these never-ending assaults on the decency and the goodness of this country offend the hell out of me.
Uh, and the fact that this never-ending assault obviously has an effect.
Uh, it can't, it can't help but have an effect when it's daily and numerous times a day.
Anyway, Oxford University.
Going to give researchers four million dollars to study why mankind embraces God.
You know, give me two million and I'll explain to you why liberals embrace Obama.
You know, what's the difference?
This you know, it reminds me.
I I remember um this is a long time ago.
This might have been when I was back in Kansas City.
No, Sacramento in the mid-80s.
And uh somebody in Congress came out with a report.
Do you believe that we are going to spend a million and a half dollars to understand why Eskimos swap wives?
And I remember saying, for half that.
You know, I'll blow the whistle on Citrus Heights, California.
Oxford to study faith in God.
Any of you people can tell them for five dollars why mankind believes in God.
The grant to the Ian Ramsey Center for Science and Religion will bring anthropologists, theologians, philosophers, and other academics together for three years to study whether beliefs in a divine being is a basic part Of man's makeup.
Hey, Oxford, let me just I'm yes.
You want to know why I'll tell you that too, but you just say four million dollars.
It's worthless study.
Thank you, and welcome back.
Rush Limbo is always having more fun than a human being.
Should be allowed to have doing.
When I was born to do, so are you.
I was born to host you.
We're born to listen.
All right, back to the phones.
We're gonna all sit, Illinois.
Uh Phil, uh, welcome to the program, sir.
How are you?
Fine, Rush, and uh, how are you?
Good.
I want to ask it really Alsett or is it Alton?
Oh, Al SIP.
Alson, all right.
A L S I P. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I gather that.
Uh Snerdley's experience, not knowing small towns in the Midwest.
I just I just wanted to uh to check.
Thanks for confirming that for me.
Well, first, uh mega iron range ditto.
Appreciate that.
And uh memory, sir, when uh maybe the professor is just testing us, but if I recall right, the girl that brought Bill Clinton to the dance was conservatism.
That's what he ran on.
Um how how do you mean that?
Well, if I recall right, uh he was uh well, you in particular, and I'm just a pupil, uh, were very upset by him stealing our issues.
Uh welfare reform, middle class tax cuts, and then he couldn't do them, and then uh Newt Gingrich and the boys held his feet to the fire on the welfare reform and he re-ran on that.
Uh so you're talking about 1996.
Yes, and before uh Well, but no, 1990, he didn't he didn't run on welfare reform in nineteen ninety.
He did run on a middle class tax cut, but uh he wasn't he wasn't making a big deal of it.
I don't I don't think no Clinton was running on the worst economy in the last fifty years.
He was trashing uh the U.S. economy.
One if you want to go back to 1992, and if you if you want to say that uh uh Clinton could owe a part of his election his success in 1992 to um uh conservatives, is that what you're saying?
So to conservatism.
Conservatism.
Yes, he was uh then if I recall right, he was the leader of uh Southern Democrat uh leadership committee.
Yeah, but all that was a sham.
Yeah, but they uh Clinton uh what here's I remember saying what I said Clinton has to get the vote.
So he can't he can't come across as the far left extremist that he is Hillary's gonna take care of that stuff.
Hillary can go out and talk to the groups and and represent that stuff.
Uh Bill has to get the vote, so he has to moderate somewhat.
Um but you you here we go again.
Snerdley, you keep throwing these people at me are gonna get me in trouble out there.
Thanks, uh thanks, Phil, for the phone call.
One of one of the problems in 1992, did we want to go back and relive this?
Does it have relevance to today?
You decide.
We had an incumbent president who had abandoned some conservative principles.
Uh read my lips, no new taxes.
We had a incumbent president who didn't seem interested in being re-elected until it was too late.
And let's not forget the little hand grenade with a bad haircut, Ross Perot was in there, and he split for a while.
The uh the uh anti-Clinton vote, conservative uh vote, uh whatever.
Uh, and and the enthusiasm ended up on the uh on the left, just as it appears with Clinton, just as it appears that there is more enthusiasm on the Democrat side uh right now in their voters than it is uh among Republican and conservative voters, but that's too soon to say whether that's gonna be a factor in the general election.
Phil, thanks.
Thanks again for the phone call.
Dave in uh in Lafayette, Indiana, nice to have you with us.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Uh, ten time caller dittoes to you.
Thank you.
Over the last 20 years, I've managed to call every couple of years.
But I called the poke the bear a little bit today, and I hope I don't upset you.
But last night I watched Obama's speech, what I call uh a free market marks Marxist speech, because it seemed to contradict each each comment he made the time before.
But what I was wondering last night is I I had I'd come to the Conclusion that not even listening to that speech could get me to vote for McCain.
I've never voted Republican because I've never found one to be conservative enough since Reagan and I was too young back then.
Wait a second.
Wait a second.
Who are you?
Are you a Democrat?
No, I'm not.
I I'm a recovering libertarian because I've realized over time reading about the libertarians that as far as foreign policy, they're pretty kooky.
And you and I had a conversation about four or five years ago, and you put it up on your website and said I will never vote for a loser third party, and I was giving you grief about it.
You might remember that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I'm trying to go back to what you said a minute.
You said you've never voted Republican.
No, I'm not.
And no matter what Obama says, even if he goes from Marxism to free marketism from one word to the next one in Cincinnati, you're you wouldn't vote for McCain.
I just can't get myself to do it because my vote is not supposed to be, and I've heard you say the same thing.
My vote is not supposed to be with a party, but with a principal.
And I just can't support him.
And I sit and listen to Obama last night, scared to death this guy might win, or maybe even worse, Hillary wins.
But even with that, I can't bring myself to vote for him because I think that if McLean, as our friend Mark calls him, if he wins, this trend toward leftward this leftward trend for the Republican candidates will only continue, aren't we just supporting another one to the left and then the next one to the left of McCain again?
Yeah, yeah.
See, this is there's half of what you just said isn't accurate.
Okay, what's that?
We're not gonna win.
Oh.
I did didn't I say if?
See, thank you.
Thank Snerdley, you know, you just you you keep stirring things up here.
There's Snur there is no we we are not gonna beat a Marxist, socialist, whatever you want to call them liberal, with somebody who is a little bit of that on some things.
We're not we're not gonna we're not gonna steal committed liberal Democrat votes from the Democrats.
Um and and i well if we do, if we do and expand our party that way, the party's gonna change forever.
But the dynamic is that we're not gonna win.
I'll t I'll tell you here's here's McCain's um uh best chance, Dave, and I I'm saving this for another day.
But this is a a uh a commentator at Rasmussen's website.
Vaporous Obama turns off many centrists.
The whole point of her her piece can be summed up in this little pool quote.
Centrists.
What is a centrist?
A centrist is a moderate.
What's a moderate?
Somebody didn't have an opinion.
Wait to a majority forms and says, I am for that.
But by definition, a moderate can't tell you what he thinks uh because he's too open-minded to have an opinion.
Uh moderates think that people with opinions are closed-minded and extreme and not open enough to uh alternative ideas.
Centrists generally do not find cults of personality entertaining.
By the way, the author here is Fromah Harrip.
Centrists generally don't find cults of personality entertaining.
The mass hypnosis reminds them of the mortgage frenzy.
All these people buying into a dream and not caring about the fine print.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, is giving them a choice.
This is despite the best efforts of its right wing to pick a candidate against who many Democrat would be better.
And the more the radicals beat up on the Arizona Senator, the more he looks like a contender to moderate Democrats.
What Democrats must understand is that their moderates now have another candidate to consider, and this slice of the electorate is big enough and grumpy enough to swing a general election to John McCain.
So what this babe is saying here, Fromo Harrip is saying that the moderates and the centrists isn't amazing what these people become.
Now I know this is a Rasmussen poll site.
But what uh moderates can become a vessel for whatever you want them to be when you're in politics, because we've we've raised these moderates and independents up uh to a mythological status that it is only they who determine who wins presidential elections.
It's only them.
And this stands things on its head.
But this is the conventional wisdom of inside the beltway politics.
And the Zogby or the Rasmussen people here are saying that moderates are really turned off by this Obama show that's going on out there, and they're not going to vote For Obama no matter what.
Even these Democrat moderates are not going to vote for Obama.
But they do have a candidate now.
And that's McCain.
So what happens if that turns out to be the By the way, the national polls do not show this.
What are you frowning about in there?
Are you upset because I excoriated you publicly?
What are you?
What he?
McCain?
We've been talking about it all day.
Have you seen the polls?
Have you seen the poll Have you seen the I know it's only February?
Sterley says he can't believe that I said McCain is not going to win.
Uh if if the election were today, and it's not, of course, do you think he would?
Not today.
I know I certainly is living in hope in there, folks.
Um, the the the the point here is is that let's let's say this is true.
Let's say that these moderate Democrats are not on the Obama show.
They're not digging it, they don't want any part of it, and McCain's their guy.
Okay, so Democrat moders coming over.
What are they coming over for us?
Or are they escaping the Obama bandwagon?
Uh but Rush, but Rush, isn't this good?
Isn't this good for Democrat moderates to become Republicans?
Uh, I guess.
I mean, if it's got some substance behind it, if there's if they're actually joining us, because there's some things about our party that they like.
But if we have adjusted their part or our party for them so that they like it, uh, and if they're only fleeing Obama because they don't like Obama and they don't like cults, uh, then it's a temporary thing.
But anyway, that's that's one person's recipe for how McCain can win.
Anyway, I'm up against it here on a break, and I got to take a timeout.
We'll do that and be back and continue right after this.
Don't go away.
That's what I've been telling you.
He's a blank canvas.
You can make him anything you want him to be.
If you want to say Obama's a virgin, he's a virgin.
If you want to say Obama's clean and pure as wind driven snow because he hadn't been in politics long enough to be corrupted, but you can say that.
Absolutely.
All right, uh, let's see.
Uh audio soundbite number 18.
As you know, Michelle Obama.
Got some people riled up with her statement that for the first time in her life she's proud of her country.
Her husband Barack Obama, and by the way, have you noticed have you noticed the difference in those two when they speak?
I mean, she loaded for bear.
She's sometimes angry.
I mean, she's not she's saying nothing along the lines of what Barack is saying at all.
And that's because Axlrod is not writing her speeches.
Well, you just hang on.
If you if you if you think that I'm hang on, I want to play the bite, though.
He's on the radio in San Antonio today, W O A I, talking to the host Jim Forsyth, who said your wonderful wife hitting the campaign trail.
She'd been quoted, for the first time in my life, I'm proud of America.
Why why is it, sir, that she hadn't been proud of America before?
And is this the first time you've been proud of America?
What she meant was this is the first time that she's been proud of the politics of America because she's pretty cynical about the political process.
She didn't say that.
She's not alone.
But she's been seeing people participate and get involved in record numbers, and that's maybe a deal.
This is why I think a lot of people get turned off of politics, because you know, a statement's made, and people try to take it out of context and create a big deal out of it, and that's not at all what she meant.
Oh, come on.
This is why people get turned off to politics.
This is why people get turned off to people.
She said for the first time in her life, after going to Harvard and all these things, living in a Chicago suburbs or wherever she lives.
They're millionaires out there.
This is the first time in her life she's been proud.
He's the one added words and changed the context of her comment.
But see, all I'm doing now is cementing the bond that uh Obama's supporters have.
You've got to be very careful how you launch into this criticism.
Maybe I may, you know, maybe I should seriously endorse Obama.
I mean, just well, that's just to see what would happen to some of his supporters.
You know, take advantage of liberal disgust with me.
At any rate, I mentioned earlier that some of these things Obama is saying have been repeated prior, four years prior by the Breck girl.
John Edwards, because the same guy ran Edwards' campaign, David Axelrod ran Deval Patrick's campaign for Governor Massachusetts David Axelrod, who is running Obama's campaign, David Axelrod.
Here are some samples.
Uh this is uh Edwards, as quoted by Sasha Issenberg.
Obama borrows from Edwards, the Boston Globe's political intelligence or blog on January 5th.
I haven't spent most of my life in politics, but I've spent enough time in Washington to know how much we need to change it.
Obama.
I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington, but I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.
Edwards.
Hard work should be valued in this country, so we're going to reward work, not just wealth.
That was Edwards, July 28th, talking to a Democrat National Convention in 04.
Obama.
We shouldn't just be respecting wealth in this country.
We should be respecting work.
Edwards, again from the Democrat National Convention.
Reject the tired old, hateful negative politics of the past.
Embrace the politics of hope.
The American people, you can reject the tired old, hateful negative politics of the past, and instead you can embrace the politics of hope, the politics of what's possible, because this is America where everything's possible.
John Edwards, Democrat Convention, 2004.
Sound familiar.
And this is uh from Charles Babbington, by the way, the Associated Press.
Democrat Barack Obama said Sunday, it's difficult to break out of the politics of the past when the country was badly divided and Democrats lost control of Congress.
So uh even even Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, back in August said this.
You listen to the language of what people say, particularly Obama, who seems to be using a lot of John's 2004 language, which is maybe not surprising since one of his speech writers was one of our speech writers.
His media guy was our media guy.
These people know John's mantra well as anybody could know it.
They've moved from hope is on the way to the audacity of hope.
I'm constantly hearing things in a familiar tone.
The Brett Girl's wife Elizabeth.
And that was last August 2007.
So none of this the importance of this is two things.
It means that Obama is not, perhaps not authentic.
It also means that the people don't care who says that.
Well, I'll be it it's not the words that are that are resonating here, it's who's saying them.
Uh if Edwards was saying many of these same things, and he was.
He didn't catch fire.
There weren't people, you know, fainting at Edwards rallies.
You know, women weren't thinking of throwing their bras at John Edwards.
You didn't need Gurney's to take the fainted out of the and there certainly weren't 20,000 people at a time lining up to hear John Edwards.
But all these things are true of Obama, which means it's a it's a uh a cult of personality, among other things.
But it's the the authenticity thing is is what represents the um uh I think the biggest target for people who want to start taking uh pokes at Obama is gonna be tough, though, because anybody who starts criticizing him is gonna have to be prepared for the fact that they're only doing it because they're racist.
All right, a brief timeout.
We'll come back and close it out right after this, folks.
Sit tight.
L Rushbow back before you know it.
So basically what we have here is this media guy, David Axlrod, the puppet master.
He presses a button on his computer, an old speech pops out, hands it to his various clients, Edwards, Obama, whoever, uh, sort of like the college student selling his term paper to other students.
That is what's happening.
And the difference is Edwards couldn't sell this stuff.
Uh Obama is.
Uh it's the authenticity of this that's probably going to be the focus down the road of his opponents.
See you tomorrow, folks.
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