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March 21, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:19
March 21, 2008, Friday, Hour #2
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And greetings once again to you.
Welcome if you're just joining us.
It's the Rush Limbaugh Program.
This is the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, and it is Friday.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
Thank you.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
No, no, no, no.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That was fine.
Thank you so much.
Really, really appreciate it.
For those of you on hold, please stay there.
We're on hold because we want to talk to you.
We're going to be talking for the next couple minutes with Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter about his new book, Never Give In, Battling Cancer in the Senate.
Senator Specter, welcome to the program.
It's nice to have you back with us here.
Rush, thank you very much for the invitation.
A great pleasure to talk to you and your listeners.
Thanks.
The title of the book, Never Give In, Battling Cancer in the Senate.
You were battling more than cancer in the Senate.
The book, I've read the summary of the book, and it's 11 or 14 pages here.
It is incredibly detailed about the process you went through when you were diagnosed.
I think it was lymph cancer.
But that was not the first health crisis you've had.
You had a brain tumor.
Am I correct about that?
Rush, that's right.
I had a brain tumor.
A doctor gave me three to six weeks to live once.
I was really shocked, and I sort of blurted out in the chain of consciousness.
Happened back in June of 93.
I said, oh, my, my wife and I were going to go away for the weekend to celebrate our anniversary.
And the doctor looked at me and said, go and have a good time, believe it or not.
And I thought to myself, Rush, this guy must be crazy.
I said, give me my films.
I'm going to see another doctor.
And I had it removed, and it was benign.
And I found out that you couldn't tell for sure until you took it out, froze it, sliced it down, and looked at it under a microscope.
So that in telling people this story in my book, Never Give In, I want them to know that they sometimes need to get a second opinion and not lose hope until they do so.
What year was the brain tumor?
That was 1993.
1993.
Yep.
And here we are 15 years later.
You were given three to six weeks.
When was the lymph cancer discovered?
It was discovered mid-February of 2005.
2000.
Now, that was the same year that Peter Jennings was discussed, diagnosed with lung cancer.
And he was going through cancer treatment, chemotherapy, at the same time you were.
And I remember Senator Spector once he made his appearance announcing to his audience on World News tonight that he had been diagnosed and that he was undergoing treatment.
We didn't know at the time what stage his lung cancer was, but we knew he was going to be getting treatment for it.
And he assured the audience he'd be in when he could.
But we never saw him again.
His disease was devastating.
But during the period of time, there were people, Ted Coppel, friends of his, that went to speak to him.
And some would come out and quote him and said that he had so much admiration for you because you were going through chemo at the same time and you were at work every day and he didn't understand how you could do it.
Well, Rush, I wrote him a note and told him that I was staying on the job and tough as it was to drag myself out of bed, I was doing it.
And I urged him to do the same thing.
And he put on his website a thanks for notes that he'd gotten and mentioned me and said that he tried my approach, but he simply couldn't do it.
So he had a tougher time.
But I had written to him and he was a courageous fellow.
My mother had brain cancer, and she was on chemo, and it was debilitating for her, too, which is one of the reasons why the subject of your book fascinates me.
Would you I want people to when you're in the midst of your treatment, you have lost all your hair, you're bald and you're in the midst of probably what's the worst time in your chemotherapy, and yet you are at work every day, and you're at work in the Senate where a lot of things are going on.
You are a member of the Judiciary Committee, plus other committees that you're on.
Would you take people through, because you want to inspire people with this book and tell them to hang in that a mental attitude is as important here as getting proper medical treatment.
Yeah, that's right, Rush.
I want them to know that it can be done.
I know that there are some limits as to what people can do physically, but when it comes to determination and when it comes to a mindset, I think that a lot can be done if you just are determined to do it.
And you are right.
I was chairing the Judiciary Committee, and we had really tough confirmation hearings.
Take the confirmation hearing of Justice Alito, for example.
I had a real battle with Senator Kennedy, right in the middle of it.
It was a day when I wasn't feeling so hot, which was most days.
And Kennedy interrupted the questioning, addressed me as chairman, and said, Mr. Chairman, I move we go into executive session to get a subpoena for the records of Alito with respect to the concerned alumni of Princeton.
That was a group which was a little tough on minorities and women.
And I looked at Kennedy and I said, well, Senator Kennedy, if you really were sincere about that, why did you wait to make a grandstand play on national television?
Why didn't you mention it when we were talking in the hall a few minutes ago?
Or later, as I would joke about it, in the Senate gym.
But, of course, Kennedy hadn't been in the Senate gym since the Johnson administration.
Well, but this is the point.
You're in the midst, and at that point, you're probably at the worst of the chemo.
You had your wits.
You had your sense of purpose about you.
You were able to muster enough energy.
Would you please, I'm just curious about this myself because I saw my mother and I've seen a lot of people.
They wake up in the morning and they just feel so bad physically, they just don't even want to get out of bed.
You got out of bed every day.
What time did you get out of bed?
What time did you get to the Senate?
How long were you there?
When did you get home?
How much sleep a night did you get to?
Well, I'll answer all your questions.
I've been getting up for a long time at 5.15 to play squash, and I got an automatic alarm clock, which means I've got to go to bed early.
But I'd get up and I'd really drag myself to the squash court.
And sometimes I couldn't play more than a couple games.
Usually I'd play five or six before, but a couple.
Then I'd really drag myself through a shower, go to the office, and have some meetings and maybe a hearing, and I'd try to duck out mid-morning and take a nap.
And when the votes would come, I'd have an office close to the floor, a so-called hideaway.
I'd go vote and come back and do as much resting as I could.
Then mid-afternoon, I'd take another nap.
And I had meetings and I had hearings.
We had a lot of confirmations.
We confirmed Bill Pryor and Janice Rogers Brown and some others.
And I try to get home early in the evening and be in bed by 8.30 so I could get sleep from 8.30 to 5.30 and get up and start and do it all over again.
Frankly, I'm amazed.
There are days, Senator, I have a cold and can't do all that.
I don't want to do all that.
I must mush through it.
But a cold is not chemotherapy.
I've never experienced chemotherapy, so I don't know.
I've seen it in others, but I don't know what other than the nausea and the hair loss.
I don't know what it feels like.
Well, it's very debilitating.
You get it, and you're sort of in a stupor.
And you get it all.
I got it on Friday afternoon, Friday, so that I could have a little recuperation time in the next 48 hours.
And then I wouldn't take the train.
I was also with my immune system down.
I would be driven.
And I'd leave my house early in the morning, about 7, drive to Washington.
Fortunately, I'm close, get there about 9.45 and take a nap.
And you just don't, you feel like doing absolutely nothing.
But you know with a little experience that if you stay in bed, you're going to feel worse.
And if you get up, when you have as tough a job as I did, candidly, Kennedy was a great distraction.
And I wasn't thinking about myself.
I was thinking about how to deal with the Alito confirmation.
Well, that's key, isn't it?
Because that took your mind off your suffering.
Right.
It's good to be busy so you don't think about, frankly, how lousy you feel.
The Alito hearings, those were filled with fireworks.
Mrs. Alito running out in tears over some of the, I think it was Senator Leahy had made some comments.
And you were chairing those committee hearings.
And I remember people were applauding your work then, knew that you were suffering, knew that you were in the midst of chemotherapy.
How long were you being treated, and how long did it take from the time you discovered you had lymph cancer until they told you that either you're cured or information or whatever your current condition is?
Well, just another word about Alito.
They were trying to get enough traction, Rush, to filibuster.
They felt with the Supreme Court nomination, Kennedy felt he couldn't filibuster unless he got some traction.
And if they got him pegged as a member of the concerned alumni of Princeton, they thought they could do it.
They knew we didn't have 60 votes.
We ended up with 58, and they knew we had more than 50.
So they were trying to get traction.
But to answer your question directly, I was diagnosed mid-February, and I took chemotherapy until near the end of July.
And on part of those days, right when I was in the middle of the worst of it, we were having meetings with the president on scheduling Chief Justice Roberts.
And then when the Roberts hearings were on, I had almost no hair.
And when Alito came up a couple months later, I had a little bit of hair.
The picture in the book of you with the president when you have no hair, was that the meeting on Roberts that you're referring to?
That's it.
That's the meeting on July 21st.
Kind of an interesting picture, Rush, as you can see from the picture of the President's body language.
I sort of joke about it and think that the President might have been thinking, well, I got to shake Arlen Specter's hand.
He's the chairman.
But they say it's not contagious, but who knows?
The way he's, as you see, is sort of leaning the other way.
But President and I have gotten to be good friends over the years.
He's come to Pennsylvania a lot, and when he comes, he likes to talk.
He invites me to the car and the plane.
And he wanted the Roberts hearings finished.
He wanted them started in August.
And I had to tell him, I said, Mr. President, you're lucky you've never been a senator.
If you bring people back in August, they're going to be in a foul mood.
I need to get Roberts confirmed.
And after we followed my ideas, he was very pleased.
Senator Specter, we've got to take a brief commercial timeout.
We will continue when we come back.
Senator Arlen Specter, and his book is Never Give In, Battling Cancer in the Senate.
Stay with us, folks.
We are back, Rush Lindbaugh, The Excellence in Broadcasting Network, and we are talking with Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, his book, Never Give In, Battling Cancer in the Senate.
Senator, one more question about this.
In our remaining few minutes, I want to touch on just two other things involving your present business.
You heard from people who have been inspired by your message in the book or people that you met while you were getting treatment who were having a tougher time than you did and were inspired by what you went through and did.
Rush, I've heard from quite a few people just like that, and very gratifying, telling me that they were very pleased to see what I was doing, and they were fighting harder themselves.
One incident involved a good friend of mine, the husband of one of Joan, my wife's schoolgirlfriends, Marvin Park, lives out in Southern California now, and he has lymphoma.
And he became very dejected, very morose, wouldn't get out of bed, didn't pay any attention to his dog, which he loved dearly.
And we sent him an advanced copy of the book.
And he read it, and a few days later, his wife, Harriet, called Joan and said, Marvin read Arlen's book.
And he said, if Arlen Specter can do it, so can I.
He said, get me my clothes.
He got dressed.
He walked the dog and he got out of bed for the first time in weeks.
And physically, he was the same guy before he read the book that he was after he read the book.
But the example and the personal touch led him to say, well, if Arlen can do it, so can I.
And he got out.
That's exactly where purpose in writing the book that has to be heartwarming for you.
Well, it really is, Rush.
When you're somewhat in the public eye and people know what you're doing, especially because I had all the exposure during the Roberts and Alito hearings, I wanted to tell the story.
It's a little more open, frankly, than I feel comfortable doing, but it doesn't have any real meaning or impact if you don't let it all hang out there.
So when I hear about people responding to it and finding it a little easier to cope, that's very gratifying.
A couple other things here before we go, and I've got roughly four and a half, five minutes.
What's the status of important judicial confirmations on nominations sent up by President Bush?
I know that there are very few that happened during the final year of a two-term president.
Where are we, say, compared to the number of judges you Republicans confirmed for President Clinton in his final year?
Well, we're way behind for President Bush.
And the last two years of Clinton, he confirmed we've confirmed 15 circuit judges and for President Bush only six.
On district judges, the last two years for Clinton, 54, and the last up till now, only 37.
So we've got a long way to go.
Rush, we haven't had one single federal judge confirmed in 2008.
And we had a hearing, we didn't have a hearing on a circuit judge since between September of 2007 and late February 2008.
And We're reviewing our options now to see if we can find some way to exert enough pressure to get a little fairness here.
Who leads that?
Is it you because you're on judiciary?
Is it Senator McConnell?
And who do you talk to?
Pat Leahy, or do you talk to Harry Reid?
All of the above.
I've taken the lead on it, and I wrote Senator Leahy a very tough lawyer letter a couple of weeks ago and went to the floor and laid it on the line.
And I've talked to Senator McConnell, the leader, about our options, and I've brought it up with my colleagues.
We have lunch on Tuesday, and I even talked to Senator, well, I've talked to Senator Leigh about it a lot, and I've talked to Senator Reed about it.
But it's up to me to take the lead and to be backed up by Mitch McConnell and then to be backed up by the caucus.
And as I say, we're weighing very heavily now what we may be able to do.
I don't want to start something, Rush, unless I'm prepared to go through it.
Phil Graham had a great statement.
He said, never take a hostage.
You're not prepared to shoot.
Great.
It is.
It is.
Oh, that's pretty descriptive of what you face.
Final question is: I'm dealing with just a couple of minutes here.
A lot of football fans in this audience.
Since the Super Bowl, we've heard very little about this guy in Hawaii, Matt Walsh, that claims to have videotape of the New England Patriots and the St. Louis Rams walkthrough the Saturday before their Super Bowl.
What's the status of that?
Well, the status of it is that there has been an exchange of correspondence between Walsh's lawyers and the NFL lawyers.
I've seen the letters.
Walsh's lawyer let me see them on a promise of confidentiality.
And I believe an objective and fair reading of those letters is that the NFL is discouraging Walsh from coming forward.
Really?
Because their statements are just the exact opposite.
Well, the NFL says they're trying to encourage him.
And I issued the challenge to the commissioner a couple of Saturdays ago, and they put out a Sunday release that they were making substantial progress.
Well, we've had almost two weeks since that Sunday release, and nothing has happened.
And I believe those, listen, I think the NFL has a duty of integrity.
They have an antitrust exemption, which gives them a preferred position.
They are role models.
If you can cheat in the FNL, you can cheat in college or high school or your sixth-grade math test.
And I think ultimately, Rush, if we get enough fire under it, they're going to have to show those letters.
And when they do, they're going to have to change their tune and let Walsh testify because those reports are looking pretty strong that there was a filming for the 2002 Super Bowl.
Senator, 10 seconds, enough time to thank you for your appearance here today.
Congratulations on your book.
It's extremely well done.
And congratulations on your recovery from the disease.
Thank you very much for your time today.
Great talking, Rush.
Thank you.
You bet.
Oh, yes, my friends.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Operation Chaos.
New York Governor David Patterson admitted yesterday that he may have improperly billed his campaign for at least one hotel tryst with his girlfriend.
We are getting close to needing a new governor in New York again after this guy's only been there.
This is his first week, right?
The Hotel Trist apparently listed his constituent services.
New York Daily News Review found that in a handful of other campaign expenditures, David Patterson may have used campaign funds to cover personal expenses and misstated their purpose in public disclosure for them.
Know what these people, these Democrats are turning practically everything they do into a joke.
And this Obama stuff, that stuff is serious.
This, you know, opening these race wounds like this, taking us back 30, 40 years, making it look like no progress has been made.
What Barack Obama has done, I'm going to say something here that might offend, or not offend, but might make some uncomfortable.
But it is clear to me that there has been a major transformation in Senator Obama.
And it is this.
Up until the videos of the right Reverend Wright showed up, Barack Obama had succeeded in transcending race.
And there were a lot of people on the Republican side, too, who felt really good about the guy.
He was smart, well-spoken.
He was competent.
He was able to excite crowds.
He looked young and fresh and new.
And furthermore, he was black, but it didn't matter to him.
He transcended race.
Then the Reverend Wright stuff hits.
And that's, I mean, there's no escaping this.
I don't care what kind of speech you make.
With average Americans, forget the drive-bys, with average Americans, there's no escaping that.
There's no escaping what people heard Reverend Wright said.
And if, as I have heard some drive-by media analysts say, if most white people in America were shocked at Reverend Wright, when we are told that Reverend Wright's not that uncommon in America in terms of black churches, and what he said is not that uncommon in terms of what many black Americans believe, white America shocked, thought so much more progress had been made on this.
And so Obama, in dealing with this, has thrown his white grandmother under the bus and then yesterday drove the bus backwards and ran over her where he threw her under the bus by calling her a typical white woman.
So all typical typical white, what?
Typical white, no typical white woman, white person, whatever, typical white person.
And now it is clear, and this is the stuff, this part that might bother some of you, it is clear that Senator Obama has disowned his white half.
That he's decided he's got to go all in on the black side.
And therefore, I think I saw this endorsement, Bill Richardson.
Grab soundbite 22.
Bill Richardson showing up with goatee and a dangling mustache, like Fu Manchu with the beer with a little goatee there.
And that's not by accident, ladies and gentlemen.
You know, there's a big argument between the Hispanic community, black community, over who is the official American minority.
Because the official American minority gets the goodies.
And so there's animosity.
And I'm thinking we might be looking at the Democrat ticket here.
And what little I was able to listen to, because the commercial breaks everything.
Richardson was on fire.
Here is the actual endorsement that we got today of Obama from Bill Richardson.
Barack Obama, you're a leader who has shown courage, judgment, and wisdom throughout the years.
You understand the security challenges of the 21st century.
And you will be an outstanding commander-in-chief.
Above all, you will be a president who brings this nation together and restores American global leadership.
Your candidacy, and this is an expression of your candidacy, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our nation.
And you are a once-in-a-lifetime leader.
You make every American proud to be an American.
And I am very proud today to endorse your candidacy for closing.
Now, as I said earlier, there have never been any tell-all books on the Clinton administration from members of it.
But I'll tell you, a lot of Clinton people, ex-Clinton people, are certainly endorsing the anti-Clinton.
I mean, they run from him in droves here.
Not all of them, but a lot of them are.
Well, I don't know.
Richardson might have been holding out to endorse whoever would make him VP.
And the Clinton campaign might have said, sorry, bud's not you.
Obama might have said, well, you're in the running and you're in the top tier.
I don't know if they've made a deal yet, but I just, I thought, because Richardson was on fire and Obama looked really beat down.
He was hang dog.
His head was hanging.
He laughed a couple times toward the end of Richardson's speech.
Richardson was the one out there yelling and screaming and all animated and everything.
So it's going to be interesting that I, but clearly now, the original initial attraction to Obama is gone and it is his doing.
And now he's had to shift gears.
One of the best things I may have ever read on race was posted yesterday at theamericanthinker.com by a contributor there by the name of Ed Cates, K-A-I-T-Z.
And it's entitled Obama's Anger.
Let me read you some excerpts of this.
Back in the late 1980s, I was on a plane flying out of New Orleans.
I was sitting next to me was a rather interesting and, according to Barack Obama, unusual black man.
Friendly, gregarious, and wise beyond his years, we immediately hit it off.
I'd been working on Vietnamese commercial fishing boats for a few years in southern Louisiana.
The boats were owned by the recent wave of Vietnamese refugees who flooded into the familiar tropical environment after the war.
Floating in calm seas out in the middle of Gulf of Mexico, I would hear tearful songs and tales from ex-paratroopers about losing brothers, sisters, parents, children, lovers, and beautiful Vietnam itself to the communists.
In Bayou country, I lived on boats and in double-wide trailers, and like the rest of the Vietnamese refugees, I shopped at Walmart, ate a lot of rice.
When they arrived in Louisiana, the refugees had no money.
The money that they had had was used to bribe their way out of Vietnam and into refugee camps in Thailand.
They had few friends and a mostly unfriendly and suspicious local population.
But they did, however, have strong families.
They had a strong work ethic and the audacity of hope.
Within a generation, with little or no knowledge of English, the Vietnamese had achieved dominance in the fishing industry there.
Their children were already achieving the top SAT scores in the state of Louisiana.
While I had been fishing, my new black friend had been working as a prison psychologist in Missouri, and he was pursuing a higher degree in psychology.
He was interested in my story, and after about an hour getting to know each other, I asked him point blank why these Vietnamese refugees with no money and no friends or knowledge of the language could be within a generation so successful.
I also asked him why it was so difficult to convince young black men to abandon the streets and take advantage of the same kinds of opportunities that the Vietnamese had recently embraced.
His answer, with only a few words, not only floored me, but became a sort of a razor that has allowed me ever since to slice through all the rhetoric regarding race relations that Democrats shovel our way during election season.
He said to me, well, we're owed, and the Vietnamese aren't.
In short, he concluded, the Vietnamese are hungry, and we think we're owed.
It's crushing us.
And as long as we think we're owed, we're going nowhere.
A good test case for this theory is Katrina.
Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, assorted white apologists, continue to express anger and outrage over the federal response to the Katrina disaster.
But where were the Vietnamese leaders expressing their anger?
The Vietnamese comprise a substantial part of the New Orleans population, and yet they are absent.
Any report claiming that the Vietnamese were owed anything.
This is not to say that the federal response was an adequate one, but we need to take this as a sign that maybe the problem has very little to do with racism and a lot to do with mindset.
The mindset that one is owed something in life has not only affected black mobility in business, but black mobility in education as well.
Remember Ward Churchill?
About 15 years ago, he was my boss.
After leaving the fishing boats, I attended graduate school, University of Colorado Boulder.
I managed to get a job on campus teaching expository writing to minority students who had been accepted provisionally into the university on an affirmative action program.
And although I never met him, Ward Churchill, in addition to teaching in the ethnic studies department, helped to develop and organize the minority writing program.
Job paid most of my bills, but what I witnessed there was absolutely horrifying.
The students were encouraged to write essays attacking the white establishment from every conceivable angle, and in addition to defend affirmative action and other government programs.
Of the hundreds of papers that I read, there was not one original contribution to the problem of black mobility that strayed from the party line.
Ethnic studies, sociology majors, because it allowed them to remain in disciplines whose orientation justified their existence at the university.
In short, it became a vicious cycle.
Peace goes on, and it's got another page and a half here to go.
We know that Barack Obama really has no interest in the audacity of hope.
The second to last paragraph.
With his race speech, Obama became a peddler of angst, resentment, and despair.
Too bad he doesn't direct that angst at the liberal establishment that has sold black people a bill of goods since the 1960s.
What Obama seems angry about is America itself and what it stands for, the same America that has provided fabulous opportunities for what my black friend called hungry minorities.
Strong families, self-reliance, a spirit of entrepreneurship should be held up as ideals for all races to emulate.
Eric Hoffer said, you don't win the weak by sharing your wealth with them.
It will but infect them with greed and resentment.
You can win the weak only by sharing your pride, your hope, and your hatred with them.
In the end, we should be very suspicious about Obama's anger and the recent frothings of his close friend, Reverend Wright.
Again, says Eric Hoffer, the fact seems to be that we are at least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.
Vehemence is the expression of a blind effort to support and uphold something that can never stand on its own.
Quick time out.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
All right, we go back to the phones.
It's Open Line Friday.
Really appreciate all you being as patient as you have been.
This is David in Millanocket, Maine.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello there.
Hello there.
We're owed.
We're owed my large white ass were owed.
Oh, my gosh.
If Snerdley's comments to me on the phone motivated me to clarify my thoughts, this we're owed mentality pisses me off royally, Rush.
I'd like to give a quick shout-out, though, first of the two unhappiest national-level politicians in the country right now, John Kerry and Andrew Cuomo.
What must these two be thinking?
Also, a quick word to your former caller, early caller, Paris.
I got rid of television reception 15 years ago last month, and I haven't looked back.
Well, that can improve anybody's outlook.
Oh, my gosh.
Thanks to Mr. Snirdley's comments, I've decided to kind of couch the question a little more delicately.
It's not about, for me, it's not a question about race.
It's a question about opening up the floodgates and just how much more do we have to do as a society for people.
And I'm going to throw out it the R word, the other R word, reparations, civil war era reparations.
Given Obama's relations, given the preacher's comments, the hate speech coming out of this guy, and Obama's 20-year association with the guy, I just have to wonder whether or not a Liberal Congress, the Congressional Black Caucus, civil rights leaders, and others are going to have heightened expectations about Civil War era reparations.
And this is personal for me.
This is not just race or reparations.
Well, you know, we don't know.
This is one of the problems here that we don't know.
We've got Obama's 20-year association with this hate monger.
We know that he has subjected his two daughters to this hate monger.
We know that he has finally said that he has found some of what the hatemonger said repugnant.
And yet he disowns nor dissociates himself from the man.
He instead trashes white America in the form of throwing his grandmother under the bus.
Now, I wonder if his grandmother was enough of a racist that when his grandmother found out that her daughter was going to marry Obama's dad, who was Kenyan, black, if the grandmother said, no, no, no, you can't do it.
I don't know this.
But wouldn't a genuine racist have tried that?
This is the woman that raised him.
Now, we go back to Reverend Wright.
Reverend Wright has spoken out in favor of reparations.
There are quite a few civil rights leaders who have over the years.
There have been some members of the Congressional Black Caucus who have.
We cannot just sit here and assume that because of the way Obama has presented himself prior to Reverend Wright's mass exposure, because up until that time, no, no, this is what I meant about him transcending race.
This guy is, he's not, he has to go down there to Selma and put on a fake accent to make it look like he's down for the struggle.
He has no direct link to the civil rights struggles of blacks in this country.
He has none whatsoever.
Oh, but he does, doesn't he?
No direct, but he's got the cred thanks to Reverend Wright.
So, Reverend Wright's a mentor.
We don't know if we're looking at somebody here who, after they're elected president, is going to move forward on reparations.
We don't know.
We'd like to think, based on our impression of Obama before Reverend Wright.
No, he's not done.
That's kook stuff.
It ain't going to happen.
But we don't know.
And with his reluctance to dissociate himself and disown Reverend Wright, and now with his transformation here into a full-fledged black candidate now, as opposed to one who is transcended race, it's a decent question only because we'd have to assume one way or the other.
I don't think he would do that.
I'm telling you, just two weeks ago, nobody would have thought that that'd be anywhere on Obama's mind until we learned about Reverend Wright.
So I can't answer it, and neither can anybody else.
And to the extent that that concerns people, it may be relevant.
Try this headline: ABC News Obama campaign claims Clinton has character gap.
A sales rival is untrustworthy and duplicitous.
Can you imagine how horrible Obama's internal polls must look right now?
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