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Aug. 9, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:31
August 9, 2010, Monday, Hour #3
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Oh yeah, that's got sort of a twangy country beat to it, really hip.
You know, George W. Bush, the day after the election in 2004, in his speech accepting victory, he pulled me out of the, recognized me out of the crowd and called me the architect.
And ever since then, members of the American Institute of Architects have been plaguing me, saying that if I call myself the architect, I can because I've not passed a qualified exam in any state in the union that they can find that identifies me as an architect.
I tell them it's just sort of a metaphor.
It's sort of a label.
It's not a specific designation of the ability to build a house, a building, or bridge.
But they said, they keep saying, stop calling yourself the architect.
So I rely upon other people calling me the architect.
It's a title I don't refer to myself.
I don't in the third person refer to myself as the architect says.
But I'm happy to be called the architect by my friends.
George W. Bush, I was 22 years old and I was working for his old man.
I had gone in October of 2000, excuse me, October of 1973 to work for George H.W. Bush a month after I met him.
And I was been elected college Republican National Chairman.
And I went in to meet with the chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H.W. Bush.
I took along my executive director.
I gave this young lad his first job in Washington, D.C.
It was a guy named Lee Atwater.
And we walk in to meet with Chairman Bush and two little 22-year-old guys.
And we walk in and he gives us the lecture about behave yourself.
We were in the sub-basement, Snerdley.
We were underneath the parking garage.
I mean, there was the parking garage above us, the basement, and then the first floor, second floor, third floor, and on the fourth floor was the office of the chairman, George H.W. Bush.
So we went up to meet with the chairman at his behest, and he said, don't overspend your budget.
Don't misbehave.
Do everything we tell you to do.
Don't get into trouble.
And then spent a lot of time with us talking about what our plans and aspirations were and what we were doing to go win the vote on college campuses, really showing a lot of interest in us, which we were both, Lee and I were both taken aback at.
And when we finished, Atwater, who Atwater always was thinking ahead, and Atwater always had a wonderful demeanor about him.
And when Atwater was agitated, he sort of stuttered.
He said, Chairman, can I ask you a question?
And Bush said, the senior Bush said, yeah, go ahead.
He said, is it true you got a boat on the Potomac?
The chairman said, yeah, I've got a boat on the Potomac.
Is it true it's like Boston, whatever, with Evan Rude, Fort Andrew?
The chairman said, yeah, that's exactly the kind of boat I got.
Can I bought it?
Can I bought it this weekend?
He said, there's this really cute girl coming up from South Carolina, and I'd like to buy the boat because it would really impress her, and I know how to operate that boat, and I'll bring her back fully guessed up, Mr. Chairman.
And this had just enough hood spa that George H.W. Bush said to this kid, this 22-year-old kid whom he'd met just a few minutes before, he said, yeah, you can have my boat this weekend.
And that weekend, Atwater met the cute little girl from South Carolina named Sally and drove her around on the Potomac River on the boat of George H.W. Bush, chairman of the Republican National Committee.
And as luck would have it, he later married her.
And that was how Lee Atwater dated Little Sally, who became Sally Atwater, his wife and mother of his wonderful daughters.
And I was there for it.
But anyway, that was in like August.
In October, George H.W. Bush called me up and said, I'd like you to come to work for me as my special assistant, which really sounds cool.
I mean, special assistant, the chairman of the Republican National Committee.
But the office consisted of the chairman, the chief of staff, a wonderful guy named Tom Lyas, a formidable secretary named Rose Zamaria, who was actually in charge, the driver, and all-ran handyman, and me.
And you can imagine who was at the bottom of the totem pole.
Well, the day, this is Thanksgiving week, about a month later, five weeks, six weeks later, and I get a call from Tom Lyas, and he says, I was sitting in my office now on the fourth floor.
The college Republicans were still in the sub-basement, but I was on the fourth floor.
And he said, look, Chairman Bush has a meeting at the White House.
I got a meeting on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
And Rose Zamara and Ms. Amaria is not going to be here.
And Don, the driver, is not going to be here.
He's going to be driving chairman down to the White House.
So George W. Bush, W., who's at Harvard Business School, is going to be coming down on the train.
And he'll call when he gets to Union Station.
And you meet him in the lobby with the keys to the family car.
So at the appointed hour, early in the afternoon, call comes into the office, answered by the intern or whatever.
And W has arrived at station and he's walking down from Union Station.
So I go down to lobby of 310 First Street Southeast.
And in walks a few minutes later, George W. Bush in his Air National Guard flight jacket, wearing cowboy boots and Levi's with that distinctive in the back pocket, you'll know what I'm talking about, Part of America.
In the back pocket, there was the distinctive ring, you know, the sort of the large, about three-inch diameter in the seat of, in the seat pocket of his pants, and exuding more charisma than anybody should be allowed to have.
And he was down, he was used to driving around a red sports car at Harvard Yard at B School.
And my job was to give him the keys to the family car, which was a purple gremlin with Levi Strauss interior.
Now, you can say a lot of things about 41, but that man is not car-proud, never has been, as long as it's got wheels and it moves.
So there's his son who's been given the keys to the car.
And I'm pointing out to him, yeah, it's that purple gremlin right out front with the Levi Strauss interior.
The ugliest darn thing you've ever seen in your life.
But anyway, we've known each other a long time.
That's how we met.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was scared.
You have but.
Yeah, well, the question from Snerdley was, when I was going through the special prosecutor investigation, was I ever scared?
And yeah, I was scared.
I didn't want to show it, and I didn't let people know it because I didn't want my colleagues to worry about me, and I didn't want my critics to get a sense of that they were somehow winning.
So I did everything I possibly could to muscle up and not show it.
I write about it in the book, and I was shocked when I wrote about it how when I finished writing it, how forthcoming I'd been.
I'd been more forthcoming than I thought I was willing to be.
And then my wife and my son read the chapter and helped freshen it up and sharpen it up some.
But yeah, I was.
I mean, when you have a bunch of FBI, you know, even though I knew I'd done nothing wrong, even though I'd been told I'd done nothing wrong, you know, I remember when I walked into the grand jury for the fourth time with my lawyer, Bob Luskin, I said, Bob, how many times has anybody that been your client gone to the grand jury?
How many times have they gone?
He said, none of my clients has gone more than once except you.
And you can read about it in the book.
I mean, at the end of the day, this was not about Valerie Plame.
I mean, right from the get-go, the prosecutor knew that no law had been violated when Under Secretary of State Richard Armitage had disclosed her name to Robert Novak.
Right from the beginning, he knew that what I'd said to Novak and what Novak recalled me saying to him was roughly the same.
I recalled saying to Novak, when he brought the issue up to me, did you know that Joe Wilson's wife worked at the CIA?
My response was to say, I've heard that too.
His recollection of what I've heard, what I said to him was, so you've heard that too.
But essentially, right from the get-go, the FBI knew that there was no essential disagreement between the two of us, that I was accurately depicting what I had told Novak, and that there was no problem with it, that I had no legal exposure.
But what they were trying to do was the prosecutor had to get a PELT.
You know, when you have a high-profile case like this, there is a pressure on the prosecutor to demonstrate results.
And so, you know, there was a concern about was he trying to find something that I didn't remember correctly and get me on it, even if it was inconsequential.
And at the end of the day, what this all boiled down to, and I write about it, I hate to ruin it for the people who don't read the book, but what it came down to was after basically nearly three years of being investigated was he sat down with my attorney and said, we would be inclined, we're thinking about indicting your client.
We're inclined to believe him, except for one thing.
If he can't remember a conversation that apparently lasted for no more than a minute or two on Friday morning, July 11th, 2003, if he can't remember having a conversation with Matt Cooper of Time magazine, why did he ask his staff to go find any evidence that he'd ever had a meeting with Matt Cooper?
If he can't remember it, why did he ask his staff to do that in the early part of the investigation?
And my lawyer said, well, it's because of me, Bob Luskin, his lawyer.
I had drinks with a colleague of Matt Cooper at Time who said that she said to me, to my lawyer, Bob Luskin, that Matt Cooper had said he had had a telephone conversation with me.
So immediately after having drinks with this Time reporter, my lawyer, Bob Luskin, called me and said, get your staff to go see if there's anything that will help prompt your recollection.
This is anything in your files that indicates you talked to Matt Cooper.
And that's why I had gone to ask my staff to do this.
In four appearances before the grand jury, he'd never asked that.
And when he did finally ask it of my attorney, and my attorney gave him the answer, he said, you've rocked my world.
I mean, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars had been spent investigating me, but it was all on a suspicion of a prosecutor on something like that.
And as a result, my family had to go through hell, and they did.
And what was ironic was just at the moment when I was, when I knew that I had no exposure, the next six months were the months where the media went nuts.
And I detail in my book, Courage and Consequence, which incidentally is not my courage, it's George Bush's courage.
And the consequences is about the eight years of his consequential administration.
But in my book, I detail the nuts in the press who went out and said things at a moment when I had no exposure.
All I was waiting was for the attorney, for the special prosecutor to ultimately let me out.
But in the May and June before he let me out, in June, all of these people in the press were going insane, saying Bush's brain, you know, right-hand guy Rove is going to be sent to jail when they didn't know Boo Doo Diddley Squat.
And people in front of my house, a death watch of press reporters, and sitting in front of my house when my child came home from school, people saying ugly things on television.
I recount them all in the book.
But yeah, but I got to tell you, I wasn't going to let anybody know I was scared.
I mean, at the moment when I had the pressure was the most on me, I resolved that I was going to do everything I possibly could to look, you know, to add a little bit of humor, to be upbeat, to be, you know, to be outgoing, to be fresh, to be focused on my job, and not, because I didn't want my colleagues to worry about me.
And I didn't want my enemies to take joy in seeing me ground down.
You know, don't let the bastards grind you down.
And I was determined not to.
Snerdley, stop asking these introspective questions.
I don't like looking at my navel.
And with that, we're going to take a break.
And after we come back, we're going to talk about politics, politics.
Yeah, there we go.
There's a little beach music.
That might have been the thing, the kind of thing that Lee Atwater would have been playing on that guitar of his.
Though he was really into RB a few weeks before he was diagnosed with his terrible brain cancer with his tumor, he was in Austin, Texas, playing at an RB bar there and got to go out and see my good friend.
He used to come to Austin regularly to do that kind of thing.
Look, politics, let's spend some time talking about politics.
You know, it really has been remarkable the last since January 20th of 2009, the inauguration of Barack Obama, an historic day.
If you take a look at the president's job approval, which that day was in the Gallup, was about 20% disapprove and 70% approve.
Pretty good numbers.
As of the latest, they are 45% approved, 48% disapprove.
President Obama hit 50% in the Gallup poll faster than any modern elected president except Bill Clinton, William Jefferson Clinton.
Of course, Clinton started at 43% on Election Day, not 53 like Obama.
The only other president to get there quicker was President Ford, who was not elected and had to pardon Richard Nixon in order to get to the 50% faster.
But Obama was only seven months into his presidency before he hit that sort of vital 50% number.
And look, when a president gets to 50%, he stops being helpful to his party largely in most contests.
President Obama was at 52% approval last November when Republicans took the big victories in Virginia and New Jersey and swept most of the races in Pennsylvania.
And President Obama has suffered these losses, not among Republicans.
He didn't start out particularly good there.
He's lost them among independents.
A year ago, Barack Obama's approval rating in Gallup was 56% among independents, and today it's 38% among independents.
The people who elected the guy, the people who turned out to vote for him after having voted for Bush in 2004, turned out and voted for him in 2008, these independents, they've turned on him with a vengeance.
The other thing that the White House has got to not like is his support among Latinos.
If you take a look, for example, among blacks, his approval rating was 88% in January of 2009, and in July of 2010, it's still 88%.
But among Latinos, it's dropped from 74% approval to 54%.
Almost one, you know, that's almost one out of every three, you know, Latinos has dropped away.
His approval among whites has dropped from 62 to 38.
And, you know, it's not happening because we don't like the president.
It isn't because his personality rubs us raw, though sometimes it does some of us.
It is because of his approval on the issues.
If you take a look at what he's done on the issues, that's what's driven people away.
He's turned out to be distinctly different than what he said he would be when he got elected to office.
I mean, he ran as a relentless centrist.
Remember the campaign?
We're not red states, blue states, but United States.
I'm going to be a bipartisan president.
You know, criticized the deficits of the Bush years, which ran just slightly above the post-World War II average.
He criticized him.
He was going to be a tax cutter.
I'm going to cut taxes for people making less than $250,000 a year.
In fact, for every one word that he devoted to raising taxes to say generally that he would return tax rates to the way that they were under Bill Clinton, he said that he was going to raise, he was going to cut taxes on those making less than $250,000.
He devoted four words to that, four to one, tax cut.
In fact, in the most widely watched speech of the entire campaign, his speech before the Denver Convention, his acceptance speech, he never mentioned raising taxes once, deliberately.
He was a budget cutter.
I'm going to scrub the budget for programs that do not work and end programs that do not work.
And he was a centrist.
And then he came into office and he turned out to be something very, very, very different.
He turned out to be a strong liberal.
And as a result, take, for example, The Economist in late July did a poll.
Approval on immigration, 30%.
Social Security, 31.
Budget deficit, 32%.
Gay rights, 34.
Taxes, 35%.
War in Afghanistan, 35.
Economy, 36.
War in Iraq, 37%.
Healthcare, 40%.
Terrorism, 40%.
Environment, 40%.
Education, 40%.
In fact, education is the only issue in which he's right side up.
That is to say, his approval of 40% is higher than his negatives.
And on the number one issue facing us this year, the president is really in bad shape.
You know, CNN opinion research in the middle of July, 42% approval on the economy, 57% disapprove.
Deficit, 36% approved, 62 disapprove.
And his numbers are dreadful among independents, these people who elected him.
They think and are acting like Republicans this year.
And they see him as very liberal.
You know, he went out of his way to sort of proclaim himself as a centrist in the 2000 election.
And as a result, in March of 2008, he had, you know, 54% of the people said he was liberal, but a good number, 28%, said he was a moderate.
But today, same poll, Rasmussen, 76% see him as a liberal, and 17% see him as a moderate.
And worse than that is it must have just galled James Carville and Stan Greenberg to say something like this.
But they put this question in the poll, I think, in order to sort of show how nutty the Republicans were and how out of touch they were.
They said, do you think for each word or phrase, please tell me whether or not it describes Barack Obama?
And they used three words, socialist, big spender, and too liberal.
The problem was the answers were pretty strong.
55% said the word socialist describes him.
62% said a big spender.
57% said liberal.
And you have strong numbers saying that among independents.
So while they had to put out the number, they weren't probably too very happy about it.
This has led the Republicans to being in great shape on the generic ballot.
If you take a look at, for example, Gallup since March, there have only been a few weeks out of all the weeks since March, April, May, June, and July, only a few weeks in which the Democrats were ahead on the generic ballot.
They were ahead briefly in early March.
They got ahead in late April, early May, and fell back behind.
And then they pulled ahead again for one two-week period in July and then have fallen back behind.
And in Rasmussen, since March, the Republicans have been ahead each and every week.
And that can't be happy for Democrats.
Because, look, Republicans don't need to be ahead in the generic ballot in order to win the election.
And when we come back, I want to share with you, I want to preview for you some polls data that are coming out tomorrow that show why the Democrats are in such bad shape and why they're adopting the strategy of blaming Bush, saying it's worse than they expected it to be, and it's all about how bad it's going to be if the Republicans are let back in.
We're going to preview a really interesting poll about which you're going to learn more tomorrow from the mainstream media.
Back after these words.
Well, welcome back.
Welcome back.
We're going to be talking now about a little bit more about politics.
I promised you some insight into a poll that's going to be coming out tomorrow.
It's been sponsored by American Crossroads.
This is an organization that I've been helping.
It's really interesting.
You know, the chairman of the group is Mike Duncan, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and he's got a great board of directors.
The executive director of it is a fellow named Stephen Law, who was the Under Secretary of Labor in the Bush administration, was the general counsel over at the U.S. Chamber for the last year and a half, previously Senator McConnell's chief of staff and executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
The political director of American Crossroads is a guy named Carl Forte, who is one of the smartest people in politics you've never heard of.
He's been in charge of the independent expenditure efforts for the Congressional Campaign Committee for the last several cycles.
Really smart guy.
And they've got a very small and dedicated staff, and I'm helping them.
Now, that has not stopped the press from attacking them.
In fact, it's encouraged them because anything I'm associated with gets attacked.
So they've attacked American Crossroads by saying, first of all, that I'm running it.
I'm merely helping raise money and encouraging it.
But they've also attacked it as a secretive organization, which it's not.
It is organized under the laws of the United States, and it's trying to provide a counterweight to what the Democrats do through the unions and through all their galaxy of liberal special interest groups.
So what it's been doing is raising money in order to spend in critical Senate and House races.
And hopefully it's going to do the job this year and help us pick up some seats we wouldn't otherwise pick up.
But they're doing a poll on Senate battlegrounds.
And this is in the key contests around the country, the key races that everybody believes are up for grabs.
And they did two very interesting things, which show the problem that the Democrats have.
The first thing they did is they talked about they read a series of questions of people who said that they would or would not vote to re-elect their incumbent Democrat senator.
And what they found is that the Democrat meta-themes, the big things that they're sort of counting on working for them, don't work as well as the big themes that Republicans are counting on.
For example, I'm going to vote for the Democrat because they're fighting for change and making progress addressing the problems the country faces versus the Republican idea of, you know, we need new people who will fix warship and get things done.
And in each and every instance, the arguments that pit the Democrat and the Republican against each other, the Republican wins and wins by a pretty hefty margin.
There's one where, if you phrase it the way that the Democrats phrase it, the Democrats win, and that is saying who's more responsible for the state of the economy, Obama or Bush.
First of all, a third of the people say Obama.
A larger number say Bush.
But what's interesting to me is that's not the real answer.
In fact, the real answer comes from, of all places, Barack Obama's pollster.
Barack Obama's pollster, the Berenson group, did a poll for a liberal group called The Third Way.
And in there, they asked voters, you know, in essence, who do you blame for the bad state of the economy, Bush or Obama?
And of course, people, if they said, if given the choice between Obama and Bush, they'd say, well, we blame Bush more than we blame Obama, 53-26, in fact.
But then they asked them, who do you think is responsible for the recession? and gave them a couple of other options besides Obama and Bush.
And guess what happened?
Bush is no longer the guy responsible.
Generally speaking, the Berenson, the Obama pollster, ask, who's more responsible for the recent economic recession?
Obama, 13%.
Bush, 20%, big banks in Wall Street, 34%, and American consumers who live beyond their means, 24%, and don't know 9%.
I mean, what we've got is we've got a problem with the Democrats trying to make the argument that it's Bush versus Obama, but the American people know that that's too simplistic and if given a choice, 58% of them say it was either the big banks in Wall Street or American consumers who live beyond their means or some combination thereof.
In fact, if you add the don't knows into there, you're up to 67 percent who say something other than Bush and Obama.
So they got a problem with that one.
Anyway, this poll run by American Crossroads.
Incidentally, you can go to American Crossroads' website today or tomorrow and sign up to get information about this or go get the results of the poll tomorrow on American Crossroads.
They're going to make it available at their website.
They then go on to ask some questions about the specific statements that Republicans and Democrats make about the big issues like the economy or like health care reform or like financial reform or deficits and spending.
And what is really problematic for the Democrats is that they lose these heads-to-head matches that take what Democrats are saying and what Republicans say and match them head-to-head.
And guess what happens on each and every one of these issues?
The Democrats are on the short side of the stick.
Even when you take the absolute best things that they have poll tested and focus grouped and tested on these things and put them out there, they come up short.
And that's got to be a problem if you're a Democrat.
If you're a Democrat and you got your best case and it still comes up short and you're the majority, you're going to be facing a really tough election return.
In fact, how tough?
Really tough.
National Public Radio, not exactly the most conservative of outlets, got a guy named Stan Greenberg to do a bunch of polling for him.
That is Bill Clinton's old pollster and the running buddy of James Carville.
And they did a very good analysis of how many seats are really vulnerable and they came up with a list.
There were 60 Democrat House seats that they considered to be at risk in this election.
And they had a total of 10 Republican seats.
That's all they could come up with was 10.
And so Greenberg did this big poll consisting of people in all of those districts that were considered to be vulnerable.
And they divided the Democrat, the 60 Democrat House seats that were vulnerable, into 30 most vulnerable seats and the second most 30 vulnerable.
In the 30 most vulnerable Democratic seats, most of which are incumbents, the generic ballot was to the advantage of the Republicans by nine points.
That means that in those 30 seats, the Democrats are likely to lose most of those seats if that holds up.
Most of them.
A nine-point advantage for Republicans on the generic ballot.
So unless they're able to spend more and bury the Republican and a lot of negative ads, the Republicans should take virtually all of those seats.
In the second most vulnerable set of 30 Democrat seats, the generic ballot was two points to the Republicans, which means the Republicans should take many, not most, not a majority, not all, but they should take a bunch of those 30 seats.
And then what about the 10 Republican vulnerable House seats?
What about the generic ballot in those seats?
Well, let me tell you, in those 10 Republican seats, the generic ballot was 16 points for Republicans.
Think about that.
16 points.
That means the Republicans are unlikely to lose any but maybe one or two of those 10 seats.
Think about that.
Unbelievable.
Those numbers are extraordinary.
And as I say, they come from not exactly the most conservative of institutions, National Public Radio, and from somebody who's not exactly a Republican pollster, Stan Greenberg.
And yet it shows the problems that Democrats are having all across the country.
The thing that's going to keep them from losing is a lot of races is money.
Because in the end of the day, these things are going to be close.
How close?
Well, we'll talk about that when we come back.
But what kind of money are the Democrats putting out there?
They're putting out a lot of money.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has just gone out and bought a bunch of television advertising for candidates between now and Election Day.
The bad news is they spent $49 million on those advertising.
The good news is that most of that money is being spent on defense, not offense.
Of the 66 seats that they are spending money in, there are 61 Democrat-held seats and only five Republican-held seats.
And one of those five Republican seats, they haven't bought the TV.
They simply reserved it.
But they're spending a lot of money to defend incumbents.
So that's the bad news for Democrats.
The bad news for Republicans is they better find a way to come up with maybe not as much money, but a significant amount of money to come contest that because they can't allow these candidates all across the country to have these big unresponded to advantages on television.
Anyway, we're coming up to a break when we come back.
I want to talk about American Crossroads, which has been attacked as a secret organization.
Talk a little bit more about that, put you in on the secret, because after all, we know none of the bad guys are listening in.
Only the good guys listen to this or the people who want to become good guys, which is what Rush Limbaugh is all about, education of the American electorate and the American citizenry.
Looking forward to talking with you more, taking a few calls when we come back.
Thank you.
Welcome back.
Carl Rove sitting in for the famous, the irreplaceable Rush Limbaugh, who's off chairing a meeting of the vast right-wing conspiracy in an undisclosed location.
We understand that they've just broken to do some trap and skeet shooting, that they're going to be sort of perfecting their NRA skills, their Second Amendment skills.
And so they're taking a brief afternoon break there, maybe a few of them hitting the golf course, but then they'll return for an important skull session tonight to settle on the strategy for the final 13 weeks of the 2010 election extravaganza.
Incidentally, I've got a couple emails during the break, rove.com.
If you want, go there and sign up for the little weekly e-blast that I sent out, and I'll make certain that I send this week a summary of the poll that's coming out from American Crossroads, or you can go to American Crossroads website and sign up there to receive it, or check it out tomorrow when they post the poll findings there.
A very interesting poll that's going to show the weakness of the Democrats.
Look, you know, look, Americans don't want their president to be out there blaming somebody else.
We don't elect president.
Look, when Bush got into office in 2001, you know, the stock market had declined 50 percent since March of 2000, and we were entering a recession.
And you don't remember George W. Bush going out there blaming his predecessors.
First of all, that's not in his DNA.
And second of all, if anybody had proposed it to him, there have been a lot of people standing around him who would have said, that's a bad idea because the American people don't want their president to be out there blaming his predecessor.
They don't want him to be out there, you know, sort of day in and day out saying it's not my fault, it's the guy who came before me.
It just diminishes the office of the presidency, and it diminishes the occupant of the office of the presidency.
And one of the ironies is President Obama, by continuing this thing for as long as he has, has made it into sort of a joke and weakened the argument for the fall elections.
I mean, every argument in politics generates a counterargument.
If you say the sky is blue, there's going to be somebody who's going to look up and say, well, it's mostly blue, but there are a couple of, you know, brown or gray or fluffy white clouds there.
I mean, and what's happened here is that, you know, the Democrats have gone out there and said, well, it's all Bush's fault.
And that's caused a lot of people, sure, you know, if you're a hardcore Democrat, that might be, you know, that might be fine.
But if you're an independent, after a while, you say, well, wait a minute, is it all Bush's fault?
And as a result, it's actually left the Democrats weaker as they come to the fall election.
Look, we've got some callers.
Let's take a couple of them if we can.
We got Emily in Atlanta, Georgia.
Emily, are you there?
Yeah, I'm here.
Thank you so much for waiting.
You're awfully nice to do so.
Oh, my gosh, to talk to you, Carl.
Oh, my gosh.
I'm so excited.
I love you.
Well, thanks.
Thanks.
Awesome.
Yeah, I guess my question is, I'm really concerned because I started getting, I don't know, I started getting into politics like maybe about two years ago, and I'm pretty young.
And, you know, a lot of people my age, they're just still in that zone, you know, like still trying to figure life out.
And I am too, no doubt about it.
But now I'm more concerned about my future.
And also that I'm worried about my parents' future, you know, because they're getting up there in age.
And I'm just, you know, and I'm wondering how are we going to wake up the younger generation, kind of like, I mean, because that's how Obama really, you know, got ahead in the numbers and the polls.
I mean, he, you know, did the whole propaganda hope thing, and, you know, they turned out in droves.
But, you know, what do you think the GOP can do to appeal to the younger generation?
Well, first of all, we need to make the argument.
You can't win the vote unless you ask for the vote.
So we need to support all of our, you know, conserve, young conservative groups, all our college and student Republican groups, all our young Republican groups, everybody we can, you know, support who's out there making the argument.
I do a lot of college campuses, and I don't just go to the moderate and conservative campuses.
I mean, I go to the hotbeds of liberalism, and I like going there because I want to do a couple of things.
I want to make the argument so that we can win the argument.
And I also want to signal to conservative students who can win the argument better than I can that they're not alone.
I think it's really important for younger conservatives and younger Republicans to make certain they join an organization so they're with others who think like them and not only will be fun and make politics more exciting, but it'd also help this process of educating all of ourselves about what to do.
And so we've got to stay in the fight.
And to do that, we've got to be thinking about future generations.
And look, there are lots of arguments to make to our peers.
I mean, to your peers.
I mean, think about it.
We've got, you know, these bills are going to be paid by somebody.
They're going to be paid by the children and grandchildren of people like me.
They're going to be paid by you and your children.
And so it's going to be important for us to get it right or we're going to be passing on a big bill to you all or a country bankrupt that is far less prosperous, a lot darker, and a lot more dangerous than we want it to be.
The other thing is that a lot of these policies today are bad for young people.
Take, for example, as part of health care.
You may not know this, but as part of health care, they nationalized the student loan programs.
You can no longer go to your local banker and get a student loan with a federal guarantee.
You can only get those from the federal government now.
So rather than a banker who says, I want to get your business, I want to get your family's business.
I want to get your, you know, I want to get your, you know, not just your student loan, but I want to get your car loan, and I want to get your small business loan.
I want to get your mortgage.
I want to get your business of you and your family.
Instead, now you have to go to the federal government.
The federal government's going to borrow money from itself, money it doesn't have, but it's going to borrow money from itself at 2.8%.
It's going to turn around and lend it to students at 6.8%.
And the four points of interest in between, the difference between what the government's borrowing it from itself at and what it's lending it to students at, that four points of interest is going to go for what?
Is it going to go for education?
Is it going to go for student grants and student loans?
No, it's going to go to pay for $9 billion worth of Obamacare over the next decade.
Anyway, a lousy way to go about doing it.
We'll be back for a closing word or two.
Thanks for your call, Emily, from Atlanta, Georgia.
Well, welcome back, everybody.
As we draw to the close of this Monday program, good news.
Rush Limbaugh will be back tomorrow and Rove will be out of here.
And I want to thank you for listening to me today.
I want to thank all the wonderful people here at EIB Network, starting with my man Snerdley.
He's been taking good care of me.
The master chief at the board there, engineer in chief, has been doing a great job.
Yeah, Mike Mamone, MEM, AMM, Eminem.
He's been doing a great job.
And I want to thank you all.
But I want to thank most of all listeners.
And I want to leave you with this.
It might be a corny note, but I've got to tell you, I've been around the country a lot, and I know people are concerned.
This is the election that we can do.
It's stay in the fight.
We're going to win.
There's no doubt in my mind.
If we do what we need to do In the next 13 weeks, we're going to enjoy a victory for conservatism that will be big, broad, durable, and lasting with big things for our country.
But only if we all stay in the fight.
Thanks for listening today.
And tomorrow, the man himself, Limbaugh, will be back.
Thanks for listening.
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