Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
All right.
I can guarantee you, as, well, guarantee is a pretty hard word.
But I can say with relative confidence, Sharon Angle beats Dingy Harry and John Racy beats Joe Manchin in West Virginia.
And I can say this.
There's a reason I can say this, because John McCain's gone in to help both of them.
But that's not, don't misunderstand me on this.
It's not because of McCain.
He just wants everybody to think it's because of him.
You sit tight, folks.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network, and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
I've had so many people email me today.
What is Drudge doing?
Oh, no.
Why talk about the Bush book now?
The Bush book, George Bush 43, his memoirs are due on November 9th, but somebody's beat that embargo, and there's a summary, or soon will be, on the Drudge Report.
Ladies and gentlemen, I can reveal it.
I've seen some of this.
It ain't bad.
In fact, it will remind you, as it did me, of when we had a president who loves America.
He doesn't even talk about Obama in the book.
There's no ammo for anybody, the laughter man in this book.
It'll just remind you of the days when we had presidents who love the country.
Great to have you here.
Telephone number again, 800-282-2882, the email address, lrushball at EIBnet.com.
So much to do today.
Now, on this Sharon Angle business, she's going to win in Nevada, and John Racy, I think, is going to win in West Virginia.
Now, there's a little blurb here from Rich Lowry, National Review Online.
John McCain coming in for a rally for Sharon Angle on Friday.
This is a key moment for the campaign, it says here.
Angle obviously doesn't have a problem with the conservative base in Nevada.
It nominated her against all the odds.
It'll crawl across broken glass to vote for her next Tuesday.
The threat to Angle now comes from moderate Republicans staying home, voting for Reed or voting for none of the above.
Reed is working this constituency for all it's worth with Republicans for Reed and with advertising directed at that group.
To win, writes Rich Lowry, Angle needs to blunt this challenge, and McCain is exactly the right guy to try to help her do that.
Needless to say, McCain has been giving conservatives heartburn for years, but he's attempting to help bring Angle to the Senate where she will firmly anchor the right flank in the GOP caucus.
Good for him for doing this.
Good for Angle for having the tactical shrewdness to make this move.
This, last time we saw McCain, he was conservative.
Now, this tells me that this race is in the bag.
That's why McCain's going in there.
Let me tell you how this works.
McCain goes in.
He went in to see John Racy the other day, too.
That means McCain thinks these two are going to win.
That means he hopes these two think that they will owe him once they get to the Senate.
He's positioning with National Reviews helping to make it look like he's putting them over the top when they've already won this race on their own.
So just, this is the kind of stuff, you know, I see this, and I start doing a little bit of a slow burn, and I finally catch myself and keep the slow burn from becoming full-flamed flame out.
What do you mean I'm such a cold shower?
I'm not a cold shower.
Sharon Angle did this on her own.
John Racy did this on his own in West Virginia.
I mean, let me tell you, Scott Brown did this on his own in Massachusetts.
But you listen to Brown, he thinks McCain did it.
Because McCain was the first guy in the Senate to, you know, publicly support him.
I mean, good for McCain.
It's worse than McCain coming out and opposing him, which he's done.
He's opposed Ken Buck in Colorado over Bennett.
He's opposed some conservatives.
Anyway, I'm...
Well, I was going to say I'm sorry, folks, but actually I am not.
Sorry.
I mean, we have to look at it.
We have to look at it this way.
Nixon went to China.
McCain goes to Nevada.
Okay, do that.
Put that over there.
I'm going to put that over there.
Story in the news.
Science finds a liberal gene.
Scientists find a liberal gene.
Study conducted by researchers at UCSD, University of California, San Diego, and Harvard.
According to these scientists, ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene called a DRD4.
That and how many friends you had during high school determine whether or not you are a liberal.
James Fowler, UC San Diego, led the study focused on 2,000 subjects from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.
Scientists matched the subjects' genetic information with maps of their social networks.
According to researchers, they determined that people with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults.
However, the subjects were only more likely to have leanings to the left if they were also socially active during adolescence.
Quote, it is the crucial interaction of two factors, the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends and adolescents that's associated with being more liberal, according to the study.
So it is a defect.
It is genetic defect.
A genetic defect combined with an overactive social network as an adolescent.
I remember January 11th, 1995, on a Rush Limbaugh, the TV show, talking about a liberal.
I said.
He's a liberal.
He just can't help himself.
It's programmed into the brain cells.
It's genetic.
It is.
It's always been.
Everybody tries to say, how can a liberal be that way?
You know, why do people do stupid things?
It's in the brain.
And now we've got science to actually back it up.
And let's go to the audio soundbites to prove it.
What better subject to prove that liberalism is a genetic defect than Chris Matthews at PMS NBC last night on his show Hardball during a discussion about the Lauren Valley incident.
This is the moveon.org babe that tried to interrupt a rally for Rand Paul and ended up on the ground with a boot on her shoulder.
Like Obama had his boots on BP's neck.
Like the SEIU, who beat up a black conservative at a Carnahan rally in St. Louis in the spring.
They're terribly upset that I found justification for the way this moveon.org babe was treated.
Hear how it sounded.
Rush Limbaugh is not to be believed here.
First of all, the person's head is pinned down by this foot, and everybody can see it.
Absolutely.
This is the kind of stuff I said the other night.
I'll say it again: the kind of stuff we saw from hoodlums in the 30s in another country I will not mention.
This kind of behavior by people who are supposedly political fans or they go operational like this, operating as local police, is something we saw up in Alaska where they arrested a reporter.
What is this behavior by American political activists where they now arrest people, stomp them?
These are supposed to be people who are just good old American tea partiers.
Now, here's Chris Matthews wondering why in the hell these people at a Rand Paul rally would act this way.
He fails, utterly fails to see that her foot, by the way, is on her shoulder, not her head.
He utterly fails to see that all of this happens in defense, in defense of liberal action.
That has taken place previously.
Here's Joan Walsh was Matthew's guest as they continued the discussion.
This woman was wearing a wig.
It was part of street theater.
She was not carrying a gun.
I'd like Rush Limbaugh to acknowledge, like Tea Partiers have carried guns to President Obama's rallies.
She was not wearing a t-shirt saying the tree of liberty needs to be watered by the blood of tyrants regularly.
It was street theater.
She was D. Paul and his corporate connections.
That's perfectly legitimate.
And she was stomped.
This guy who claims that he put his foot on her shoulder, you see in the video, he takes it from her shoulder and he puts it on her head.
All right.
All right.
So these people live in their own genetic defect world.
Joan Walsh is the editor at salon.com.
I've described the situation accurately.
She wears a blonde wig.
She shows up.
She's at every protest rally in the country and around the world.
She has a fake gift that she wants to present to Rand Paul.
Now, I'm telling you, if the Secret Service were there and she was trying to get to President Obama in this manner, something similar would happen.
It does.
It looks like she's trying to jam this fake award through this group of people anyway.
Lauren Valley worked for Greenpeace.
They don't do violence.
She's worked for the Rainforest Action Network.
They don't do violence.
They do.
Remember the moveon.org demonstrator who bit off a Tea Party member's finger.
Lynette Squeaky Fromm, another left-wing radical, took a pot shot.
President Ford, nobody tackled her first.
She was able to get in, get it, and get out.
So here's Matthews comparing the Tea Party people to Nazis, is what he's doing here, following in the footsteps of Nancy Pelosi.
Are you going to wonder when people are going to start wearing uniforms?
I mean, they've got an army up there in Alaska of militia people.
You've got these guys going around acting like street thugs.
I mean, it isn't far from what we saw in the 30s, where all of a sudden political parties started showing up in uniform.
I mean, it's amazing.
Two different worlds.
You know what this election is going to show?
This election is going to show a lot of stuff.
I think there are many things brewing out there that the drive-bys are not talking about.
I think Democrats in blocks of people are running away from the Democrat Party, running away from Obama.
I mean, all this talk about Sharon Angle has a problem with moderate Republicans in Nevada and needs McCain to come in there and help out.
It's the other way around.
is the Democrats are facing mass exodus.
I mean, there are people in every, I saw a story, and I don't know if it's true.
There's so much out there today, and it's even hard to confirm some of this stuff.
But we've all noticed that Obama and Joe Biden have been a lot of time spending a lot of time in Delaware.
Why?
If that race, the polling data shows her down double digits.
But I'm seeing stories that the internal polling data says no that she's actually up in that race and that something happened, something is happening in Nevada that is inexplicable.
And that is that Democrats in blocks, in waves, are planning to vote Republican.
They are so upset and ticked off at what Obama has done to the Democrat Party.
The real story here, and it's the story that the media is papering, and they know about.
They know there's scandal brewing throughout this administration.
This new Black Panther business in the Justice Department, somebody openly saying at the Civil Rights Division, no, no, no, we're not going to prosecute black defendants.
We only have to prosecute white defendants.
The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, was only to maintain quality and fairness and equality for black voters.
And they're openly saying this.
I mean, there are scandals brewing throughout this administration.
The Democrat Party, the Reagan Democrats, the Scoop Jackson Democrats, I mean, they're still there.
But this is not what they're about.
They're not about a president who hates a country.
They're not about a president who doesn't like the country.
They're not about a president who wants to preside over an America in decline.
Hillary Clinton out of the country is not an accident.
It's not a coincidence.
Hillary Clinton wanting to be president sometime before it's too late.
It's not an accident.
It's the Democrat Party that's falling apart.
It's the Democrat Party that's losing its cohesiveness.
Barack Obama has destroyed the Democrat Party.
They just, we don't know it.
It's not being reported for obvious reasons.
I mean, look at Obama's on television every day.
Every day.
It means it's not special.
And every time he goes on television, he diminishes himself and the office of the presidency.
I mean, even drive-by media people are very upset that he's destroying the so-called Obama brand.
He goes on Jon Stewart's show, and Stewart's calling him dude.
The president of the United States.
Don't use that phrase, dude.
Stewart says, as Obama is praising the work Larry Summers did.
I wouldn't use that phrase, dude.
Did a heck of a good job.
I mean, this is dispiriting to a lot of Democrats.
We move back to the audio soundbites because we're still demonstrating the genetic defect that is liberalism.
Chris Salizza is also on Matthews' show here, and he's, you know, he's saying to himself, I got to get these guys back off the ledge, calling a Tea Party people Nazis.
That's one of the reasons that Tea Party people are doing so well because the American people do not think they're Nazis.
They're not Nazis.
So Chris Salizza comes in.
All this discussion about Lauren Valley, that incident, the Rand Paul rally.
No, I don't think it is right-wing by its nature.
I would say at the end of campaigns, passions get very inflamed, and sometimes people act, as this guy clearly did, inappropriately and in a way in which no person who is a member of civil society would say is acceptable.
I do not think that is an ideological thing.
I do not think it is a right-wing thing.
I do not think it is a left-wing thing.
So here's Salizza trying to walk him back.
No, no, no.
Whatever happened at the Rand Paul thing, it's not conservative doing that.
That's just some single guy acting inappropriately.
Matthews doesn't like hearing that.
He responds to Salizza thus.
Name the last liberal candidate who hired a private army, the last one that was stomping his political or her political opponents in the city.
I'm not defending.
Name a liberal who's done it.
Barack Obama.
Barack Hussein Imam Obama, Chris.
It's called the SEIU, the Purple Army.
It's called the Chicago Way.
Name the last liberal candidate who hired a private army.
They are hired every day.
They are given marching orders every day.
There's Obama on Spanish radio telling these people, if you're not going to deal with your enemies, it's Barack Obama who says they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.
They hit us once, we hit back twice as hard.
Anyway, arguing with these people is a waste of time because they, it's now been documented by science, are suffering from a genetic defect.
Hi, welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, the fastest three hours in media.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program, we will get to your calls at some point today.
800-282-2882.
Liberalism, a genetic defect.
Why not?
In fact, liberals are descended from pond scum.
They say so.
They claim it to be true.
They insist, they teach that they are descended from pond scum.
What do you mean by that, Rush?
Well, very simple, folks.
They don't believe in creation.
They believe in evolution.
And they were swimming around in some primordial soup as amoebas or some other fishy life form swimming around in the algae, swimming around in the pond scum.
I mean, the best argument against evolution is liberals.
Liberalism.
And liberals themselves, the best argument against evolution.
So why is it so hard to believe they have a genetic defect when they insist and they teach that they are descended from pond scum?
Now, there's quite a few stories that I want to address today, and we've touched on them some yesterday about what's going to happen after the election.
We're going to make the bald assumption the Republicans will win the House and get close to winning the Senate.
Of course, winning the Senate doesn't mean much until you have 60 votes, but that's a little bit of a distraction.
Bottom line is, what's going to happen?
What will the Republicans do?
People are eagerly standing by looking at what will Obama do.
And Stephen Spruill today, National Review, The Corner, President Obama's puzzling political strategy for after the midterms.
This is a report from Richard Wolfe, who's in the tank for Obama over at NBC.
Then we have Boehner saying publicly what he intends to do.
What needs to happen is for me to weigh in on what needs to happen, and I will.
By the way, ladies and gentlemen, yes, I have seen, I have read, and I will comment upon the open letter to Rush Limbaugh from the guys at Hillbuzz.com.
Now, Hillbuzz.com, I mean, their open letter to me is essentially saying I'm only half right when discussing reverse Operation Chaos.
Now, essentially, and it's a long open letter to me.
I can't read the whole thing.
I mean, I could.
I have the talent to do it and keep you interested, but I don't have the time because I have too many other things to squeeze in.
But basically, the open letter to Rush Limbaugh from the guys at Hillbuzz.com is saying that they are doing everything they can to oppose Obama and burn the party to the ground for the good of the country.
These guys claim to be leading the charge to burn the Democrat Party to the ground.
It started with them over the way Hillary was treated.
They originally were Hillary supporters, Hillary Democrats.
But now they're part of the voting bloc out there that's just fed up with the party at large and especially Obama.
They've been upset with Obama and his campaign from the get-go because of what they did to Hillary, but now it's expanded.
It's gotten even larger.
Now they're just totally devoted to bringing down the Democrat Party at large.
Now, I have to be honest.
The Hillbuzz confuses me a little bit because they claim to like Sarah Palin.
And I don't know how you like Sarah Palin and Hillary at the same time.
I've got to explore this a little deeper, and I shall.
Well, I don't know if it's a gene thing or not.
No, no, no, I am not, by any stretch of imagination, saying that the guys at Hillbuzz have a genetic defect whatsoever.
But I mean, clearly, they are devoted to the destruction of the Democrat Party.
Now, maybe they see the way Palin has been treated and they're upset by it.
But regardless, make no mistake about it, their open letter to me is for me to understand what they think the media is ignoring and what a lot of people know and ignore, that there are three things, basically two things going on, that there are scandals brewing and have been brewing in the Obama administration that the Republicans are going to zero in on after they win next Tuesday or sworn in in January, and that the Democrat Party at large needs to be brought down because, and it is, because there are Democrats in droves leaving the party.
They'll either vote Republican or won't vote at all.
Hence, my instincts, Operation Reverse Chaos, right on the money.
Well, no, I'm not wrong about anything, snurdly.
They're saying I'm not going all the way.
I don't fully realize how right I am.
They're not saying I'm wrong about anything.
What I'm missing is the anger at the Democrat Party within the Democrat Party, within Democrat voters, within the people, Democrats who do not want the Democrat Party to be of the Chicago way in Washington.
Now, again, all this is up for grabs.
A lot of us sit around and wonder, what has happened to the Democrat Party?
Are they all a bunch of SEI union thunks?
Are they all a bunch of Marxists?
Has the entire voting Democrat Party, the moms and pops of the Democrat Party, the small business owners of the Democrat Party, are they Marxists?
Is this what they want?
Do they want a president from their party happily presiding over an America in decline?
Now, the Hillbuzz guys say that no, they don't want any part of it, and that that's what I'm missing.
We'll see.
All will be revealed after the election on Tuesday.
I mean, we remember Ronald Reagan was a proud Democrat once.
He said the party left him.
Bill Bennett was a proud Democrat once.
A lot of, they're called neocons now, were Democrats at one point.
Shelby Steele has a great, great piece in the Wall Street Journal today, a referendum on the Redeemer.
This one sentence in this piech, in this piece, I want you to listen to this.
This is one of those things I wish that I, El Rushbo, could claim that I wrote.
Barack Obama put the Democrats in the position of forever redeeming a fallen nation rather than leading a great one.
Bingo.
That one sentence.
Remember what I always say, brevity is the soul of wit.
That one sentence encapsulates it.
Barack Obama put the Democrats in the position of forever redeeming a fallen nation rather than leading a great one.
Now, back to the Hillbuzz guy's theory, if they're right, then there are some Democrats who are fed up with that kind of leadership at the top of the party.
Redeeming a fallen nation, leading a nation in decline rather than leading a great one.
Whether or not the Republicans win big next week, it's already clear that the transformative perspirations of the Obama presidency.
Yeah, I know it's aspirations.
It was played around.
Transformative aspirations of the Obama presidency, the special promise of this first black president to change us into a better society are much less likely to materialize.
Whether or not the Republicans win, there will be enough Republican gains to make the no in the party of no even more formidable, if not definitive.
But apart from this politics of numbers, there is also now a deepening disenchantment with Obama himself.
He has a meager 37% approval rating in the latest Harris poll.
37%.
So we're talking Bush 43 territory.
Are you hearing about this?
Are you seeing that number trumpeted in state-controlled media headlines?
You are not.
Harris poll 37.
The Gallup poll forecasting a tidal wave, generic ballot, large turnout, which you're all going to have, 5540 Republican advantage.
Unprecedented.
Unheard of.
And now Obama in Harris has a meager 37% approval number.
His embarrassed supporters console themselves that their intentions were good.
Their vote helped make history.
But for Obama himself, there is no road back to the charisma and political capital he enjoyed on his inauguration day.
Amen.
With a couple of exclamation points.
And it is illustrated by the fact that Obama's on television multiple times a day and has been trying to recapture that.
In fact, he's out trying to energize his base to recapture the same feeling they had during the campaign of 08.
And they can't because the bloom is off the rose.
His embarrassed supporters console themselves that their intentions were good.
Their vote helped make history, but there's no road back.
How is it?
How is it that Barack Obama could step into the presidency with an air of inevitability and then in less than two years find himself unwelcome at the campaign rallies of many of his fellow Democrats?
This is not hard for me to answer.
But I shall read it to you as Shelby Steele does.
He writes, The first answer is well known.
His policy making has been grandiose, thoughtless, and bullying.
His health care bill was ambitious to the point of destructiveness.
Finally, so chaotic that today no citizen knows where they stand in relation to it.
His financial reform bill seems little more than a short-sighted scapegoating of Wall Street.
In Forenbalese, he has failed to articulate a role for America in the world.
Don't know why we do what we do in foreign affairs.
George W. Bush at least made a valiant stab at American rationale, democratization, but with Obama, there's nothing.
But Barack Obama is not an other so much as he is a child of the 60s.
His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of the new counterculture American identity.
And this new American identity and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned is grounded in a remarkable irony.
Bad faith in America as virtue itself.
Read that again.
Bad faith in America as virtue.
Bingo!
Your country is flawed.
Your country is immoral.
Your country is unjust for being led by someone who believes this at his core.
The 60s counterculture identity is grounded in a remarkable irony.
Bad faith in America as virtue itself.
Bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America.
Bad faith in all of that.
All of that is not just bad faith, it's corrupt to the children of the 60s, one of them now president.
So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency.
He's simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity.
When he bows to foreign leaders, he's not displaying otherness, but rather the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.
Isn't that what we all instinctively felt?
Obama, by bowing, is essentially apologizing.
In bowing to tyrants and dictators, Obama is acknowledging that he agrees with them that America is guilty, is acknowledging its own capacity for evil.
All this would be enough to explain the disillusionment with this president and with the Democrat Party that he leads, but there is also a deeper disjunction.
There is an otherness about Obama, the sense that he is somehow not truly American.
Birthers doubt that he was born on American soil.
Others believe that he is secretly a Muslim or in quiet sympatico with his old buddies, Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, now icons of American radicalism.
Bad faith in America became virtuous in the 60s.
Another way of saying this is hating America.
Blaming America became virtuous in the 60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies.
The segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the imperialism of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores, and so on.
The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the 60s that America was characterologically evil.
By virtue of its character, America was evil.
I don't know about you, but I've always believed Obama felt this.
All I've ever needed to see is who he's hung around.
To this day, I am amazed that people continue to write.
People on our side continue to write how they were shocked or are shocked to see Obama revealing his true identity.
He's not what he said he was going to be in his inaugural address.
He's not what he said he was going to be during the campaign.
And I scratch my head and say, why are these smart people two years late in seeing what was plain as day in front of their very face?
We've got a radical who's got a chip on his shoulder about this country.
This country is evil, unjust, immoral, and he's here to get even with it.
Maybe it's hard to get your arms around.
Maybe it's hard to actually think somebody like that's been elected, but it was without question the case.
And so now we have somebody who believes that America is of evil character.
Thus, the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad faith in America and its institutions through the presumption that evil was America's natural default position.
And if that's the natural default position of America, that's the starting point for making us decent and goodness and whole.
Among today's liberal elite, bad faith in America is a sophistication, a kind of hypnosis.
More importantly, it's the perfect formula for political and governmental power.
It rationalizes power in the name of intervening against evil.
And when you're intervening against evil, you have the right to do anything including shred the Constitution.
When you're fighting evil, there are no rules.
You can do whatever you must do.
Those are my words I have added here to Dr. Steele.
I will use the government to intervene against evil tendencies of American life.
Economic inequality, structural racism and sexism, corporate greed, neglect of the environment, and so on.
So I need your vote.
That's what Obama did.
I need your vote to make this country fair again.
I need your vote to make this country moral again.
I need your vote to get rid of this nation's basic evil.
That's what elected him.
I got to take a break.
We'll be right back after this with much more.
Don't go away.
I believe I was the first to note, I was the first of many things, but I was the first to note that Barack Obama is the first post-American president.
And make no mistake, Barack Obama is very happy about what he's done to the country.
Very happy.
He sees himself as Reverend Wright's chicken that's come home to roost.
Very happy about it.
Now, back to Mr. Steele.
There is a limit to bad faith as power, and Obama and the Democrat Party may have not reached that limit.
The great weakness of bad faith is that it allows American exceptionalism as a rationale for power.
It disallows it.
There's no room for it.
It puts Obama, the Democrats, in the position of forever redeeming a fallen nation rather than leaving a great one.
They bet on America's characterological evil and not on America's sense of fairness, generosity, or ingenuity.
Bingo!
Bingo.
Obama and the Democrats are forever redeeming a fallen nation rather than leading a great one.
And when bad faith is your framework, as in Mushel, never being proud of her country until it supported her husband, then you become more a national scold than a real leader.
You lead out of a feeling that your opposition is really only the latest incarnation of that old evil that you always knew was there, like the Tea Party.
The Tea Party is the embodiment of the old evil of America.
The Tea Party embodies all the racism, the sexism, the bigotry, the homophobia that is this nation.
That's why they are the enemy.
But the Tea Party is a reaction to a president who seems not to fully trust the fundamental decency of the American people, but instead looks at the American people as indecent.
The Tea Party is a reaction to Obama, who doesn't trust the decency of people because he doesn't see it.
He doesn't believe this country has decency.
The Tea Party fills a void left open by Obama and his ethos of bad faith.
And that void is being filled big time, and it will be seen as such on Tuesday.
Aren't the Tea Partiers and their many fellow travelers simply saying that American exceptionalism is not racism?
And they are offended.
We are all offended that Obama's view of America is us as indecent, immoral, and unjust.
We will not tolerate it.
That is not our country, and that is not who we are.
And we're not going to put up any longer with being characterized that way.
And it starts Tuesday.
The New York Times today, very sad, ladies and gentlemen, they got polling data.
Women, independents, in fact, the Obama base is abandoning him in droves in their polling data.