All Episodes
Previous Next
March 16, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:33
March 16, 2012, Friday, Hour #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
And we're back, the final hour.
Open line Friday.
Great to have you here, folks.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line.
One big opportunity for those of you on the phones to have a question asked and answered.
Or any comment you want to you think something should be discussed on this program but isn't, give it a try.
800-282-2882 and the email address L Rushbow at EIB net.com.
You know, speaking of Twitter, and I I have been asked to remind you that if you wish to follow me on Twitter, there are two handles that we've set up.
At Limbaugh is one, at Rush Limbaugh is the other.
No space between Rush and Limbaugh.
So, at Limbaugh or at Rush Limbaugh.
And there are a bunch of fakes out there, as you can well imagine.
The two legitimate ones are at Limbaugh and at Rush Limbaugh with no space between the two names.
and I Obama or whoever, the intern who tweets for him, just tweeted the following.
I hear patients in the hospital say, Thank goodness health care reform passed all the time.
Now does anybody really believe that?
The president just tweets that he hears patients in the hospital say, Thank goodness health care reform passed all the time.
Can anybody name one way in which somebody in the hospital is benefiting from Obamacare at this moment?
There is only one way, and it's not good, by the way.
There's only one way.
If somebody in the hospital is an idiot, and they're ending up somehow they're not paying for it, they might believe that Obamacare has been implemented.
No, no, I guarantee you there are a number of people who think Obamacare equals free for them.
But if if they're you know, unless they're children under the age of 26 who are still on their parents' insurance plan.
Does anybody really believe anybody in the hospital that thank God for Obamacare?
It's all part of the re-election campaign.
It's all campaign.
It's how they try to create this.
It's right a Hugo Chavez handbook, by the way.
All great father, all great protector.
Obama has made it possible for me to be in the hospital.
Thank God for Obamacare.
It's all part of the mix.
Have you seen this story?
Adam Eugene Cox, 33 pleaded guilty on Tuesday to threatening to kill Joe Arpayo and his family.
The Maricopa County Sheriff.
Adam Eugene Cox, originally arrested on January 27th as the main suspect in an Arpayo death threat investigation that began on the internet.
Cox's threats read in part, I plan to kill Arpayo first.
He'll be filled with a thousand bullet holes before the year is out.
I promise you this.
He won't screw with Obama, only he didn't say screw.
He'll be buried ten feet under his whole family will be murdered along with him.
Cox's postings indicated he's an avid Obama supporter.
That Arpayo's investigation into the legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate may be behind his threat.
Now this happened in Arizona.
Arizona was the scene of the tragic shooting of Gabriel Giffords and others.
Well, it was just that was just a year ago, right?
Notice that this is this is a story from from KTR Radio.
But it's not just them, the whole media out there.
Well, they're covering KTR, KTAR is covering it in Phoenix, but outside of that, you notice how little coverage this has gotten from the mainstream media.
Can you imagine if somebody had threatened to kill take your pick?
And it was learned that they were avid supporters of Sarah Palin.
You think you'd hear about it?
you think it'd be all over the news?
And do you think the media would go try to find evidence on Sarah Palin's Facebook page of what could have inspired this insane lunatic to go try to kill somebody?
Here you have an avid Obama supporter.
Now the media, when Gabriel Giffords was shot, blamed Palin, and then they next tried to blame me.
And neither of us, of course, had anything to do with it.
The lunatic was not even political.
And now we have an absolute political lunatic, a big supporter of Obama's, threatening to kill Joe Arpaio and his family and the media's asleep.
They're not interested.
The PERP is an Obama supporter.
Yeah, just imagine if it were a conservative threatening a prominent Arizona liberal with death.
And they can track it back, say Sarah Palin or uh some other prominent conservative.
And something else we should add.
Obama went out to Arizona and made this big pitch for civility.
And we must stop talking about each other this way.
And we must we must all now be nice.
And uh we we must find ways to bridge the partisan divide.
Everybody was saying, well, isn't that what you promised to do in your campaign?
But just wanted to point it out, folks, because it's not getting any coverage outside of uh outside of Phoenix.
Let's see.
Um, this see, I told you so.
Audio soundbite time.
We've had a couple today.
Why not add a third?
June 14th, 2011.
Me on this program behind this golden EIB microphone.
What their campaign is going to be, and I told you this when they got into Washington, they discovered it was far worse than they even knew.
I've been telling the members of this audience, if you're new, that one of the things Obama's gonna say is, oh, this economy.
Why haven't our policies worked?
Because we didn't know how bad it was.
The Bush people, nobody told us how bad it was.
It's worse than we ever knew.
Our policies are just now starting to work.
They would have worked much sooner if people would have been honest with us.
Well, we didn't know how bad it was, so our policies are late getting started.
And that's exactly what they're doing.
Last night, on his campaign website at Barack Obama.com, Obama released a new campaign ad in the form of a 17-minute movie.
And we have a portion of the movie, uh, David Axelrod, you'll hear here, uh, with Chicago mayor Rom Emanuel and the and a narrator is Tom Hanks.
What was described in that meeting was an economic crisis beyond anything anybody had imagined you had people telling you that the auto industry was literally days from collapse.
Christy Romer, the incoming head of the Council of Economic Advisors, said Mr. President, this will be as deep as anything we've experienced since the Great Depression.
And millions of people have gonna lose their jobs.
Not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt had so much fallen on the shoulders of one president.
Oh my god.
Oh, jeez.
Oh, go!
Oh!
Can you get any syrupy?
Any more syrupy.
Not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt had so much fallen on the shoulders of one president.
I'm telling folks, I just I know these people.
I know them as well as they know themselves when it comes to their politics.
And so this is what they're setting up.
That's just thirty seconds out of the seventeen minute movie.
So you can see, yes, it's oh much worse than we thought.
Much worse.
They didn't tell us.
We didn't discover until it was too late.
Our stimulus should have been bigger.
We need to spend even more to fix these problems.
Half my brain tied Behind my back just to make it fair.
And as always, talent.
Much more than I even need, really.
On lawn from God.
Back to the phones to Fort Walton Beach, Florida.
This is Paul.
Glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to the program.
A pleasure to speak with you, Rush.
Thank you.
Uh the um primaries so far have conclusively shown that uh Governor Romney has a major Southern problem.
Out of six Southern states that have uh held primaries, uh Senator Santorum has won four, uh Speaker Gingrich has won one, and uh Governor Romney has won one.
And the one that Romney won was Virginia, where uh Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum weren't even on the ballot.
That's true.
And uh that's a story all in itself.
But uh if we just look at the uh um at the vote totals in the in the six Southern states, uh well, let's say five, and uh not worry about Virginia since Newton and Rick weren't present for one reason or another.
Um Governor Romney's um um percentage of the vote ranged from a low of twenty-six percent in Georgia to a high of thirty-one percent in Mississippi.
Now that's consistency.
And the um non-Romney vote ranged from uh a low of sixty-six percent in Mississippi to uh to a high of seventy-three percent in Georgia.
So this this goes beyond being a problem.
This is uh this is uh almost a deal breaker, uh, because if Governor Romney becomes the Republican nominee, uh uh since 1984, no Republican has been elected president without sweeping the Southern states.
I'm talking about the eleven contiguous Southern states that are traditionally considered the South.
Yes.
And uh also the last Republican be elected president who lost more than one Southern state was Richard Nixon in nineteen sixty-eight.
So we're looking at a major historical trend here that Governor Romney would have to reverse unless he were to uh really pick up the pace in the South, and there's no indication he's gonna do that.
Well, let me share with you something I just saw today.
Where did I see this?
I think it was from the John Locke uh foundation blog in North Carolina.
I don't have it in front.
We're just looking for it while you were speaking.
I thought I had printed it out, but I didn't.
So I gotta do this off the top of my head.
But that's a pretty good place.
And I think I've got this down, Pat.
Here's the theory.
The theory is that the swing state in this election is going to be North Carolina, that Obama cannot win without no matter what else he does.
Now just follow me on this.
I'm not saying I I'm just saying what's out there.
That's the reason Obama's headed in there every other day.
That's why the convention is there.
They won it in uh in 08, but it they're having problems now.
And furthermore, the theory goes that this election is going to turn on 45,000 people in the Raleigh Durham, what is called a triangle area.
These 45,000 people are upper middle class families that make 75,000 dollars a year and they are apolitical.
They're not committed Democrats or Republicans, but the way they line up is how this election is going to turn out, and the theory that's espoused in this piece is that the only Republican these people are gonna vote for is Mitt Romney.
Without giving you all the detailed reasons, it has to do with the fact that they're not political.
It's not that they're moderate, it's just that they're apolitical.
But if at the time something comes along, and if, for example, the social issues are being discussed, whoever they perceive as being most aggressive on they'll vote against whoever they perceive being most aggressive on the vote against these are people that um they're they're their hands up, they distrust politicians and political people, and for whatever reason.
Now during the break, I'm gonna print this out and I'm gonna get all the answers to the questions that you have as you listen to me explain this.
But um uh with all due respect to the authors of the study that you referenced, uh the uh overwhelming um uh results of the primaries were uh um Governor Romney's high was thirty-one percent, and uh he's in the high sixties and low seventies in in non-Romney votes, which seem to refute the thesis of the study that uh that everything hinges on North Carolina.
Plus, remember uh uh Senator McCain and in his losing effort in 2008 lost three Southern states, uh Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.
So uh what happened to Senator McCain in the 2008 election verifies, okay, what I just said about uh uh the Republican candidate to have a realistic chance of being elected president has to sweep the South.
Uh well, this piece is from the American Spectator, but they quote research from John Locke Foundation.
It's an American Spectator article.
And I think, as I as I'm watching Obama and the Democrats, they know something that we don't, and the and the fact that Obama is in there all the time and Michelle is in there, everybody talks about Ohio and and some of these other battlegrounds.
I think North Carolina's the state.
That's why they were flipped for a wig when the when the governor decided she wasn't gonna run.
When Beverly Purdue said she was not going to seek re-election, that panicked them in the White House.
And uh the Southern I don't dispute what you're saying at all about Romney's performance in these southern states of the primaries here.
Um but it it's gonna be it's he's gonna get better than 31 percent when the general comes around and and Republicans are voting against Obama as much as they're voting for Romney or anybody else.
Well, he'll get more than 31 percent, but the problem is the the historical trend going back 44 years is that the Republican nominee must sweep the South or at the most lose one state.
But that's the point.
This is that that's the point of this piece in the spectrum.
Throw that out.
When has it ever been that North Carolina mounted that mattered as much?
It never has well the Democrats are acting on on the subject we're just talking about is that the South is the key.
It is the doorway to the president's presidency for the Republican nominee, and Governor Romney is the least electable of all the Republican candidates in the current field to carry the.
Yeah, but see, I you're not uh we're not communicating.
What I'm telling you that this piece, maybe I'm sure you disagree with the piece, and feel free to.
I'm not trying to tell you it's uh it's accurate.
I'm just sharing with you something out there that contravenes the uh age-old statistical data that you are citing, and this piece says throw all that out that it's North Carolina and it's 45,000 highly educated employees that make an average salary of 75 grand.
They work in research triangle park, their counterparts are in Charlotte, and they're a hundred percent Democrat.
There it's there has been a shift, political population shift in North Carolina.
So the question for November will be this.
This is from the piece.
Who can reach out to these educated upscale people who are going to be the deciding voters in North Carolina that are going to decide the election?
The answer for Republicans is very clear.
Mitt Romney's main appeal is to those upscale voters.
Now I'm telling you this because Paul that the Republican hierarchy believes this, and that is why they are so tied to Romney is because of the kind of people he'll get voting for him from where.
I'm just saying.
And welcome back.
Great to have you here on Open Line Friday.
Paul in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.
I know you're still out there.
The original piece from which I was Xiring is in The American Spectators by William Tucker.
It's out yesterday.
It's called Election Year Math.
And it's it prints out to four pages.
Basically, Tucker says it's all going to come down to three states that went for Obama last time.
They are North Carolina.
Where'd they go?
North Carolina, uh, Colorado, and Virginia.
Those are the three states according to William Tucker's election year math, North Carolina, Virginia, and Colorado.
Now, the actual piece that I was exerting is entitled The Final and Most Important Presidential Battleground North Carolina, also posted yesterday by Teresa Cervaceus, the Mech Deck blog in Charlotte.
And she starts out by saying the American Spectator piece is dead on.
Few people fully realize how pivotal North Carolina is to Obama's re-election.
North Carolina will likely be the most pivotal battleground state in the nation this year, or one among just three.
And there's a map that accompanies this piece.
We'll link to this at Rush Limbaugh.com today so you can see it yourself.
We'll link to this piece in William Tucker's election year math and American Spectator.
If Obama wins, all of the states that John Kerry, who by the way served in Vietnam, if Obama wins all the states that John Kerry won in 2004, all he needs to get to 269 electoral votes is North Carolina, Virginia or North Carolina and Colorado.
Now, according to this map, if Obama wins all the states carry one in 2004, which, as you can see, is almost guaranteed to happen given how liberal they are.
So there's a big assumption here.
The assumption in this piece is that Obama's going to win everything that carry one in 2004.
He's one electoral vote short at 269.
So he's going to need either North Carolina, Virginia or North Carolina and Colorado.
And Tara Cervaceus writes here that the final background is a battleground likely to be North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado.
Democrats figured this out long ago.
That's why they're holding their convention in Charlotte.
The Spectator article says.
Okay, so who in North Carolina will decide which way the country goes and whether Obama is shown the exit?
And from the Spectator piece, the more than 45,000 highly educated employees that make an average salary of $75,000 and work in Research Triangle Park.
And, of course, their counterparts in Charlotte.
Now, if I may pause for a moment to make a brief observation.
Now that these 45,000 highly educated people know how important they are, all bets are off.
That's the one thing about reporting this.
It's sort of like my big problem with independence.
I don't have a problem with independence personally.
But every year we're told that independence is going to determine who wins.
Not the 40% that go Democrat, the 40% that go Republican.
We're told that people that haven't made up their minds.
We're told that people who aren't partisan.
We're told that people who are moderate, say they are open-minded.
I have rejected this.
It has bothered me ever since I've been old enough to understand what this is.
I think partisan, motivated, energetic, enthusiastic people determine who wins elections.
And therefore, whoever can go convince most of the independents to join them is going to win.
Now, the problem with that is that the independents know this.
And so the independents have a little arrogance about them sometimes.
They think, well, we're the ones that really count.
So they're the ones that hold up.
Okay, who's going to give me the most is a possibility.
And that breaks down the whole system.
When the vote for President Earning is determined on who's going to give me the most.
Now, we've got a piece, and I am making this the biggest piece in the country today, because I am talking about it.
This whole country is now going to know that there is a theory that 45,000 people who work at Research Triangle Park are going to Determine who the president is.
Whether that's true or not, these 45,000 people now might think that it's up to them.
So what are they going to demand?
You know, now that this has been publicized, every political person in the world is going to be making tracks.
They already are, is the point of the piece.
The Democrats already are.
The Democrats are already in North Carolina, in there and out of there as often as they can get.
Convention in Charlotte, and they're wooing and working on these people at work at this place.
But the counterparts over in Charlotte, let's not forget about them for a second.
And here's something that's not said in the article.
The reason that just 45,000 voters in the triangle now have such power is because of the roughly 100,000 new black voters, the Charlotte area has picked up over the last decade.
Those are solid Democrat voters.
They turned North Carolina from red in presidential elections to purple, and they set it up to tilt.
These hundred thousand new arrivals in Charlotte.
That's how much Charlotte's population has grown.
100,000 new black voters has turned the state from red to blue.
Actually, purple.
Now it is the young professionals over in Research Triangle Park who will either go along with them or provide the counter.
Continuing further, these newly successful people, these 45,000 highly educated employees at Research Triangle Park, they have become the pivotal block that swings the state of North Carolina between Republican and Democrats.
They are not committed to either party.
This is what I was telling you last half hour.
They are not committed to either party.
They're not terribly involved with social issues.
Their main worry is the economy.
If Republicans make birth control and separation of church and state the major issue, they'll go Democratic.
If the Democrats mess up the economy, produce $4.50 gallon gas, 8.3% unemployment, they'll swing Republican.
They will probably decide the 2012 election.
Now I am always leery of anybody who tells Republicans to steer away from social issues because what I know is they secure victory.
So I don't want you to think that I sign on to this.
To me, it's a little bit much to sit here and accept that the votes of 45,000 people are going to swing this presidential race.
It could happen, but now that they know it, this is like turning a camera on them.
When you when you take a television camera somewhere, you forever alter what otherwise would normally happen there.
You put a TV camera on a street corner, and I guarantee everybody starts playing to it.
Okay, same thing.
These 45,000 people have now been told that they are going to determine who the next president is.
Can you imagine how that is going to affect them?
And can you imagine the kind of targets they're going to be?
This I in fact I think the story kind of blows the whole theory now since this cannot happen under the radar.
Now that everybody knows or is going to suspect or a lot of people are going to operate under the theory that these 45,000 people determine it, it's everything that was natural about this is gone now.
It's all fake, phony contrived.
Now, let me keep reading though from the piece.
Who is the man, William Tucker in the Spectator, says Republicans should send to fight the fight.
That would be Mitt Romney, hands down, says the spectator.
An interesting point of view again, says uh this blogger for a hard right publication.
American Spectator is a conservative publication.
It is not hard right, it's mainstream conservative.
So the question for November will be this: who can reach out to these educated upscale people who are going to be the deciding votes in the few states they're going to decide the election?
The answer for Republicans is very clear.
Mitt Romney's main appeal is to these upscale voters in every primary.
He has run best in urban and suburban areas.
He appeals to people with a college education.
He appeals to women.
He appeals to the more affluent.
These voters are not scared by his Mormonism, but they are put off by social issues and they are worried about the economy.
Romney scores well on all counts.
Now all you've got to do is watch North Carolina polls to figure out which way this thing's going to go.
Well, as I say, I I think now that the spotlight is on these 45,000 people, they're not going to behave naturally anymore.
I I think that this has a tendency now to forever alter the natural state these people are in.
Imagine you were one of these 45,000.
And the most listened to radio talk show in the country has just told the world that you are going to determine who is going to win the presidency.
Well, all pretense at normalcy is over.
These people are no longer living anonymously.
So I don't know if the theory is going to hold up now.
The whole point here is that throw everything out.
This is Mr. Tucker's theory.
Throw all this stuff out about Ohio and Florida being swing states, throw all of that, throw all this Southern stuff out.
Of course, Romney's not going to lose the South once he's the nominee.
If he is, the Republican nominee is going to win the South.
This is absurd to uh to uh think otherwise.
I gotta take a break here.
Brief time out, sit tight, we'll be back and continue after this.
Now I should point out the original piece by William Tucker, Election Year Math, focuses on three states.
North Carolina is one of them.
The blogger who culls pieces from the election year math piece by William Tucker, who I also read from, focuses much more on North Carolina because she is in Charlotte.
She's local.
So she focuses much more on what he says about North Carolina, but his piece doesn't focus on North Carolina as much as the blog does.
And we'll link to both of them at RushlandBoy.com.
But again, now this all assumes, and there's so many assumptions here, and they're all risky.
It all assumes that North Carolina ends up being the key.
And if Romney cannot win the base in these states, these 45,000 won't matter.
And there are a lot of people.
Romney apparently is uh where is it?
Illinois somewhere.
I don't know.
He's running some ads here, and I've I've gotten emails today from people who are just fed up.
They're tired of the never-ending parade of negative ads Romney's running.
I'm I'm just sharing with you what I'm getting.
Some of these negative ads are starting to turn people off.
They're not all that effective.
So Romney is going to have to win the base before these 45,000 matter.
It's going to have to get the base out in North Carolina for those 45,000.
This is my argument.
Every time people tell us we got to focus on the independence.
The independents are fine and dandy, but if you don't get your base out, and how do you do that?
You'd get them out with your core principles.
You get them out with boldness and confidence and good cheer.
Uh uh enthusiasm.
If you can't get your base out, you get every independent voter in the world, and you're not going to win.
And that's focusing on independence first is the way to lose this.
But that's what the Republican establishment does.
They're embarrassed of the Republican base.
So in addition to that, I uh it's not a question of Romney winning or losing a South.
He's gonna win the South, but he needs to crush people there to offset popular vote elsewhere.
Virginia and North Carolina are less reliable.
He's Romney's gonna need the base to turn out big in November for these 45,000 in North Carolina to matter to be a factor, or for the independence to be a factor.
Uh if if anybody wants to take anything away from this, 45,000 equals, as far as I'm concerned, the independence.
If you don't get your base out, all the rest of it's academic.
got to get your base.
That's why Obama's doing all this crazy Keystone pipeline stuff and his green energy stuff, is because he knows that's what his base wants to hear.
Yeah, this contraception nonsense that the Democrats have been playing, this supposed Republican war on women.
That's all Obama trying to get his base whipped up.
All this nonsense for the past two weeks on me.
Well, it is about getting rid of me, but it's also about firming up his base.
That's all he's doing.
Because he's in trouble with his base.
He's in trouble with women.
He's in trouble everywhere.
Their panic has set in the White House.
Don't doubt me on this.
And they know they don't have a prayer if they can't get his base back, and that's what they're trying to do.
And we're going to make the same mistake if we try to go after independence first.
We'll see you Monday.
▲
Export Selection