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April 10, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:03
April 10, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Time Text
I don't even know why we bother to have elections.
I look at these polls and Obama can't lose.
His approval number polls are in a tank, but when it's up against Romney or Santorum, well, he can't lose.
Hi, folks, welcome back.
Rick Santorum has just suspended his campaign.
I I think the reason for suspending the campaign is it allows you to continue to raise money to pay off your debt.
But the campaign of Santorum's been suspended.
God bless him.
I don't know why.
I I don't know if he had uh internal polling numbers that looked bad in Pennsylvania.
I don't know if it's uh money.
I don't know if it's the accumulation of pressure on uh on him from the establishment.
It's probably a combination of, you know, these these uh I don't know, some people say unprecedented in a Republican primary negative campaign ads have clearly worked.
They drove Newt out, they drove others out.
Uh of course the women took care of Herman Cain.
Uh let's see what else.
The attack ads on Santorum have been plentiful and all of it.
Now, here's what happens next, folks.
Here's what happened.
By the way, great to have you back.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program is 800-282-2882.
So the Republican establishment, which has wanted Romney from the beginning.
Don't forget now, I want to go back and relive this from last summer, when the intensity really kicked in.
This was always to me a very curious Republican primary.
You've heard the old adage that in primary campaigns, candidates run to shore up their base.
Which in Romney or Santorum or Rick Pearl, whoever on the Republican side, which means you run to the right, you shore up the conservatives, you get them, and then after you've done that, the conventional wisdom.
The theory is espoused by political consultants since the burning bush is that you then move to the center after you've secured your base, you move to the middle, and then you go after the precious independence, and you add them to the base that you have shorn up by virtue of your victory in the primaries, and that carries you to victory.
What was always striking to me about this Republican primary is that the establishment set out from the get-go to shore up the moderates first to win this nomination with moderate Republican votes, not conservative Republican votes.
Do not doubt me when I tell you, the Republican establishment is not happy, and we've talked about this, I don't know how many times before, how many years Republican establishment is embarrassed of many conservatives, both conservative media people, conservative uh voters, they're embarrassed of them.
I'm talking about the New York Washington corridor Republican establishment types, just embarrass them.
So it was remarkable.
And and they uh they they had their candidate, which was Romney, and then all the others, which were conservatives, who ended up splitting the conservative primary vote.
And to many people, this was extremely frustrating for well, a host of reasons.
But if you go back and look at what happened in the 2010 midterms, that was that that was a landslide victory.
And it wasn't centered around a candidate.
It was centered around an idea.
And the idea was that conservatism and limited government and individual liberty and freedom were what make this country great and what will save this country.
And so the Tea Party came to life.
People who had never been in politics before, people who had never been to a town hall meeting were appalled, aghast, frightened what they saw happening to the country via the policies of Obama.
So they started getting involved.
A name for them was created called the Tea Party.
And they started showing up at town hall meetings, and they became the animating force of the Republican Party.
They didn't have a leader.
They were made up of political amateurs.
And when the 20 turn 2010 midterms came along, the Democrat Party suffered a landslide defeat almost unprecedented.
Now it was never reported that way because obviously the media is not going to tell a truth about the shellacking of Democrats got, but they lost over 700 elected offices from the federal level through the state, down to town, community, township, wherever.
It was a shellacking.
It was then thus expected that a Republican presidential nominee would arise from this vast movement and give a leadership face to the Tea Party in the person of whoever would adopt those policies and garner that
support, and then that person would go on to become the nominee and then continue on the basis of ideas.
and ideology, the same things that secured this massive landslide victory in the midterms in 2010 into the general election for president this year.
But that didn't happen.
Instead the Republican establishment made no effort to secure the support of the Tea Party and instead stayed within itself and opted to secure the nomination with a with a with a strategy that emphasized moderate candidates over conservative candidates.
And that was frustrat I can't tell you how that frustrated a lot of people who had such high hopes people had because of the Tea Party and its success in 2010 people had the the greatest of hopes and expectations that that would continue into the presidential year and be another shellacking all the way from top to bottom of the ballot with victory in the White House.
And now that hasn't happened.
And so there is great disappointment.
And something else that's happened in the process of this primary campaign is that supporters of the more conservative candidates in the primary have seen ads run against their candidate, these negative ads, torch ads, and they're mad.
like Gingrich.
Gingrich was the was livid after the negative campaign run against him in Iowa was livid.
He became obsessed with destroying Romney became obsessed with denying Romney the nomination didn't matter who else got it if it wasn't going to be him it wasn't going to be Romney.
Well time flew by and now Newt is saying that he'll do what's necessary to help Romney get elected.
So many people are looking at this I'm not I'm not I'm just trying to accurately describe the thinking and the feelings of a lot of people this is I'm not I'm not speaking myself per se here.
I'm just recognizing for those of you that are not intimately involved in this tell you there is a degree of of sadness and disappointment over this of the lost opportunity it's perceived to be up against what we're up against.
So where does that leave us it leaves us now where the establishment candidate is the nominee.
But even I can't give you a specific timeframe of this it was in the last month or two I remember remember having the stories here there were times what was it Wisconsin or Illinois some state If Romney didn't win it, then it was it was over.
The establishment was already getting ready to throw Romney overboard and say the hell with this, let's look at 2016.
There were a number of instances in the primary where the uh the the preferred winner, Romney, was having so much trouble locking it up that the establishment was pulling its hair out.
Oh my God, if he can't win, oh geez, well, we've free the we need a new remember the story.
We need we may have to go to the convention to get a new candidate.
Oh, yeah.
Well, Jeb Bush, they were trying to hope Jeb will you come in?
We so even now there is there are lingering, I don't know what this doubts, but but there's a there's a level of insecurity on the Republican establishment side about where we are.
So I just want to prepare you people for something.
Just want to prepare you.
Now I don't even know if I want to do it now.
Because I don't want to be accused of throwing negativism on this pile right now.
I'm not I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna reserve this for a while.
But it's a pretty big point as to as to what is possible down the road here given various outcomes.
I'm not trying to be sneaky or mean spirited by taunting you and teasing you here and then pulling it back.
I'm not I'm not I'm using my best judgment here in uh in in withholding this.
But um I don't know who the beep's gonna be.
I have no clue who the Veeps gonna be.
Now, Chris Christie, who many people are touting is the VEEP now.
Christie is out there.
I don't know if we've got the audio of this or not, but Christie is out there really, really letting welfare recipients have it.
He is really letting welfare recipients have it.
And it's it's it's gonna be eaten up by a lot of let me in fact.
Let me find out.
I got so many stacks here that have the here it is.
Here it is.
These stacks give birth to themselves during the course they just grow and end up in different places.
Here we go.
This is from uh uh New Jersey.com.
Headline, Governor Christie, nation turning into people sitting on a couch waiting for their next government check.
Governor Chris Christie said the country's becoming a paternalistic entitlement society this morning in a speech at a conservative conference headed by former President Bush, addressing Bush, and we got some Bush subites coming up by the way.
Addressing Bush and other National Republicans, Christie said he has not seen a less optimistic period in the country in his lifetime.
Government's telling him to stop dreaming, governments telling people to stop striving that we'll take care of you.
We're turning into a paternalistic entitlement society, and that that will not just bankrupt us financially, it'll bankrupt us morally.
We'll have a bunch of people sitting on a couch waiting for their next government check, Christie said.
Well, he's right.
He's just maybe a little late in coming to this uh observation, because it's been going on for quite a while here.
For 50 years, this has been the Democrat agenda.
He's just succinctly nailed it here.
But it's not we're going to have.
We got it now.
There's lots of couches out there, folks.
Lots of people on them.
To the phones we go.
Livonia, Michigan.
This is Ken.
Glad you waited, sir.
Great to have you on the EIB Network.
Yeah, thanks for taking my call, Rush.
Yeah, um, I just wanted to comment that the suspension of the campaign by Rick Santorum is really a uh sad day for America.
It's a sad day for those of us that believe in America, believe in the Constitution, uh, want to get back to the way our country is supposed to be run.
Um what concerns me, Rush, now, when we look at our economy and how things fell apart, uh decisions made by Democrats and Rhino Republicans, uh moderate Republicans, uh, led to our uh country's collapse.
What is gonna happen now with Nett Romney?
I mean, here's a man that clearly just look at who has endorsed him, is not a conservative.
Um this is not going to be good for our country.
Um I feel that uh I I hope Rick Santorum reconsiders.
But if if we end up having a uh non-conservative running for president, uh unfortunately this is not a good thing.
Now, this thank you, Ken very much.
This is what I was just talking about.
Uh I know a lot of you out there uh I'm still getting emails.
I, you know, I really love you.
I really like you, but you really make me mad with your constant, you're you're your constant harping at Romney, which I've I've uh tried to not harp here.
I've I'm always challenged by the necessity being honest, and not be misleading about anything, but I'm under no illusions here that uh king maker or any of that.
I'm just I'm just telling I know what the high hopes were coming out of the 2010 midterms in the Tea Party and and everything.
The only thing I can tell you, Ken, is that uh Romney came by here in January, and I think it was the 13th, uh middle of the month, and I met with him after the show.
It was about 4.30.
Met with him for almost an hour, and he left here for a huge fundraiser here a mile down the road, mile and a half.
And during that conversation, he I mentioned this to you.
He said to me that he wouldn't be surprised if he ended up being a one-term president because he's got to shake things up.
This country can't go the direction it's going, or his children and grandchildren and nobody else's will have a future.
And in when he was talking about that, he sounds just like you and I. Uh you and me, sounds just like you and me when we talk about it.
He was very affirmative in his acknowledgement to me of the of the of the threats posed by Obama and the Democrats to this country.
If you had been in that conversation, you would not have doubted his conservatism at that moment.
But then you would read where he has said in years past, ugh, I'm not a conservative, I'm not one of these, and you'd scratch your head.
I'm not saying it wiped any of those other instances out.
I'm just telling you that that day, he sounded like me.
He was fairly echoing the fears I have about what's in store for this country if the Democrats are not stopped.
This transformation, this belief that our founding was unjust and immoral, and we've had a a fraudulent country for 200 plus years, that it's a country that was structured by the rich for the rich at the expense of everybody else,
and everybody was just left to fend for themselves, and the founders knew that most people couldn't fend for themselves, and that was the way that the founders kept all the goodies for themselves and their family and others in their socioeconomic class that was all part of this is what Obama believes, and that it's finally taken 200 plus years, but the evidence of the failure of the founding of this country is now clear.
And Obama is the right man at the right time to finally fix it.
And he's doing it by taking away everything from the rich that he can and ostensibly redistributing it and giving it to all the people who have been shafted and screwed since the founding of the country.
And he's gonna do that by growing government and making it the distribution center for all that's fair and just economically and politically and socially.
and Romney that day spoke Made it sound like he understood this, agreed with it, and also agreed that it has to stop.
Then the other day, uh what was some some I forget this it's off tip of my tongue here.
Somebody said something offensive and Obama condemned, and Romney in five minutes joined in a condemning it too.
And I said, No, no, I'm just like, no, no.
It was it was clearly pandering.
I don't remember what it was.
It was just last week.
He condemned somebody that Obama condemned because they had done something or said something.
I forget what it was now.
I'm sure many of you are shouting at your radio, you remember what it was.
So anyway, uh now uh the establishment there there are no more excuses now.
Well, there are.
That's why I guess I want to know what the excuses are going to be if this doesn't go the way they have it planned.
If this doesn't pan out to big time electoral victory the way the establishment has it figured, then what will their excuse be?
And I think I know.
I think that if this campaign goes on and if it results in Obama winning, I think what the established is going to do is blame us.
I'm gonna blame us conservatives for once again being too rigid and too demanding and too narrow and being unrealistic and all this, and telling us that we're the reason that Obama won.
If we'd have just gotten behind it so forth, which of course will be bogus.
Uh it's Augusta guy that was Augusta National not admitting women.
That's what it was.
Obama hyped on it and yeah.
Okay, be right back.
Santorum, I just gave a little bit of a listen.
Great, great speech that he's giving here.
We'll have audio sound bites, hopefully a few of them before the end of the program today.
Definitely uh tomorrow.
It's always the case.
Concession speeches, pressures off.
Uh doesn't matter what happens next, you're out of the race.
Media very unhappy because all these massive commercial buys are now over.
Romney will stop spending money.
Uh well, you guys have to start directing it at um at Obama now.
And Obama, by the way, can now focus everything on Romney.
One of the reasons I was in favor of this continuing to play out was to delay Obama's eventual uh onslaught, and whoever the nominee is, but now it's Romney, so that that will um that'll begin.
And we'll see.
It's gonna be fascinating to to uh the primaries are over.
Santorum is pulled out.
The only guy left out there is uh is Ron Paul.
So it will be uh fascinating, and we'll do this.
Fascinating to watch Romney and listen to the shape his campaign takes now.
How ideological will his campaign be?
Will it be rooted in conservatism?
He doesn't have to talk conservative anymore.
Will he continue to do so?
We will find out.
It uh won't take very long.
To the audio sound bites, George W. Bush.
This is the uh appearance today in New York at a George W. Bush Institute uh conference on taxes and economic growth.
That's where Christie showed up and told everybody that we're becoming a bunch of lazy sitting on the couch waiting for the next welfare check to come in.
That's what he said.
He said the country's becoming a paternalistic entitlement society at the Bush Institute.
Government's telling them to stop dreaming people, to stop striving.
We'll take care of you.
He's right, they are, but they've been doing that for 50 years.
We're turning into a paternalistic entitlement society.
It'll not just bankrupt us financially, it'll bankrupt us morally.
We'll have a bunch of people sitting on a couch waiting for their next government check.
He's right.
We already do.
One of the things I expect that um Obama will do will be to rename the Buffett rule to the Romney rule.
The rich not paying their fair share.
Get ready for this, folks.
It is going to be an all-out assault on the wealthy, as typified by Romney.
Occupy Wall Street will be reborn.
Occupy Wall Street is already being conceived out there in various states.
It's about ready to uh to to be born, to give birth.
And so it's you know it's it's time to put on the flak jackets.
It starts now.
Here's George W. Bush at his conference, this is uh in New York City today on taxes and economic growth.
If you raise taxes on the so-called rich, you're really raising taxes on the job creators.
And if the goal is private sector growth, you gotta recognize that the best way to create that growth is to leave capital in the treasuries of the job creators.
I wish they weren't called the Bush tax cuts.
They're called some other body tax cuts.
They're probably less likely to be raised.
If you raise taxes, you're taking money out of the pockets of consumers.
We trust people when it comes to spending their money, and so should the government.
George W. Bush, after three years shows up to defend his economic policies.
And laments that it's called the Bush tax cuts.
If he recalled anybody else's tax cuts, nobody wants to get rid of them.
He's right.
He's absolutely right.
He knows how despised and hated the media holds him.
How despising the media he is by the media, the left and so forth.
So anyway, he's out there, he's defending his stuff now.
Uh Donald Trump was on CNBC today with Joe Kernan, talking about the Paul Ryan budget, and and and Trump thinks it's catastrophic for the uh Republican Party.
Joe Kern says, Look, I disagreed with you initially.
When you said Ryan shouldn't have put out his budget plan, you thought the people take that budget and twist it around, use it, maybe is not what it is.
And exactly is exactly what's happened, Donald.
I like Paul Ryan.
And I'm not knocking anything about his plan.
I'm just saying the timing of this plan is potentially catastrophic for the Republicans.
The timing of the plan.
So back to CNBC's squawk box, Joe Kernan then got haul of got hold of Ryan.
He played Ryan that clip of Trump.
And Kernan then said, so Donald is cynical.
Maybe it's a realistic viewpoint.
Obama can lay in the weeds with a budget that got zero votes from either side.
He doesn't tell the American people any hard choices they're gonna have to make.
So you tell them.
You tell them the hard choices.
And Grandma and Grandpa think they're gonna be out in the snow starving after they read your budget.
Obama doesn't have a budget anybody paying any attention to, so his safe.
And you you're gonna make people think they're gonna be starving in the snow.
Well, this is a wise move, Congressman.
I think it's wise to be honest with the American people about the problems we have ahead of us.
I think it's the right thing to do is show leadership, put solutions on the table to avert a debt crisis.
So, yeah, I think the analysis is correct.
The president has chosen to punt, not to lead on this most pressing issue of our generation.
Wait for Republicans to offer their plan, then attack.
And that's his method to political success to the election.
I think people are gonna see through this.
You know, where I come from in a very swing area in America and Wisconsin, people want to be talked to like adults.
They want the facts, the truth, they want ideas and solutions.
They don't want to be painted to like children.
Well, then we're gonna have to start telling them about Obama's record, because that's the answer to this.
The answer to this is not to defend the Ryan budget.
That's minutia.
If we're gonna get into this, if we're gonna roll up the sleeves, the only target is Obama and his record.
That's all that matters.
And that's how you stay on offense.
I mentioned this last week.
I'm repeating it again.
His record must be the battlefield.
Because he can't defend it.
There's not one aspect of Obama's record that he can point to and say, want more of this?
Vote for me.
Nobody wants any more of it.
People have to be reminded.
He's running not as an incumbent.
Obama is running for office as somebody who hasn't been there yet.
Obama is trying to recreate the 2008 campaign.
There's a mess here.
This mess is 200 plus years old.
It doesn't work, and it hasn't worked.
And I'm the guy to fix it.
That's his campaign.
This is a country that has only cared about the people who can take care of themselves.
And most people can't take care of themselves because most people are victims of the people who can take care of themselves.
The people who can take care of themselves have exploited all these other poor saps that can't.
Well, I'm here for these poor saps.
I'm here to make sure you don't get trod on anymore.
I'm here to make sure you don't get disrespected.
I'm here to make sure that your money's not taken away from you.
I'm here to make sure you have just as much chance to get rich as these guys who've taken your money.
And he's going to run as somebody who is positioned to fix the 200 plus years of absolute disaster this country has been.
And it isn't going to be his disaster.
None of what he's done is going to even come up as far as he's concerned.
So it's going to be incumbent on the Republicans on Romney, on Ryan, whoever.
Obama's record.
And it's simple.
It's easy because it's all a failure.
Everything going wrong in this country, everything trending down is because of Barack Obama.
The previous 200 plus years have been the most successful in the history of the human race in terms of organizing a population into a nation.
This country the greatest ever because of its recognition and celebration of liberty and freedom.
and And the nature of our creation and the yearning of our natural spirit.
All of this led to the greatest nation in history that Barack Obama sees as essentially a crime.
A nation where there was never any social justice, a nation where there was never any economic fairness.
But he hasn't really done anything yet.
He's running not as the incumbent.
You'll be able to count on one hand the number of times Obama cites any of his so-called achievements.
One of them will be health care, and he'll have to lie about it.
Yeah, I gave health care to every American.
I reduced their premiums, and it came in saving money.
That's what he'll say.
And it's going to be up.
Republicans are roll up their sleeves.
Nope.
It didn't happen.
But that's going to require confrontation.
That's going to require competition.
That's going to require a lot of confidence.
Anyway, there's one more Paul Ryan bite here.
Joe Kernan on CNBC says Paul Krugman says that you have 4.6 trillion dollars.
Um it says here tax toes.
That I don't, is Paul Ryan cut anybody's tax toes?
Anyways, it i you says you you're gonna close loopholes to make up for the lost revenue.
And you haven't identified any loopholes.
So what Congressman Ryan, what are you ha you're you're spending 4.6 trillion dollars?
What how's your budget any different than anybody else's?
The problem, Joe is spending.
Spending is set to double, then triple over the course of this century.
We have to deal with the spending.
It is a spending-driven debt crisis, and we don't want to try and tax our way out of the problem we have, because if we do, we will shut down the economy and we'll actually never close the gap on the deficit.
Let's get spending under control, cut spending, reform entitlement programs, do it in a gradual way so that people can adjust accordingly, prevent people in a near retirement from having any disruption in their lives, and get pro-growth tax reform to get people back to work.
That's Paul Ryan responding to people who say it's just bad timing.
You don't want this budget out there now because it's such A huge target.
We don't need a target right now.
Back after this.
Sit tight, my friends.
There's still much more straight ahead.
I will just say this.
If the Republican establishment is not careful, they are going to destroy themselves in the process of this campaign.
If they if they if they screw this up, they they've never, nope, we've never had a better chance to win than this.
If they screw this up, folks.
We have a couple of Santorum speech sound bites.
Here's the first.
This race was as improbable as any race that you will ever see for president.
I want to thank God for that, and I want to thank all of you across this country for what you have given, hopefully not just me and our family, but what you've given, which is a voice to those who are many cases voiceless.
And we have tried to be a witness not just for your for your stories and your voice, but to provide a positive and hopeful vision, not a negative campaign.
We painted a hopeful positive vision for a country, not just economically, but reflecting hopes of Americans, not just the fears of Americans.
He spent a lot of time on his speech today talking about the fact that he didn't run any negative ads, didn't run a scorched earth campaign.
And it's a direct it's not a direct, it's a veiled reference to Romney, who who uh who did.
And Santorum, like all the others, is livid about it.
But they work.
Negative campaigns work.
Here's the second bite we carried around our copy of the Constitution.
And of course, it was that constitution that got the Tea Party folks excited, legitimately so, about the operator's manual of America being discarded by those in Washington.
And I think what I tried to bring to the battle was what Abraham Lincoln brought to this battlefield back in 1863 in November 19th, when he talked about this country being conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
He was quoting, of course, the Declaration of Independence, conceived in that declaration.
And we talked about that declaration as the heart of American exceptionalism as to who we are, because we will never be a country that can go forward as a great and powerful country again unless we remember who we are and what makes us Americans.
You hear the reference of the Tea Party there.
It was the fondest hope that that Tea Party eruption in 2010 would produce a like-minded presidential nominee and campaign.
But you know, you look back at who would have ever thought Santorum would win eleven states when this started?
Who would have ever thought that happened?
I don't think Santorum believed he would win eleven states, but he did, and it is quite telling.
Santorum never mentioned Romney by name, by the way.
I wanted to make sure I mentioned that before we have to take our final obscene profit timeout.
As to why Santorum got out, folks, I i I think it's pretty obvious.
I I I don't think he could convince Newt to join forces with him and to take this out to the convention.
I don't think he wanted to do that with Ron Paul, but I don't I I think he probably just concluded he couldn't put a coalition together with the people remaining, and that was it.
There was just there was there was no way forward.
My wild guess.
Others will expand on this, I'm sure.
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