All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 15, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
August 15, 2012, Wednesday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
You know, it's been kind of a fun year doing a show in Milwaukee.
Really the last two to three years.
A big election, reform minded Republican got elected governor.
Big wave of Republicans won in two thousand ten.
Then the Republicans who got into power actually acted on their beliefs as opposed to ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of all other Republicans.
The reason so many conservatives have been frustrated with the Republican Party.
They talk conservative, but then once they get in office, they're terrified of alienating the media, they're terrified of the backlash, they're called all sorts of bad names, and they come up with some wussed up watered down thing that they call policy.
It's what soured many conservatives on the Republican Party.
Well, back in my state of Wisconsin, we had a governor, Scott Walker, who actually acted on his beliefs, and they threw everything at him, up to the point of trying to recall him out of office.
The lesson in that for me was that if you govern conservatively, you can win.
Now Walker did have one big advantage in Wisconsin.
Under our laws, you're not eligible for a recall until after you've been in office for one year.
That allowed time to pass while his policies were in place, which have worked.
Governor Walker inherited a three billion dollar budget deficit.
We're now in Wisconsin running with a balanced budget, some projections of a surplus.
Aid to school districts had been cut year after year after year, resulting in cuts in education.
School aids are cut now, but those school districts are able to balance their budgets because of the reforms the governor put in place.
In other words, somebody talked conservative, then got in, governed exactly the way he talked, and it worked.
It's been a remarkable thing to watch, and it's the reason why Walker has gotten so much national attention.
Other governors have done the same thing or at least similar things in similar ways, successes of Chris Christie in New Jersey, and others.
My state has also produced Paul Ryan, who's been in the Congress since nineteen ninety eight.
In fact, the similarities between Walker and Ryan are just amazing.
They were born within twenty five, thirty miles of one another.
They're only a couple of years apart in age.
They even kind of look alike.
They're both very, very conservative.
They're both I mean, they're they're similar guys, and I've had the privilege of watching both of them literally grow up while I'm doing my talk show and talking about them.
The thing about Ryan, and the reason why this selection is such a big deal, is that it tells us something about Romney.
Ryan's not running for president.
The vice president is about as important a job as the president makes it.
Some vice presidents do nothing and are never heard from again.
Others become significant parts of the administration.
Clinton did use Gore for some things.
Bush used Cheney for a lot.
Obama and Biden.
I mean, I if you're the Obama team right now, what do you do with Biden?
Okay, well, we're gonna go negative, Joe.
Okay, I got the I got it, Chief.
Well, but you don't say this, you don't run around and say cha chains.
Biden's actually now trying to explain himself, by the way, for those of you who didn't hear about his remarks, which we've given a little bit of attention to today, he said that the Republicans want to put put us all back in chains.
Biden now meant to say unshackled.
That's what he says.
The point that I was raising, though, about this experience I've had in Wash in Wisconsin and the significance of the Ryan appointment, is that not everybody agrees with my spin on this.
Rush has been talking about this a lot the last few days, the Republican consultant class, the political consultants who get hired to get Republicans elected to various offices.
All the ones that aren't working for Romney, they're of course going to be critical of how the Romney campaign is being run.
But they all do have clients.
They're representing a lot of people running for the Senate, running for the House, running for governorships.
And they're out there quietly ripping on this whole Ryan thing.
Wall Street Journal's lead editorial today talks about it.
They even have a term for them.
The bedwetter caucus.
Rush hasn't used that term, has he?
Good.
Not yet.
The bedwetter caucus.
Let me let me share a couple of paragraphs in this.
That didn't take long, much as we predicted last week, the Republican Party's bedwetter caucus has emerged on schedule to explain why Mitt Romney can't possibly win the election with Paul Ryan on the ticket.
GOP pros fret over Paul Ryan reported Politico, the website with perfect beltway pitch on Tuesday, quote, in more than three dozen interviews with Republican strategists and campaign operatives, old hands and rising next generation conservatives alike.
The most common reactions to Ryan ranged from gnawing apprehension to hair on fire anger that Romney has practically ceded the election.
Romney's catastrophic blunder, it seems, is that he chose a running running mate who does more than talk about reforming government.
He's really tried to do it, and this is simply not done in presidential politics.
Now I'm not going to say that every consultant is an idiot.
They have these jobs for a reason, and some of them have pretty good track records.
But what they're really, really good at doing is the same thing over and over again.
What they aren't very good at is actually seeing the future.
I believe the Romney choice of Ryan enhances his chances of winning.
I believe we are at a stage right now where you have millions of Americans who are more engaged than they have ever been.
I believe this is going to work.
I've interviewed Ryan a lot.
I interviewed him on this very program a couple of years ago when he was first putting out his blueprint that has become the economic proposals that Mitt Romney is largely buying into.
And I asked him, I said, you know, the thing that in politics that you don't ever do, you don't ever put it out in writing.
You don't get specific, because they're able to cherry pick out this, that, or the other thing, and attack and demonize.
And Ryan's response has always been, I just get the impression that right now people are open to hearing this.
For 40 years, every election that comes by, the Democrats run these ads saying Republicans are going to kick Granny off of Medicare and Social Security.
They're gonna take away your Social Security and Medicare, they're gonna take away your Social Security and Medicare.
They've been saying it over and over and over.
Some of those elections are won by Democrats, some of them have been won by Republicans.
But never has any Republican ever kicked Granny off of Social Security and Medicare.
But in the meantime, those programs that we were able to pay for for so long, during all of those years in which the baby boomers were this huge group paying taxes into the system.
And senior citizens were a minority of the population.
All of that is changing.
Then it got way worse because of what Obama has done with stimulus.
Obama, true, inherited deficits.
The worst Bush deficit was about 400 plus billion dollars.
He did inherit deficits.
And he inherited an economy that wasn't doing very well.
It wasn't as bad as the Jimmy Carter economy, but it wasn't doing well.
That's a fair thing to put on Obama.
He didn't inherit a rose garden.
But he came up with his plan to fix it.
He had the opportunity to do whatever he wanted.
He had the big majority in the House and the big majority in the Senate.
They wrote the stimulus plan exactly the way they wanted.
And what it did is blow up the deficit without producing any improvement in unemployment, without giving us any real growth at all.
And those deficits haven't gone away.
So now you've got the perfect storm.
Massive deficits, and the baby boomers going on to Social Security and Medicare.
We're already tapped out.
And most baby boomers aren't even on yet, the entitlement programs.
People understand this.
Some people don't pay much attention, but Most people see what's happening, then we've got the backdrop of Europe, which is just us a few years advanced.
People are worried about this.
I think they are more open than they have ever been to a campaign that actually gives them some answers.
They may not be all the answers they want to hear.
It isn't, well, we can just keep doing everything that we're doing, and nobody's gonna have to worry about it.
It's in a few years we're going to have to change Medicare.
And here's how we're gonna do it.
We're going to make it optional, but this is the way we're going to do it.
And we want to lower tax rates.
That's right, not raise them, lower them.
We want to lower them because we need to stimulate the economy.
When you're spending 40% more than you're taking in, you've got to come up with some way to take in more.
And we don't think raising tax rates brings you more revenue.
Every time we've cut tax rates in the last 40 years, we've had an increase in revenue to the government.
We think that will help.
That's their plan.
And unlike these consultants who think laying out that plan in specific and putting Medicare on the table is suicidal.
You're running against a failed president who has no plan to do anything.
I don't buy that people are going to tune out the other side that's offering an alternative.
Furthermore, when you have a Democratic Party that's going to run a campaign based on pure obnoxiousness, plant hecklers in every crowd that Romney and Ryan go into, run ads making every wild charge imaginable, trotting out old Harry Reed to claim that Romney hasn't paid taxes taxes since 1922.
A campaign that treats the American people as adults might work.
Why have the crowds been bigger than they were before Ryan was chosen?
I don't want to overreact to the rally that occurred in Waukeshaw, Wisconsin, which is close to Ryan's district.
But there were 13,000 people there.
There were 10,000 people in High Point, North Carolina.
The crowds the last two days have been huge for both Romney and Ryan ever since this announcement.
This has touched a nerve.
This is energizing people.
And the consultants will say, well, you're just energizing the people who are going to vote for Romney anyway.
I don't know that that's true.
The Tea Party movement that started in 09 led to a big big election in 10.
The Republicans swept the country.
You tapped into something there.
And I think they've tapped into something this time around.
Romney has grown in stature by the choice of Ryan.
People are going to take note of this.
Ryan says we're going to treat the American people as adults.
We're going to do something unusual.
We're going to tell them the truth.
Who's to say that can't work?
Who's to say that you can't lay out a conservative agenda and win?
I've heard all this nonsense before.
I heard it in 1980 when Reagan was running.
Oh my goodness, the Republicans have done the worst thing possible.
Here we have a chance to beat Jimmy Carter, this failed president, and they take this right winger.
He's too extreme.
The American people aren't going to buy it.
Remember how that ended.
And then Reagan actually came in and governed on his principles.
We had a 25-year recovery after that.
We won the Cold War.
See, the thing about the consultants is they're hired guns.
I don't even know how many of them even believe this stuff.
I know that Paul Ryan believes it deeply.
Wasn't so sure about Romney.
By putting Ryan on the ticket, Mitt Romney has staked his future on governing this country in a conservative way and trying to solve our problems.
You don't take Ryan, knowing all the risks associated, unless you intend to do big things.
And I think people instinctively know this, and I think they are way ahead of the curve that the pundits are still stuck on.
They understand this far better than these political consultants.
I think the turnaround of the Romney campaign started last weekend.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
This is one of the marks that sits in for Rush, Mark Belling from WISN in Milwaukee.
Phone number 1800-28282.
A lot of twos and eights in that number.
To Patty in Durham, North Carolina, it's your turn on the Russian bar program with me, the guest host, Mark Belling.
Hi there.
How are you?
I'm great.
So I was listening and I heard uh the woman comment about uh what uh Ryan looks like, what Romney looks like, and my point is it's not what they look like, it's of what they do.
I think Romney did an excellent job in kicking Ryan because it really is about the economy.
Ryan actually is willing to be bold.
And when Erskine Bowles turns around and says that Ryan is a genius when it comes to the economy.
I think Democrats need to start listening.
Because if you don't have a good economy in the economy, you don't have any Medicaid, you don't have any Medicare, you don't have any Social Security.
You have to have the economy first.
No one is putting the economy first.
Well, I think clearly that's the issue, and it's the one that usually decides whether or not presidents get re-elected or not.
If the economy is good, the president in power usually wins when the economy is bad, the president usually loses.
And the problem that Obama has right now is that he doesn't have a plan.
We've seen their plan.
It was stimulated that the president is a very good thing.
He has tax cuts.
Well, the tax cuts he's talking about are the ones that Bush had in place.
Right.
So have you been able to do that?
The point that I was making is is that the plan that he offered is the one that we've already tried and it didn't work.
So if you're Obama, what do you offer?
The Republicans at least have an alternative that's out there, and being specific about it probably does help.
There's interesting stuff out here.
I've got a Zogby poll.
For the first time since he began running for president, this is Zogby, Republican Mitt Romney has the support of over 40% of America's youth vote.
A troubling sign for President Obama who billed his 2008 victory with the overwhelming support of younger idealistic voters.
Polister John Zogby told uh Secrets Tuesday that Romney received 41% in his weekend poll of 1117 likely voters for the first time crossing the 40% mark.
What's more, he said that Romney is the only Republican of those who competed in the primaries to score so high among eighteen to twenty-nine year olds.
That's a big deal.
Those were the people who bought into Obama in 08.
Let's be honest about this.
Barack Obama did inspire a lot of young people.
That hope and change rhetoric was something that many people believed in.
You remember the videos of young people who were supporters of Obama literally tearing up when he spoke.
Now I saw through it.
Many of you saw through it, but there were people who believed it.
The Obama that won in 08 was the guy who said, We're not a nation of red states and blue states, we're United States.
He talked about hope and change.
That was the Obama that won.
The Obama of 2012 doesn't even resemble that candidate.
Now he's negative, he's angry, he's attacking.
People don't have any hope.
He's instead trying to scare them into voting for him.
Saying the Republicans are going to destroy everything.
What he's presenting is a status quo that's no good, saying the Republicans will make it worse.
So much for hope.
And as for change, this was the change.
In the meantime, something else has happened to the youth vote.
The unemployment rate of people under 30 has exploded.
Those people who voted for Obama, a lot of them don't have jobs.
Half of them are still living at home.
It's amazing how many people 28 years old are still living at home.
They've lost all hope.
The thing that they voted for didn't happen.
I think a lot of them are either going to sit this one out or they're going to be open to Romney.
That's a huge part of the Obama base that's that I think is leaving him right now.
Yes, I think young people are going to be open to Romney Bosnerdly is challenging me on this.
I think they are, and I think choosing Ryan, Ryan may be conservative, but he seems to them to be with it.
He's fresh, he's bright-eyed, he offers ideas, he's becoming the new Obama in terms of presenting hope and change.
Furthermore, Ryan is not one of those grumpy Republicans who's out there sour saying that we're doomed.
He's saying the times can turn around.
And this makes Romney better.
Have you noticed how much better Romney has been on the stumps since he chose Ryan?
I think Romney knows that he did something right here.
I'm the guy from Milwaukee, which is in Wisconsin.
You know, my state Wisconsin actually is the birthplace of the Republican Party.
1854, Rip in Wisconsin.
Or so legend goes, Rip in Wisconsin claims it.
I I do think we might be the birthplace of the reformed Republican Party, though.
I mean, what Governor Walker, Scott Walker has done in Wisconsin, I think has inspired a lot of public officials around the country that they don't have to be cowardly, that they can govern on conservative principles, they can ride it out, and they can be rewarded by their voters.
I think we've got the best governor in the country.
I know there are a lot of other good ones.
And I think we've got the best congressman in the country in Paul Ryan.
So Burst Bullsnerdally gets a yeah, yeah, yeah.
How do you explain what happened in your Senate election?
Tommy Thompson did win a four-way Republican primary for the United States Senate yesterday.
Let's get into some of these election results.
Pretty much across the country this year, when you've had a candidate in some of these Senate races, when there was an establishment Republican and a reform alternative candidate, the reform candidate has won.
That's what happened in Indiana, where Luger, who was in the Senate forever, was beaten by the state treasurer Murdoch, who ran as a reform-minded outsider.
It's certainly what happened in Texas, where the establishment candidate, who by the way was conservative, David Dewhurst, the lieutenant governor, lost to Ted Cruz.
In races like this, one-on-one Republican primaries where you've got a longtime Republican who is perceived as being establishment, and a new face, a reformer, for lack of a better term, a Tea Party type candidate, has been the Tea Party candidate that won.
So what happened in Wisconsin?
Tommy Thompson, longtime former governor of the state, 14 years the governor, then member of the Bush cabinet.
He did win the primary yesterday.
This is a key seat.
The incumbent senator is a guy named Herb Cole, Democrat.
He's retiring.
With the Senate up for grabs this year, this is a big chance for the Republicans to gain a seat.
The Democratic candidate is a Congresswoman from Madison, uh, Tammy Baldwin, very, very liberal.
She has a lot of money, though.
She's openly gay and would be the first openly gay member of the United States Senate.
And for that reason, she's raising a lot of money from the gay community.
In the meantime, claiming that this would be a major statement that we are now beyond homophobia and so on.
It makes her an interesting candidate.
Anyway, there was this Republican primary in Thompson won.
And some people are questioning whether or not this means that Wisconsinites rejected the reform Tea Party message.
And I don't think that's the case.
It was a four-way primary.
Thompson won, but he got only 34% of the vote.
Wisconsin is not one of those states where you have a runoff until somebody gets 50%.
There were four candidates running, three were to the right of Thompson.
You had a very wealthy businessman named Eric Hubdy, who ran bought a lot of ads and ran on a very, very conservative message.
But you also had a former congressman named Mark Newman, who was endorsed by a lot of the national organizations, Tea Party Express backed him, the National Alarm of the Club for Growth backed him, Senator Rand Paul backed him, he was backed by Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina.
And then you had the Speaker of the State Assembly, a guy named Jeff Fitzgerald, who helped carry Scott Walker's program to the legislature.
Clearly, all three of those candidates were to the right of Thomson, and what happened was they divided the vote.
A lot of the national conservatives expected Mark Newman to win, which is why they gave him their support and their money.
But Hufdi started fishing in the Same pond as did Newman.
And it hasn't been so easy to portray Tommy Thompson as just this typical warmed over establishment Republican.
He was an innovative governor when he did govern.
There's still a lot of goodwill there.
And it was a long time ago.
But he also did something that was key.
His campaign logo.
It looks like a highway sign, and the number is 51.
The 51st vote to overturn Obamacare.
He hammered that over and over and over.
And the message that he kept running on was I'm the guy that can win the seat in November.
You want to overturn Obamacare, you want to give President Mitt Romney a governing majority, you've got to elect me.
So I don't think it was as clean a conservative versus you know a reformer versus establishment race simply because there were so many candidates and there was a lot of other stuff playing in.
Now in Connecticut, Linda McMahon, who is the wife of Vince, together they run what is it now?
WWF, WWE, WWO.
It's rest it's wrestling.
Does anybody watch it anymore?
Who's the who who who's the who's the biggest name wrestler now?
I haven't paid attention to wrestling since the rock.
I think I d I don't think he's the champion anymore.
Anyway, she ran against Chris Shays, who's a moderate Republican, longtime member of the House.
Linda McMahon ran two years ago, lost in the general election.
She's running again.
She did win that race by a wide margin.
Now Connecticut's kind of a liberal state, and the concern is that if you choose somebody who's too conservative, can't win there, she did win.
Uh Senator Connie Mack, uh got won the Republican nominate Congressman Connie Mack, who's the son of Senator Connie Mack, won the Republican nomination down in Florida.
I don't think he had a lot of opposition.
He he did, but he won fairly easily though, didn't he?
Well, you're you've got more insight into Florida than I do.
Tell me what I should say about that race.
Nothing.
I'll say nothing about that race.
So anyway, there were some interesting political results uh uh yesterday.
In general, though, I do think you have a Republican voter base that's energized, that's paying attention, and is more issue-driven than ever.
Let's go back to the phones.
Monroe, Louisiana, and Connie.
Connie, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
I, first of all, I am insulted that pre vice president Joe Biden would go there talking about taking you all back, uh, putting you back in chains.
What did he want them to say, no, don't put us back in chains.
We keep voting for you all.
That's that's to ensure that you all will keep the party.
We will continue to vote for you, Mr. Joe.
I mean, it's an insult if people of color do not run in mass to the Republican Party and vote this uh I I I don't know, uh evil out.
I I don't know what it's gonna take.
Well, it the it is insulting.
The metaphor is just so ugly.
It's so over the top.
Everybody knows what chains means.
I mean, you think of two things.
You either think of slavery or you think of the chain gangs.
The metaphor was so blunt, it was so crude, and so preposterous.
There's nobody who actually believes it.
So why are they resorting to this type of language?
I just think that they don't know what to attack Romney and Ryan on.
They know that they should go negative because that's what Axelrod tells them, and they come up with these statements that I think just backfire.
You don't see any Democrats today defending Biden's comments.
Biden's even trying to explain himself.
But I I just think that it's it's the use of that.
We're gonna in fact, do we have the uh play the long version of the uh play the full version if we have it of the Senate every Republican's voted for it?
Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they're proposing.
Romney wants to let the he said in the first hundred days, he's gonna let the big banks once again write their own rules.
Unchain Wall Street.
They're gonna put you all back in chains.
Wow.
I mean, even by the standards of Joe Biden, who seems to be something of an idiot.
That's that's just crude stuff.
Bo Snerdley's asking if it's going to be cotton picking or fruit picking this time or why.
The issue he doesn't even he didn't even connect it.
He's talking about banking legislation or something or another.
And he comes up with this, and like I said earlier, this is only August.
You've got Republican consultants that are concerned that Romney's made a mistake by going with Ryan because you've got a candidate who's going to run on the issues.
Well, what in the world are the Democrats now running on?
Harry Reid's saying Romney doesn't pay taxes, just makes it up.
They run an ad saying that Romney killed a woman.
Wasn't true.
Completely discredited.
Now Biden's out there talking about putcha back in chains.
And by the way, there were a lot of black people in that audience.
That's just crude stuff.
You take a look at the two vice presidential candidates here.
Take a real look at him.
The knock that's being put on Ryan is that he's too substantive.
The consultants are all concerned.
You put Ryan on, he's had all these ideas, all these plans.
He's got this idea to reform Medicare, he's got this tax cut proposal.
He's all these specifics.
You can't do that.
You've got to be much more vapid.
You've got to treat the American public like they're idiots.
Anyway, the knock on Ryan is that he's too substantive.
Look at the clown on the other side.
This isn't an isolation.
Every week Joe Biden says something that's stupid.
And in this case, just insulting and obnoxious.
You know, Rudy Giuliani made a very, very interesting point in an interview last night.
He's questioning whether or not Joe Biden could function as president.
Is he stable?
I mean, we know why Obama always has the teleprompter.
When he doesn't have the teleprompter, he says things like, You didn't build the business that you poured your life savings, your sweat into, risked your marriage, risked your family, it didn't build that.
That's what happens when the president is off the teleprompter.
But there was at least a thought process behind that.
By the way, Obama keeps saying that those comments are taken out of context.
It's the context that makes you understand exactly where he comes from.
But at least there was an idea behind that radicalism.
What was the idea behind Biden?
They tell Joe to go negative.
And he comes out with a slavery image.
They are embarrassing themselves.
I think if they had more time, they'd seriously consider dropping him from the ticket.
But they're stuck with him.
By the way, is there any Republican in America who's not waiting for the vice presidential debate between Paul Ryan and Joe Biden?
I mean, in the last debate, Biden, the one that he had back in 08, Biden and talked about going to a restaurant that had been closed since I think 1984.
I think the problem for Ryan in that debate is he's going to have to pull his punches, or he's going to be looked upon as somebody who's being mean to this senile old man.
If Biden deliberately intended to make that remark, if he intended to come up with a metaphor that evoked images of terrible part of America's heritage, the worst part of our heritage, the fact that some states had slavery, if that's what he meant, if that's where he was intending to go, how much worse is this campaign going to be?
But even more importantly, doesn't it tell you how little they have to say?
We can't talk about the unemployment rate because it won't go down.
We can't talk about the deficit because it's 1.3 trillion dollars and our own projections show it being in the same range for years to come.
We can't talk about our plan for Medicare because there isn't one.
We can't talk about the growth rate because it's tepid.
We can't talk about reducing the federal deficit because we've exploded it.
We can't talk about stimulus because it failed.
We don't want to talk about our biggest achievement, Obamacare, because the more people hear about it, the more they hate it.
Given that they can't talk At all about what they have done, given that they can't talk about their record, they're just going to run negatively.
But the negativism from them is right now so over the top.
It's demeaning to the office of president and vice president for them to be behaving this way and to be using this type of language.
My name is Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Let's go back to the phones.
Fresno, California, Stan, it's your turn on EIB.
Good morning, sir.
Yes.
Um my name is Stan for President of California.
And uh, you know, I I had kind of had to chuckle the other day when heard Rush saying, Well, uh, you know, Romney's is gonna be great when uh Romney's got Ryan for uh fix of uh for the vice president candidates.
I'm thinking, okay, well, this is there are a lot of people that down on Romney.
I understand.
So this is supposed to kind of boost his his thing up by getting Ryan to think, well, at least we got Ryan in there, you know.
Well, you know, what is so funny is I'm thinking I had to laugh because I'm thinking, well, what power is the vice president have?
I mean, you look at him, they're like a puppet.
They're like just a figurehead.
He's not gonna I mean, you know, Sam, I mean, what what what real power do they have?
Romney's gonna be running the whole show anyway.
You're right about that.
The president does run the whole show, and you asked the question what power does the vice president have.
The answer is as much as the president chooses to give him.
If Romney wants Paul Ryan to be buried in a closet, I suppose he could bury him in a closet.
But here's why I think that your analysis of this is wrong.
If he was going to choose a vice president to stick in the closet, why choose Ryan?
By choosing Ryan, he clearly puts some puts some things on the table that a lot of these consultants were telling him not to do.
He puts the Medicare reforms on the table, he puts tax cuts on the table, he puts a lot of specific stuff that Ryan has authored over the years out there.
I think the only reason to put Ryan on the ticket is to give him a governing mandate.
Now I watched this, you know, I and I sympathize with you being out there in California where you haven't had a good Republican governor in ages and ages and ages.
But in Wisconsin uh in Wisconsin, I watched what Governor Walker did when he ran in 2010.
He said he was going to reform and cut back on employee benefits.
He laid that out, and when he won, his supporters were able to come back and say he's only doing what he told you he was doing.
By putting Ryan on the ticket.
What Romney's doing is giving himself the power to be able to act on his program.
Let's suppose Romney wins.
Romney's going to be able to look at the American people and say, This is what I want to do to fix our problems.
And he's going to be able to tell the Congress that they voted for him knowing what he was going to do by laying the stuff out now.
He's not only trying to win an election, I think he's trying to give himself a mandate to govern in the way that he wants.
Otherwise, choose a figurehead, choose a vice president who wouldn't be as polarizing as Ryan is.
You may be right, and Romney might be a disappointment.
I just think there's no point in putting somebody on Ryan like Ryan on the ticket unless you intend to govern conservatively, and that's why I took this as a strong a sign as it was.
But the point that he was making that the vice president doesn't have much power is certainly correct.
And if you want any proof of that, look at Biden.
I mean, right now, if they could put the guy, they might have to put duct tape on him.
He can't say anything.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
This is what the presidential campaign has degenerated into.
They're gonna put you all back in chains.
Um in an address last night, he said that the comments of Biden are quote what an angry and desperate presidency looks like.
Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago.
That was Romney speaking last night in Ohio.
Further, his campaign and his surrogates have made wild and reckless accusations that disgrace the office of the presidency.
Another outrageous charge came a few hours ago in Virginia, and the White House sinks a little bit lower.
This is an election in which we should be talking about the path ahead, but you don't hear any answers coming from President Obama's re-election campaign.
That's because he's intellectually exhausted, Out of ideas and out of energy.
And so his campaign has resorted to diversions and distractions, to demagoguing and defaming others.
This is an old game in politics.
What's different this year is that the president is taking things to a new low.
That was Romney last night.
I think he's reacting with the proper tone to comments that are outrageous.
I think you have the ability for the Republican campaign to not only maintain the high ground, but to call attention to exactly what this administration has become.
One without any answers, and one that feels the necessity to lie and demagogue about its opponents.
▲
Export Selection