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Aug. 20, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:26
August 20, 2012, Monday, Hour #3
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Welcome to the show, ladies and gentlemen, Dougar Basky filling in for Rush.
The phone number is 1-800-282-2882.
Now, the president was out there during the last hour, and uh they I think the idea was that they would come out and they would make some hay out of these appalling remarks by Aiken that everyone's been uh talking about today.
It first off, it's not of great interest to me.
The guy made idiotic remarks, and you know he should be called out on it.
Now, Romney has come out strongly, saying that these are wrong, these remarks are insulting, how dare he is essentially said, how dare these remarks be made?
He does he's distanced himself as far as he can go.
I don't know what was in Obama campaign's mind.
This is no doubt, no question about this, that Obama came out there, turned up at the news briefing today in order specifically, specifically to hammer home Romney's connection with remarks like this.
And Romney, of course, it's very easy to disconnect yourself.
Romney didn't make the remarks.
He disapproves of the remarks.
Akin has apologized, it's too late for that.
But Romney has said he finds it insulting and inappropriate and all the rest of it.
So Obama comes out there, and he does get at some point in this conference a little testy looking.
The death stare was there a little bit.
He was not expecting questions about Medicare or the negative campaigns.
He, of course, um, if you look at him, the death stare is there.
He they're they're they're in the bunker, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm looking at his face right now, and they're they're definitely in the bucket.
He begins answering the questions with first I want to say.
We were talking about these techniques only a little while ago.
First, I want to say.
Let him try doing that during the debates.
Do you think Romney's gonna do some of these first I want to say is I'm gonna give Romney a little bit of advice here.
He's not spoken to me about giving advice, I'll give it to him in front of you all.
I think he can say things very easily that gets under the guy's skin, under Obama's skin, so he does the thing I was talking about earlier where he comes back and says, I want to come back to something my opponent said a little while ago.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is a propensity amongst Republicans to not take good media advice.
They all, all of them hire the same type of political advisors from the same lost campaign.
I call them the red tie advisors.
Because usually you see someone turn up in a red tie or a red suit or pink ties occasionally.
But beyond that, it's the same playbook all the time.
And I I am I'm amazed that they do not avail themselves of what I call the technology, the technology that we in Hollywood know in terms of learning how to communicate.
Now there is a knee-jerk reaction amongst conservatives.
Bush had this himself.
He he said, I don't need any fancy Hollywood handler telling me how to think.
And of course, he missed the point entirely.
This from a man whose father was thrown out of office, who was a very popular and well-liked president, who was thrown out of office for saying no new taxes.
He was a wartime president, Bush won and very popular, still thrown out of office.
If Bush too, think of this for a second.
If Bush too knew how to communicate what was often a very good message, where Saddam Hussein was concerned, where the Iraq war was concerned, where all kinds of things were concerned.
If he had bothered to learn how to because he was a smart guy, there's no question the guy was smart.
He may not have been your brand of conservative, but there were many good qualities to the man.
If the man had not had that knee-jerk reaction, I don't need any fancy Hollywood handlers telling me how to behave.
He might have been able to communicate his message more strongly.
I am of the belief, I'm of the certainty, in fact, that this is something that can be taught.
And they they they all the Republicans have this idea that somehow you're going to change them into something false that they're not, which is the opposite of true.
What would be done is you would teach them techniques as to how to speak into a camera, how to come into someone's home with the warmth and sincerity and all the rest of it.
Obama, by the way, lacks the ability of understanding this.
Now let's go back to Axel Rod.
Axelrod understood something during the first campaign that was very profound.
He understood how to give the appearance of presidentialness.
That's a great, that is a profound thing when you're running a new unknown challenger candidate.
I mentioned it earlier, flying around in a plane that looks like Air Force One.
Didn't seem to bother the environmentalist, but flying around on a great big plane, going to Berlin, having the podium that looks presidential.
It was great imagery.
It was as if he already had the job.
Now, in my own life, I've been approached from time to time by different characters who are running for president or were going to go into the baits or were thinking of running for president.
And we always have similar conversations.
We sat down at some point, I will not mention the names of these people, it would not be discreet of me, but you you'll know their names.
We sit down and we looked at the qualities.
What are the qualities of presidentialness in bearing, in demeanor, in attitude, in confidence?
Well, first off, someone who's running for president doesn't have a lot of times when they say, uh they don't do that.
You never hear someone who has confidence and knows what they're saying.
Rush doesn't do that.
He doesn't go, uh that's the first thing.
When you hear somebody doing that, then they're already not going to go very far in the job.
They might end up in a few debates, and they might have conservative viewpoints that are in agreement with yours, but the way they play is not going to work.
Because it plays like someone who's confused and someone who does not have the confidence.
Not gonna work.
It was very easy.
We put together what I called Urbanski's list of sixty-three qualities of presidentialness.
Which, because we're talking about politicians, had to be distilled down to about four or five qualities to be explained to them.
And when you watched the debates, there was only one person from the beginning who met the qualities of winnability.
I will tell you, to the consternation of those of the conservative fundamentalists amongst you.
And you don't know if I'm a conservative fundamentalist or not, because I'm not sharing that with you right now.
But Romney had the qualities of the winner.
And this is why I find the Tea Party exciting, because as I've said to you before, the Tea Party is the balance and the ballast.
And if you elect good people into the House and Senate, who are genuinely good conservatives, Romney has propensities to go that direction.
Do not lose heart yet, conservative fundamentalists, please.
So Barack Obama was able to be painted into this role of presidentialness, not just the exciting narrative.
He's young, he's black, he's he's an intellectual, he's all of these things.
And John McCain, of course, as we all know, was a dreadful choice.
I don't know anybody who thought it was a good choice.
I still wonder how it happened.
We are not in that situation today.
We're in a dazzlingly good situation today.
Now, Republicans in general do not want advice.
They think that you're going to change them fundamentally if they learn how to have a relationship with the camera.
Ladies and gentlemen, is there a more important relationship to be had than understanding how to come into your house over your dining table, over the breakfast table, in your living room, in a way that is compelling, interesting, sincere, warm.
Obama does not know how to do it.
He has done it in flashes and spurts and carefully controlled situations, but he does not, because no one's ever taught him this.
No one's ever explained this to him.
Remember Axelrod comes from the Alinsky School as well.
The Alinsky School of Fighting and Thug Review, if you want to see someone unhinged, watch Axelrod on just about any show.
The Axelrod Wasserman Schultz team, delicious.
But Obama does not know how to do this.
Romney does it A bit naturally.
Paul Ryan does it a bit naturally.
But every single politician, the good ones and the bad ones, I'm afraid, could be taught how to make the interview, for example, on 60 minutes work a hundred more times in their favor than it worked.
You know who was naturally good at this at various times, the Clintons.
The Clintons were marvelous.
And they were very good at staying on their points.
You know why?
The Clintons did not suffer from vanity.
You're saying, what do you mean?
Well, they they they suffered from something I call self-aggrandizement.
Self-aggrandizement is a survivor's thing.
Self-aggrandizement is Bella Lagosi, not wanting to be dragged out of the Oval Office.
Self aggrandizement means when you're asked in interviews, uh, Mrs. Clinton, what do you think of the rumors of the president's affair?
And Mrs. Clinton says back, you know, uh Matt.
So many Americans are concerned about the economy.
That is that is skillful self-aggrandizement.
They were naturals at it.
Obama can't do that.
He's gonna say, you know, first I want to tell you this.
First I want to do that, he's gonna set the stage for all sorts of wrong facts and figures, wrong partial stories.
I long to see, because I don't think people, certainly in Republican circles appreciate, in Hollywood there are conservative people.
And there are techniques available to learn how to use the cameras, how listen, the average movie star, the average movie star, think John Travolta, is handled with more care in how they craft and create an image, especially during the release of a film.
What pictures appear, what type of lighting is at interviews.
This is all very sloppy the way these things are done in politics.
And it's very easy to fix.
Now let's come to Ronald Reagan.
I'm gonna continue this a little while when we after I come back to the break, but let's come to Ronald Reagan for a moment.
The thing people say is that Reagan won and won and won because of his message.
This alone, ladies and gentlemen, is a myth.
I am in the business of communication, and I'm telling you it is a myth.
The message is not enough.
The truth is, what I've heard Rush say, conservatism, when well articulated, that's the part that's in bold and italics and underlined.
Conservatism, when well articulated, always wins.
Ronald Reagan had the first off, he was a great intellect.
He was a great thinker.
There's no dispute if you read this man's writings.
You read his writings, his handwritten letters.
There's no crossouts.
The guy was was thinking giant thoughts for years.
I met the man several times.
Met him well, I met him at the White House once, I had to go there for some event, and he also came to see a play of mine at the Kennedy Center once.
He was very nice to my wife, and we had many mutual friends together.
My ex-business partner knew Nancy Reagan since they were teenagers.
My ex-business partner is dead, we didn't split up, he died a long time ago.
We had very, very good friends in the film world.
The place where my wife and I spent our honeymoon was a very good friend's house, also a friend of the Reagans, and they spent their they spent their Easter vacation one year in the same cottage that we spent our honeymoon in.
So we we knew, and I can tell you stories that you've never read about him of how kind and nice he was.
But do not do not set aside, ladies and gentlemen, this uh this one reality.
He knew how to communicate.
He knew he had the gift naturally, and he also had what he learned along the way.
I'm gonna come back to some of this if you're if you find it vaguely interesting.
It's Dugabansky, ladies and gentlemen, filling in for Rush Limbaugh.
What is it, twenty two hours until he's back, I think?
Be right back.
I was making the point, ladies and gentlemen, that communicating conservative and having a strongly based conservative belief system is not enough.
It is just not enough.
That is why for me Romney fits the Buckley bill perfectly, the most conservative candidate who is winnable.
And I know you'll hear conservative fundamentalists, and I may be one of them, as you know.
You will hear them say, No, I how can you say that Some of the others were winnable.
Ladies and gentlemen, I watched them.
We looked at them.
We studied them.
We know some of them.
We looked at the qualities of them.
He was a wonderful communicator.
That is why the psyops mechanism all began.
He was out of touch, he was distant, he was cold.
He couldn't play well with women.
None of it is true.
They're still pushing this.
Now, Obama is on the run.
He can't communicate.
He may be losing the media, judging from these stories that start appearing, judging from the news conference, essentially the press briefing that he conducted himself a little while ago.
He's now, his drudge has the headline up there that he's um he's denying that his campaign ever said Romney was a felon.
I heard it.
We all heard it.
They're on the run.
This changed.
Two huge things happened that caused this to change.
There is no question that the very brave selection Paul Ryan, which we were told by liberals was the things was going to sink the Romney campaign, and there were a few carping conservatives, hardcore conservative fundamentalists that said that's going to sink the Romney campaign.
Some of the Rhinos said it, very brave.
Do you realize, ladies and gentlemen, Medicare is the topic, and the president doesn't want to talk about it?
The economy is the topic, and he doesn't want to talk about it.
This whole thing fundamentally changed.
He gave a talk last year and said Americans are basically lazy.
That's why we have trouble.
That was on the day he wasn't blaming the Japanese earthquake.
That was on the day he wasn't blaming the European economy.
It was the Americans who were lazy.
But the turning point moments, the turning point moments happened, and they happened almost right one beside the other.
You had this brave selection of Ryan.
Brave selection of Ryan.
And you had the words that haunt this campaign, that haunt the Obama campaign.
You didn't build that.
Now I said to you something on Friday, ladies and gentlemen, and I'm going to I'm going to stick with it based upon what I'm reading and seeing in the media.
Based upon the poll numbers, based upon the newsweek story.
I likened Obama's relationship with you to a couple who have been through a hideous divorce.
You got married.
It was a mistake.
You found out after you had walked down the aisle.
You've been through this hideous divorce settlement, which we can call the American economy.
And at some point, we've all known people in this sad situation.
At some point, the husband or the wife says to their lawyer, you know, I've just had it.
I'm done with her, or I'm done with him.
Give her the house.
I don't want to hear her name anymore.
I'm just done, please.
Whenever, okay, January she moves out, fine.
I'm done.
The American people are not listening to Barack Obama.
They're not listening to his media.
They have broken up.
They have said to their divorce lawyer, we are done.
Fine, whatever.
Let her let her keep talking.
Whatever.
But it's over.
The selection of Paul Ryan.
The you didn't build that.
Those haunting words.
That's when the numbers all started to change.
That's when the conversation started to go about Medicare.
That's when he his two visions of America.
I'm dying to really get into the underbelly of what his vision for America is.
He's been talking about the American dream for years.
I guarantee you his idea of the American dream is different from what your idea of the American dream and what my idea of the American dream is.
Those words, you didn't do that.
They had an enormously negative effect.
It was a turning point in the campaign.
And then the way he delivered them.
It just cemented them in the minds of any hard working, responsible citizen.
And it was arrogant and untrue.
And I love the commercial that he's come out with where he says, I didn't say that.
I didn't say that.
Yeah, they took me out of context.
You go back and watch the context.
The context is worse.
The context is even worse when you watch it.
It was that evil Romney who took those words out of context.
That evil the murderous felon Romney did it.
Ladies and gentlemen, our affirmative action president was not taken out of context.
He was repeating what Elizabeth Warren had already been saying.
She'd already been out there with this stuff.
Now, Romney, Romney Romney, when the president says Romney is not fit to run this country, and you have this man who will hold on to power at any cost, who has done nothing, squandered the goodwill he entered office with, squandered the goodwill with two houses of Congress.
So Ronald Reagan not only had his training and his gifts as a communicator, but also this wasn't it's this are just not natural gifts.
You also go through training, and he learned them in Hollywood, and furthermore, once he became governor of California, he had Michael Deaver.
Michael Deaver was an expert.
And Axelrod is a wannabe by comparison.
Deaver was an expert at understanding the message.
What is the message?
What is messaging?
The message is your beliefs, your sincerely firmly held belief, plus the way you articulate it.
Give you an example.
For years, when they poll whether people think whether people think inheritance tax should go up or not, people always think inheritance tax should go up.
The minute they ask you if the death tax should be raised, people say no.
That's a perfect example of the information and the message being correctly articulated.
Reagan embodied now Reagan had a fascinating journey.
He was he was a very tough, tough head of a union.
He was a union leader.
And he also recognized the legitimate threat that communism faced.
Communism was every place in America.
It was into the highest echelons of our government.
It was in the Roosevelt administration.
It was in Hollywood.
It was in the labor unions.
It was every place.
The whole red scare was a legitimate thing if you know of something called the Venona papers that were released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, you know about this.
Ronald Reagan would go around Hollywood, and there was great interest in patriotism after World War II.
And there were all sorts of groups that were forming themselves, and there were meetings held in people's homes.
And they would call themselves citizens for a better America.
And they all had these these names like they do.
But it turned out that they were anti-American groups.
He would go to these meetings and he might suggest saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and an Oscar-winning screenwriter might say, you know, Moscow has it right.
And he would be shocked at these meetings.
And they were going on all over Hollywood.
He eventually found his way.
His best friend at that time was the actor William Holden.
You know, the people always joked.
He came to Holly came to Washington and he had no friends, they would say.
No one really knows him.
He has no friends.
He had lots of friends.
Most of the friends were dead by the time he came to Hollywood, sadly.
He went with William Holden to a very famous actress's house, where there was another meeting being held, an anti-communist meeting being held, and she opened the door, an Oscar-winning actress, and she said, I thought you were one of them.
And he said, I thought you were one of them.
It was William Holden, Ronald Reagan and the studio head Dory Sherry, he was about to be the youngest head of MGM.
And it was that night, and it was a hot summer night, where the discussion focused on what do we do about communism?
And it was this pivotal night, articulated very well in Peggy Noonan's book When Character was King, that he made the big decision, and he wrote some notes on the back of an envelope.
I've not seen the envelope, but I'm told it's there at the Reagan Museum.
That communism needed to be pushed back.
I have talked to conservative friends of mine, ladies and gentlemen, during the past year, two years, during the entire Obama administration, And the tone has been so dark.
So what do we do about this?
How do we get out of this?
Dark days are ahead.
How do we save the country?
The worst is coming.
Oh my goodness, what happens if he has more power?
Those are real concerns.
But we've seen worse days.
And we have come through worse days.
Can you think of anything worse than Christmas Eve of 1776?
Where men had smallpox and their and it was below freezing temperatures.
And their toes were falling off, and they had no shoes and no socks.
And George Washington, who genuinely in every single way is the father of our country, said to them, We're going in now, we're going to Trenton now.
We've had worse days.
I'm not trying to belittle the days we're in.
But we had worse days.
Now Ronald Reagan saw this coming.
He saw communism for what it was.
He was he was he was a great thinker and a great articulator.
He spent the rest of his life thinking and thinking and writing and articulating about this more and more.
And it's profoundly intelligent stuff.
I love how the media tried to portray him as the big dummy.
He was going to get us all killed.
Remember all that?
Couldn't be further from the truth.
Now he was likable.
Now this is the thing.
Democrats could never understand.
They said this was, well, this is a Teflon presidency.
Teflon presidency.
Look, he was likable.
He was likable.
He worked on being likable.
He was genuinely likable and he worked on it.
It came naturally and he kept it going.
He was seen as a nice guy.
Now Obama, when he came into office, had a little bit of that going for him.
He was seen as a nice guy.
What did we learn since then?
Well, we've learned that he's not as nice as he seems.
Because now we've had a chance to really see him, other than in something that was the 2008 campaign trail.
So it's even, even as the public has opposed his policies, even as much as you don't want Obamacare, we've seen him.
We've seen him.
I mentioned earlier that when he brought Paul Ryan, Paul Ryan, another character who really bothers the president, he brought him to George Washington University to hear his address last April.
And this speech was advertised by the White House as a major address, that speech, that the president was going to give and a serious conversation on the government's dire financial situation.
They advertised the speech and they pushed the speech.
And he had Paul Ryan sit in the front row about a week or two after Ryan introduced his proposal for cutting spending.
What Obama did instead is that he delivered a speech with Ryan City right there in the front row.
Something the Wall Street Journal called an unspa they called it a poison pen speech, dripping with mean-spirited partisanship, gross misrepresentations of fact, and sophistry of the lowest sort concerning Republicans' alleged desire to hurt old people, the poor, and the mentally challenged.
This was not a presidential speech.
It was the sort of speech that you would expect from someone who was a partisan hack.
And after that, right after that, the next day, he went Thursday evening to regale an audience of Democrat donors on what he thought were off the record insider remarks about his budget negotiations with Republicans, including Paul Ryan, where he made a very cheap shot.
He said, when Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure he's just being America's accountant and he's being responsible.
I mean, this is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drugs bill that cost as much as my health care bill, but wasn't paid for.
He says, so Ryan is not on the level.
Those are the techniques I was talking about earlier.
A little bit of facts.
Half truths, out of context stories.
Now, Ryan, Ryan, Ryan bothers this guy big time.
Now it was predictable early on that you would start to see the meaner side.
We're talking about likability that Reagan had and cultivated.
I'm told Clinton is a very likable character.
Can you just imagine, ladies and gentlemen, if you are Bill and Hillary Clinton, and they knew you could get away with the stuff Obama gets away with, the adoration that they must have.
They just must look at him and think, wow, if we had only known.
The odds were always that you were going to see a meaner and meaner side of Obama as the months dripped along, as his popularity waned, as the conversation about Medicare took center stage, as Paul Ryan got nominated as vice president, as Obama tried to fire up his base with the four regrettable words, you didn't build that.
He is intellectually outmatched by the other side.
He is like ability unmatched.
He has personality unmatched.
He is setting aside his sermons on civility, hasn't he?
Those are washed down the gutter at this point.
Decency and respect for others passe.
I have not seen him say that anyone who does fill in the blank in my campaign should immediately be fired.
Oh no, he's very happy.
Very happy out there to throw the mud.
And I tell you, Joe Sopko, you all know Joe Sopko, whose wife died of cancer, and it had nothing to do with Mitt Romney.
I said on Friday that was the appetizer.
I said on Friday it wasn't even the appetizer.
It was the free thing the chef sends out before the appetizer.
Just wait for what's coming.
Doug Rabansky, I gotta take a short break, I'll be right back.
You see, ladies and gentlemen, the thing that the way Obama wants to divide the nation is this way.
He doesn't think that the opposition to him is just wrong.
He believes the opposition to him is evil.
This is a very important point.
He sees his opposition as evil.
And that is why he will risk dividing the nation at every turn.
He has previewed this strategy for the past year and a half.
I don't mean when he said, oh, next year the economy will be better, or when he said last month, oh, the economy's gotten better when it hadn't.
He would make these pronouncements last year, after Paul Ryan introduced his budget, last February 2011.
Here's what Obama said.
He looked at the budget and he said, that is not a vision of the America that I know.
So he talks about what his vision is.
He makes these pronouncements on what America is, what it isn't.
He talks about a compact that we have with each other.
We have one compact with each other.
It's called the Constitution of the United States.
It has done more for people.
It is lifted and f listen, we have our problems, and we can fix them without turning all of society asunder.
But ladies and gentlemen, that constitution, the American system has done more for human beings, for more people than anything else ever invented in the universe.
This'll dry the libs crazy to hear me say that.
But it is the truth, as you know.
He went out there to a fundraiser in California, Obama.
He said he said he's puzzled by what's happening to the Republican Party.
He said you've got audiences cheering the prospect of somebody dying because they don't have health care and booing a service member in Iraq because they're gay.
He says that's not reflective of who we are.
Allegations that Republicans want sick people to die.
Allegations that Republicans hate homosexuals.
These are caricatures.
These are caricatures, extreme caricatures.
That a president of the United States says such things for the purposes of fundraising.
It's something worse than deeply disturbing.
He characterized Republican votes on his jobs bill.
He said he said that the Republicans rejected the most wholesome of American workers.
How preposterous.
He said Republicans said, no more jobs for teachers, no more jobs for cops, no more jobs for firefighters.
He said, no more jobs for construction workers and veterans, no to tax cuts for small business owners and middle class Americans.
These remarks.
These remarks were made by Barack Obama.
He said something far worse.
Far worse.
He said that his opponents were racially biased.
Always comes back to this when they're desperate, racially biased.
He said, I believe America should be a place where you can always make it if you try, a place where every trial, no matter what they look like or where they have come from, should have a chance to succeed.
I believe that we can have that America again.
Will we be a country that is limited to opportunity for just a few at the top?
That's what at that is what is at stake here.
Class warfare is a very dangerous game.
It is very unpresidential.
It is not classy.
It's not polite, it's not true.
You turn a segment of society into evil villains.
That's what I was saying before.
You're not just wrong if you're a conservative, you're you're something worse than wrong.
evil.
And cultural warfare is toxic.
It's cancerous, it's poisonous.
You let that take hold, and you you you you you sicken the whole society as a whole.
Do not partake of it.
This is the man who gave us soaring speeches when he became president.
You remember this?
He said, We're not a red country, we're not a blue country, we're all one.
Where did that go?
Where did that go?
That was gone with the wind.
Rabble rousing, rabble rousing.
Well, he's reaping the benefits of that now.
We're seeing the polls, we're seeing these stories.
You want to see, you want to see class warfare.
What is he gonna do if he wins election?
And he has to explain to the unions why the Keystone Pipeline isn't there.
He'll have to explain to somebody.
This is all he does.
At the end of the day, it's hurt the country in so many ways.
Not just the economy.
Not just the economy.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's Dunkerpanski filling in for rush.
Short break.
We'll be right back.
When you hear these sort of criticisms, ladies and gentlemen, of Republicans, it is another desperate attempt, is another part in the desperation for the battle of the soul of this country.
If you have another four years of Barack Obama, things will be so twisted around, we'll be so badly off financially that we'll never turn things around.
This group, I'm gonna call them the Romney Democrats.
Remember they used to call them the Reagan Democrats.
It's the easiest thing.
You can borrow from Reagan.
There you go again.
You can borrow it throughout the rest of this campaign.
Romney has started, if you notice, he started to address the attacks.
They're actually calling them lies and distortions.
I love it.
They can look into the camera and with honesty and sincerity explain themselves, show their plan.
I love it.
You know, ladies and gentlemen, it's what is it, about twenty-one hours now until the doctor of democracy, L. Rushbow is back at a time that we need him very badly.
A squandered presidency, no surprise.
An administration built on promises, something that promised to be special, unique, transformative.
They promised to be transparent.
They were not that.
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