Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
As our level check test points, ah, all right, cool.
Levels are good.
It can go forward.
Great to have you.
By the way, if you, ladies and gentlemen, you live in a liberal city, I think you should avoid walking under tall buildings where liberals live.
They're jumping out the windows today like crazy, especially if you happen to know where Andrew Sullivan lives.
Don't get anywhere near.
I mean, it is really getting dangerous out.
There's a new Pew Poll out.
Suddenly shows that Romney is up by four percentage points over Obama.
Rasmussen now says that Romney's two points ahead of Obama in 11 swing states.
Now, for the record, Obama won those 11 swing states, 53 to 46 back in 2008.
And that was identical to his national margin.
And he's down two in those swings.
I mean, the polling data is all bad for Obama, no matter where you look.
And the Pew Poll is an amazing swing.
It's swinging up 14 points in this category, eight points in that category, seven points in this.
It's all just amazing.
Andrew Sullivan, who is a well-known inside the glitterati of punditry, he's a well-known leftist activist, and he's concerned that Obama threw the election.
He just lost it in this debate.
And these polls are all over the place.
Even in Pennsylvania, Romney, it was a story that Romney's pulled out of Pennsylvania, but yesterday and today, two polls are out in Pennsylvania that show Pennsylvania in play.
Romney down by two.
That's the margin of error.
And we think that Romney and the campaign had made the decision to pull out of Pennsylvania.
Well, they've announced they're going to do that.
They'll pull out of Pennsylvania, go to Ohio, reallocate the resources.
It makes no sense, given the polling data.
The only thing that makes sense is that the Romney camp decided to pull out of there before these polls came out in Pennsylvania.
So anyway, it is fascinating to me to watch these people who swear by these polls.
For example, I'm all hunky-dory.
I'm fine with it.
I'm not trying to throw cold water on it.
But does anybody really believe?
I need, maybe I'm wrong.
I could be wrong about this.
Is it really likely, is it really possible?
For example, that, say, women, after the debate, change their minds to the tune of 15% of them.
Is that really how people make up their minds in a presidential election?
Are people's opinions that fluid?
Well, take women, anybody.
I mean, the only demographic Obama still has is blacks, 95 to 3, in whatever poll you look at.
But you know me.
I've always had an arm's length with these polls because I think they're used to make news.
But I've also said that once you get into October, and as you get closer to the election, the pollsters all start getting concerned about accuracy and their legacy for the next round of elections and so forth.
So they always tighten up and they always get closer to reality as you get closer to the election.
But I just, you know, I don't know anybody whose opinions are this fluid and volatile.
I mean, what is the old cliche?
Nah, debates don't matter.
How many of you have heard that in past presidential elections?
They're interesting to watch and they might affect a few swings, but they really don't matter because people have their minds made up long.
Now, all of a sudden, that debate is the single.
See, my point is, is if we've got polling data now that shows Romney ahead, wherever he's ahead, I think he's been ahead for months or weeks.
I don't think it happened overnight.
I think we've been misled for whatever reason.
I'm not even chalking up to a conspiracy.
I just, and I'm not trying to talk you out of believing this one or these polls.
I mean, they're all saying Romney is surging in most every demographic.
You've got the Pew poll showing Romney ahead by four, but within that poll, you have massive shifts in certain demographics.
Rasmussen says again that Romney's up by two now in the 11 swing states that matter.
And the two polls in Pennsylvania from yesterday both pretty much say the same thing, Romney down two, which is margin of error tied.
That makes Pennsylvania, puts Pennsylvania in play.
You have these guys out in Colorado, we talked about them yesterday, that have not been wrong since 1980.
And they put together their projection based solely on economic data.
They don't poll people.
They don't go out and sample opinion.
They just look at the economic data.
They haven't been wrong since 1980.
They say Obama is going to lose Pennsylvania.
Romney's going to win Pennsylvania.
They've got Romney at 330 electoral votes.
And these guys haven't been wrong.
See, we're watching an utter panic on the left because these polls are the Bible to them.
It's their polls.
It obviously makes sense.
They own them.
They run them.
And they report them.
And I have to tell you, I watch this with utter, amazed fascination.
And these people, now that we've got soundbites of the drive-by media, in utter panic, and it is all centered around the debate, and they can't believe that it happened.
And I want to try to help you people on the left and those of you in the media.
And this is not partisanship.
I'm not going to be speaking here anything other than purely, totally objectively.
I'm trying to help you.
I'm trying to help you understand.
You're the guys that live in a bubble.
You live in your artificial universe, your created world where nothing you don't understand or agree with gets in.
You think that Barack Obama is the best speaker, the best orator, the most mesmerizing, persuasive politician you've ever seen.
And the vast majority of Americans do not.
The Barack Obama in the debate is the Barack Obama we see at every press conference.
The stuttering, the hemming and hawing, the filibustering, the refusal to answer questions.
The Barack Obama you see is the one on the teleprompter primarily from 2008 and the first year of his presidency.
That's Obama to you, to us.
Obama is average.
He doesn't excel at any, and he can read the teleprompter really well, and he can make other people's words sing when he's on his own.
No great shakes.
And I'm not saying this because he's liberal and I'm conservative.
I'm getting an honest, objective analysis of Obama's talents.
They're just not what you people think they are.
But you live in this bubble where you have convinced yourself that we're dealing with somebody practically superhuman and you just can't believe.
Where did Obama go?
And my point is, nowhere, that's who he is.
It's who he's always been.
There's nothing new to see here.
Except it is all new to you because nothing that happened in that debate comports with the reality that you've created for yourselves.
Now, I have only been following politics pretty closely for, let's say, I'm 60, probably 45 years.
And maybe I've missed it, but has any candidate for president who lost a debate ever attacked his opponent like Obama and his flaks are doing now?
Has any previous candidate ever called their opponent a liar or an actor?
I mean, they said Reagan was a B actor, but after any of the Reagan-Carter debates, Jimmy Carter actors, well, he's just an actor.
You can't listen to what he says.
It is unreal.
These guys are the biggest, sorest losers I have ever seen.
The Obama people are showing themselves to be bigger, sore losers than Al Gore was in 2000, and all they've lost is one debate.
I can't wait to see how they act when they lose the election.
That's going to be fascinating to watch.
But is this a question for you, independents and moderates?
Is this how Obama hopes to raise the discourse in Washington?
Is this how Obama wants to show leadership when it comes to civility and just this whole notion of raising the discourse by calling his opponent a liar behind his back?
I mean, he couldn't call him a liar to his face in the debate.
He had no answer for Romney in the debate.
But then the next day, goes his own way, has the teleprompter, has the script written for him at a press conference, and he starts saying, that wasn't a Mitt Romney that I know last night.
That was a liar.
The real Romney is who we have portrayed for you in our ads.
Really?
The real Mitt Romney, this is my point.
They live in this bubble.
They believe the lies that they craft.
They believe in this alternative universe that they create.
And the real Romney is the guy in their ads who lets a guy's wife die with cancer, who is a felon, who doesn't pay his taxes.
That's the real Romney to them.
That's who he really is.
And that's why the media is upset.
Why didn't Obama say that about him to his face in the debate?
Well, because Obama knows that it's BS.
And he'd be setting himself up for even more embarrassment if he tried it.
The 47% comment's a great illustration.
That's for an ad only.
You don't say that when Romney's got a chance to answer it or explain it because it would, it's a hanging curveball.
Romney'd knock it out of the park.
So, as we mentioned yesterday, Axelrod and the other Obama flaks are now saying that it's not possible to debate with a candidate who isn't telling the truth.
It just can't be done.
We heard this soundbites yesterday.
We don't know how to deal with this.
How do you deal with somebody that's lying to your face?
They don't seem to notice that Romney didn't have any trouble knocking down Obama's lies.
Romney had just a fine old time in that debate, knocking down every lie Obama told.
And yet, Axelrod and the gang tell us that Obama was so flustered, so shocked at the lying Romney who showed up.
He didn't know what to do.
Romney was telling so many lies that the smartest brain in politics froze.
This is how they expect to persuade people?
This is their sore loser excuse that the Romney in the debate was a lying sack of you know what?
The real Romney is the guy they put in their ads.
It's like the 2004 election.
The exit polls, those were what was real.
The real votes, that's where the fraud was.
They believed that too.
They thought Kerry was elected based on exit polls, which there's not one vote counted in an exit poll.
But before the polls close, they're running around congratulating each other, telling each other Kerry's the new president.
He's acting like it in his office.
Then the real votes start getting counted, and they have no clue.
And they want to charge fraud in the real vote.
They want to investigate the real vote.
Same thing is happening here.
The real Romney shows up, but he's not the Romney they created.
They don't know how to deal with it.
Axelrod admits it.
And so it has to be that the real Romney doesn't have the guts to show up in a debate.
And Obama was so flustered, he froze.
His brain froze.
He couldn't keep up with all the lies.
And there's another reason they say that Obama had to hold his tongue.
Actually, I say this.
The reason Obama had to hold his tongue was that he can't tell the American people the truth about what he really wants to do.
That's why we're not getting any second agenda specifics from him.
He doesn't dare tell us what's in store.
He wouldn't have a prayer of being reelected if he told us what his second term agenda is.
His whole campaign is Romney is a lying skunk that you can't trust, that doesn't like poor people and doesn't like the middle class, has way too much money.
Speaking of which, there was a story in the stack I didn't get to yesterday.
I forget, it was a prominent Obama supporter wondering why Romney's net worth is only $250 million.
Now, just last week, Romney was this filthy, rich, insensitive, lying sack of you-know-what who gladly let a guy's wife die of cancer, who is a felon.
And then when that didn't play, now they're starting to say, well, how come he's only got 250 with all the stuff this guy's, they're trying to say he's incompetent.
He ought to be wealthier.
He ought to be much wealthier given what we know about his career.
I'm telling you, these people are all over the place.
It's impossible to follow them.
But Obama's not going to tell us the truth about cap and trade, amnesty for illegals, same-sex marriage, massive tax increases, gutting the Defense Department.
That's what's coming.
That's what's coming in his second term.
He's not going to tell us that.
Even Obama realizes his plans are hated by the vast majority of Americans, but that doesn't matter.
They've been governing against the will of the American people for four years.
Why stop now?
So he has to stand there, say nothing, try to be cool, try to be your eye candy, or eye candy for you, like he was on the view.
I mean, to show you the depths to which they've sunk, one of the prominent items in their latest ad campaign is Big Bird and how Romney wants to kill Big Bird.
Here we've got a dead ambassador.
We've got a foreign policy falling apart.
We've got, who knows, an economy falling apart.
More bad news on the economy today.
And all Obama can do is run ads saying Romney wants to kill Big Bird.
You realize Big Bird got over a million dollars in stimulus money.
Money ostensibly for shovel-ready jobs went to PBS.
Over a million dollars went to the children's television workshop or some such thing.
Sesame Street, that whole thing.
Anyway, in a nutshell, in a nutshell, Obama's response to Romney's debate victory has been: don't believe your eyes.
Believe my ads.
Don't believe what you saw in that debate.
Don't believe that's not the real Romney.
That Romney was lying sack.
You know what?
The real Romney is a guy in our ads, killing Big Bird, a felon, and letting a guy's wife, cancer, die.
That's the real Romney.
Which is pretty ironic, coming from a guy who used to have posters of his image over the word believe.
Coming from Mr. Hope and Change, coming from a guy who doesn't dare tell us the truth about what he's done and what he intends to do.
Anyway, let's take a brief time out here.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program.
800-282-2882.
Do not go away.
Hey, by the way, speaking of Big Bird, the producers of Sesame Street have just asked the Obama regime to pull down their ad featuring Big Bird.
Well, they let it run while the issue was hot, but I think they think they've gotten all the mileage out of it they're going to get.
And the producers are now putting their foot down.
I mean, PBS likes to do their propaganda in a much more subtle way than this.
This is a little bit too obvious.
Because they rely on the public supporting government funding.
And I also think they're pulling it because it isn't working.
Really, folks, who out there, given what's going on, A, cares?
B believes that Mitt Romney wants to kill Big Bird.
It's one of these.
I know some of you think that there are people who believe it, and there are, but it's not a majority of people.
Now, I was talking about, I have a tough time believing these seismic shifts.
In this Pew Poll, it has Andrew Sullivan on Suicide Watch.
In the current poll, Obama and Romney are tied among women at 47%.
Okay, cool.
Last month, Obama led Romney by 18 points among women, 56 to 38, likely female voters.
And we are being asked to believe that the debate is what changed all that.
Now, I'm sorry, I don't believe that Obama ever had an 18-point lead in women.
Those polls were oversampling Democrats out the wazoo.
I just, I don't know too many people whose opinions are that flexible and fluid and malleable, particularly presidential elections.
Anyway, sit tight.
Coming right back.
Your guiding light, Rush Limbaugh, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
Great to have you here, isn't it?
Great to be here.
You know it, and I know it.
800-282-2882.
Pew poll.
Democrats, suicide watch.
Something about this poll that I just want to be complete in reporting it to you.
There is a plus-five Republican sample in this poll.
It's one of the first polls that samples more Republicans.
They don't list the sampling, though.
You have to discover the sampling by dividing the number of respondents.
So it's confusing.
Everybody seems to be coming up with different numbers.
But the consensus, the consensus, as the global warming consensus, the consensus among political scientists is that they oversampled Republicans by 5%.
Now, the Pew people, the Pew people are saying, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute.
We're not oversampling anybody.
This is just how people are identifying themselves in our sample, which is a new one on me.
They are saying that because of the debate and because of the increased momentum for Romney, that more people are telling them that they are Republicans now than were admitting to it last week and the week before.
I want to throw that in the mix too for you to consider.
So the Pew people, it's not that we went out and purposely found 5% more Republicans, just in our sample, 5% more people than previously said that they were Republicans.
The numbers are 403 Republicans, 396 Democrats, registered voters in the Pew Poll.
So there wasn't a whole lot of oversampling, but for example, why would they rush?
Why would they all of a sudden start oversampling Republicans if they're doing it on purpose?
Folks, that's not very hard.
I mean, look at, take a look at this.
This may be an indication.
Voter registration ends today in Colorado, Florida, Miami, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
And you can still register online before it's too late.
In fact, we've got a link.
We've put a link at rushlimbaugh.com if you want to go to our homepage.
I got some big announcements about that today, too.
We're going all digital on the Limbaugh letter.
Yep, all digital on the nation's most widely read political newsletter.
I've got details on that coming up later.
But we've got this link.
If you haven't registered and you want to register online, you can do it at rushlimbaugh.com and the link is there.
Now, Republicans, I'm hearing, have been registering online like there is no tomorrow.
And I'm hearing in places like Ohio that the request for absentee ballots by Republicans is dwarfing the request by Democrats.
All of this is anecdotal.
Some of it can be documented.
So why would the Pew Poll have 5% more Republicans?
Could it be that as we get closer to the election, they're throwing out the turnout sample from 2008 and 2004, and they're getting closer to what the 2010 turnout was.
Or maybe they're projecting, because they themselves are telling us that there's so much more enthusiasm on the Republican side.
Remember, we had the sound bites yesterday from F. Chuck Todd at NBC, and he's clearly distressed over all of the Republican enthusiasm compared to Democrat enthusiasm, a huge enthusiasm gap.
I just, I'm, with the polls, I'm not heralding this thing as though I all of a sudden believe it, because folks, I don't, I think these polls are, they're too subject.
They're too capable of being doctored and messed around with.
You look at some of these early polls that had Democrat samples of plus 11 and plus 10.
Now, I know the cliché Jay, wait a minute, Rush, you say people don't change their minds.
Do you know women?
Yes, yes, yes, I know women change their minds on a diamond.
But I'm telling you, something like this, I just, I told you three months ago, two months ago, and one month ago, if the election were held on that day, three months ago, two months ago, it'd be a landslide Romney.
And I still think that.
I look at everything happening out there, and it all adds up to a Romney win.
And I'm not looking at one poll to tell me that.
Looking at other things, in no way can anybody say that the Obama campaign is doing anything positive.
It isn't surging.
There's nothing positive about it.
There's nothing infectious about the Obama campaign.
There's nothing inspiring, enthusiastic.
You don't see a bunch of Obama pollsters or signs out there.
The bloom is off the rose.
The thrill is gone.
What have you?
We got a country in the tank.
We got a country going down the tubes.
We got a president who cannot cite one thing from his previous three and a half years say, you want more of this, vote for me.
Just the opposite.
Nobody wants any more of this.
Well, 30, 40% do, but I'm speaking in a majority sense.
Just all of the common sense data that you can see by watching and reading and listening is pretty indicative to me.
But it's risky.
There's nothing scientific about that.
The polls claim to be scientific.
But I just have never bought into this.
You know, you've got an incumbent who's never been, he's not at 50% in anything.
You know what the statistics on that are?
Defeat.
No president under 50%, no incumbent wins when his approval is under 50, when his polling numbers are under 50, it doesn't matter.
This is Lord Obama.
Well, he may not care about the statistics, but in order for them to cheat and have a chance at the cheating working, the race has to be close.
That's another burden we've got.
We've got to win and win big to keep the lawyers out of the aftermath.
Our margin of victory has to be lawyer-proof.
And I think it will be.
It's going to be stunning.
If these guys in Colorado are right, and they haven't been wrong, if they're right that Romney ends up with 330 electoral votes, they're not going to go out and charge fraud.
They might talk about fraud, but they can't do anything with it.
That's too big a margin of defeat to explain by fraud and cheating and so forth.
There's another poll out.
This one is public policy polling.
That just came out.
This is a liberal bunch out of North Carolina.
Romney 49, Obama 47, national poll.
This, by the way, is a switch.
That's a six-point net swing from last week to this week.
It's the first time in this poll, public policy polling, that Romney's had the lead.
Now, if you want to go all conspiracy on me, you can sit there and say, Rush, none of this is real.
These people, they're purposely saying Romney's in the lead, trying to get us all excited and all jacked.
And then next week, after the next debate, the bottom's going to fall out.
They're going to have Obama back at 52.
He's going to be winning every poll.
And us voters, us Romney supporters, we're just going to be so depressed, we're just going to throw it in the towel.
They're conspiracy people who believe that that's what's happening, that we're being set up with phony Romney leading poll results.
If Obama loses the next debate, that's entirely likely.
It's going to be on foreign policy.
You saw Romney yesterday.
In fact, you know what I want to do?
I want to find a way.
Coco, I was thinking about this last night, and I didn't send Coco the note.
I got distracted watching the 666th Monday night football game.
And I meant, Coco, we need a link to Romney's foreign policy speech yesterday at VMI.
We need a final where people can tune out, watch the whole thing.
We played three soundbites, but the media hasn't covered the whole thing, and it happened right before lunchtime.
Romney was smart.
He got out of there at noon right when this program began.
Bush was smart in that way, too.
They know.
They know when to wrap up their official presidential stuff.
You need to see the whole thing.
Obama on foreign policy is as vacuous and as empty as he is on domestic policy.
So now we're hearing Obama is going to come.
He's going to get really feisty.
He's not going to let Romney get a word in his wife.
He's going to be really on the offensive.
Here's the thing to look out for.
The thing to look out for is the moderator in the next debate, Martha Radditz, ABC.
I think she's doing the next presidential debate.
Is she doing presidential or vice presidential?
Whoever, whoever the moderator is, is going to be under orders to stifle Romney and to cut short answers to questions or reactions to Obama.
That's where they're mad at Jim O'Lara, PBS.
And Olara didn't shut Romney down at the point in time, many points in time, and he was shellacking Obama.
He didn't enforce the rules on time limits and so forth.
But that debate last week was not an anomaly in the sense that Obama had a rare night off and Romney had a day that he's incapable of having again.
In that debate, both people were who they are every day.
That is Mitt Romney.
That's who Mitt Romney is.
He's not the guy in his ads or in Obama's ads of him.
That's who Mitt Romney is.
I know him.
I've spent time with him.
That's who he is.
He knows his stuff.
He knows the stats.
He knows the details.
He knows the facts and figures.
He's an upper echelon manager.
He's an executive.
He knows the stuff.
Obama doesn't.
That's also who Obama was.
Okay, so we got a foreign policy debate coming up.
What's great out there about foreign policy?
Osama's dead.
Okay, and what?
We got a dead ambassador.
We got to debacle the Middle East.
We've got the Arab Spring totally misrepresented as to what it was.
We've got a president doing everything he can to distance ourselves, this country, from Israel, which is our lead ally in the region.
We've got somebody who doesn't know what he's doing.
We've got somebody who does not think there's anything special about the United States.
We've got somebody who doesn't think the United States represents the solution to any problems.
We've got a president who believes that the United States is the problem.
He's going to be up against Mitt Romney, who believes in the greatness and the exceptionalism of this country.
What happened in the first debate was not something that can't happen again.
Quite the contrary.
Something that has happened is much more likely to happen again than something that hasn't happened is to happen itself.
That is Pascal.
Much easier to believe something that has happened will happen again than it is to believe that something has never happened will happen.
Anyway, I got to take a break here, folks.
It's Profit.
Obscene profit time.
And we'll be back with much more after this.
Don't go away.
Candy Crowley, CNN, doing the next presidential debates at Town Hall.
Martha Radditz is doing the VEEP thing on Thursday with Ryan and Biden.
And then Bob Schieffer is going to moderate the final presidential debate.
And that'll be on Florin Buddhism.
So that's Schieffer is older than Jim Lara.
I don't know.
Maybe the same age.
Clearly, the same era, Jurassic Park, the Jurassic era.
But that's.
Look at, folks, this debate did more than change polls.
I don't deny that it changed the polls.
Don't misunderstand me.
But it did something else.
It ignited Republicans.
There was leadership for the first time.
I don't know how long.
For four years, half the people or more of this country have watched Barack Obama get away with the fraud that he is.
And he was called on it that night.
That is confidence-inspiring.
And what we learned is that Barack Obama, in front of whatever 60 million people, 65 million people without a teleprompter, can't change who he is.
He is who he is.
He'll be who he is in that next debate, and he's going to be up against Romney.
He'll also be who he is.
We'll see.
I want to go to the audio sound bites just to illustrate for the fun of it the panic over the polls taking place in the drive-bys.
Here is a montage last night and this morning.
The polls are really hard to understand right now, but we have one of the strangest days in polling.
It's a mixed verdict.
I look at the numbers where the gender gap is even, and I'm scratching my head about that.
It is just as much an art as it is a science.
A poll is just a snapshot of the moment.
In this very close election, polls will be volatile.
These national polls don't really matter at this stage in the game.
The polls are quite shocking today.
Don't get too wound up in one or two polls.
Wait for a week's worth.
That's Ryan Lizza wrapping it up.
So these guys, you see, these people, they live and die by these polls, except now, you know, it's hard to explain.
A lot happened.
It's really, really more complicated than you can understand.
Only, only us professionals, we professionals can make sense of this.
Just wait.
Wait for a full week of this, and it'll be better.
Wolf Blitzer.
In crisis, over the pew poll, Wolf Blitzer and Gloria Borger are still in the loop they were thrown in.
This just coming in, a major shakeup in the polls only 29 days before the presidential election.
Mitt Romney clearly riding very high since his strong showing in the first presidential debate.
And now he has taken the lead in a closely watched and highly respected poll.
Take a look at these numbers just released by the Pew Research Center.
Mitt Romney now four points ahead of President Obama among likely voters nationwide, erasing the president's eight-point lead before the first debate.
Oh, no.
And Gloria Borger is just as upset as could be.
That damn debate gave Romney all that he wanted.
Yeah, I don't think the Romney campaign could have wanted to do any more with this debate than they did.
If you look across the board at these numbers, Wolf, Romney has made gains in almost every area, including somebody who's better able to improve the job situation.
He leads, Romney leads Obama by eight points on that.
So whether it's on the economy, whether it's on leadership, he's now tied with the president as far as leadership ability is concerned.
So I think Romney got everything out of that debate and more.
You hear how surprised she is that Romney is now polling as better able to improve the job situation.
Why is she shocked at that?
What has Obama shown in terms of his ability to deal with the job situation?
Nothing.
All he's done is made it worse.
Where is the thinking, the evidence that Obama's the guy to fix the job situation?
Obama's the guy that caused it.
It's an example of bubble these people live in.
They get beside themselves over this.
Romney leading on jobs?
That's the common sense reaction.
And you don't need a debate, Gloria, for people to understand that Obama doesn't know what he's doing on jobs.
All you need is real life.
It's an absolute failure and buffoon when it comes to the economy.
And people are living it.
They don't see it in a debate.
And now, folks, guess what?
Suddenly, it's okay to question the polls.
Yep, it's okay.
But just remember last week, Politico had a story making fun of me for telling you to ignore the polls last week, that they weren't accurate.