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So again, best definition of conservatism.
For those of you who didn't see the debate, I know this kind of leaves you in the dark because you don't know when you're relying on somebody to tell you.
And I will at some point, but I want people in the audience to think about this.
These are things that the post-debate analysis didn't even get into.
And the post-debate, and I mean everywhere, the post-debate analysis on Rubio was that he made a fool of himself, that he exposed himself as unprepared, robotic, nervous, not worthy of the bump that he got coming out of Iowa, may have in fact been like the Dan Quayle moment.
That was Britt Hume's take on Fox News.
If you don't remember that, Dan Quayle was George H.W. Bush's vice presidential nominee and having a vice presidential debate.
And Lloyd Benson, known here as Lord Benson, because he's one of these left-wing Democrat aristocrats in Texas, was debating.
Was it a vice president?
It was a vice president.
Yeah.
That's right.
It was, uh, this has been, well, I forget the year.
Anyway, during a discussion of inexperience, I believe it was, Quayle happened to mention the JFK.
Was not that experienced when he was elected president after serving just a short period of time in the Senate, and Lord Benson pounced.
Lord Benson said, I knew JFK John Kennedy was a friend of mine.
And you, Senator, are no John Kennedy.
And the roof came off the place.
It was total humiliation.
It was one of the most, I mean, just devastating slams ever to have been witnessed in politics.
And poor Mr. Quayle had the deer in the headlight eyes for a while before he tried to recover from it.
That's what many said happened to Rubio Saturday night.
Now, I'm here to tell you that it was nowhere near that, but it wasn't good.
Rubio did seem to be unable to say anything else at certain times in the debate.
But the question is, how did people who are going to vote in this thing see it versus how do the analysts see it?
I am convinced after so many years of doing this that, and it's common.
It happens.
I've always been amazed.
Sorry for the stutter around here.
Looking for the best way to say this the way debate performances are analyzed, as though people waiting to vote actually have their votes so insecurely attached to themselves.
They can watch a debate and see one slip up and that can mean oops.
That's it when I want to hear somebody.
A Ruby had a bad night, very bad night.
Well, Rubio fans who are committed are not going to abandon him for this.
Maybe people who are not, you know, maybe leaning Rubio yeah, but it takes more than this to talk committed supporters out of a candidate.
This is just not the way that people make up their minds.
In fact, there's there's even some good analysis that debates are not that big a factor in in choosing a candidate in presidential debates.
I remember not recently, but back in the I forget the years, but it's not all that new that debates have taken on more importance than they used to.
Snurdly's frowning at me.
The old saw has always been that debates really don't change things much at the presidential level.
Now, that's always been a rule of thumb based and backed up on some polling data.
But But the way these things get analyzed afterwards, it's almost like analyze a football game, and you get mad at a wide receiver, dropped a certain touchdown pass, and that's why the team lost.
Well, you have, when you're analyzing a football game, you already know who won.
You already know who lost, and you can factor all these things in in hindsight.
But a debate takes place long before there's a result, and nobody really knows how any of these myriad number of things that happen in a debate are going to affect the outcome and individual votes.
For example, the definition of conservatism question may not be as harmful to candidates in New Hampshire as it could be in other states, because the electorate in New Hampshire is made up a lot of moderates and independents.
They have their share of conservatives, but it may not be as big a deal as if you fudge that question in South Carolina, for example.
But there's some people that really got that question horribly bad wrong.
I mean, embarrassingly bad wrong Saturday night.
Isn't that kind of fundamental?
Define conservatism.
There were some people that were embarrassingly bad on it.
Not one comment post-debate.
Also on the post-debate analysis of Rubio and Christie.
Yeah, Rubio did not look good.
There's no sense in you Rubio people trying to mask this.
It was not his best.
He did repeat it over and over again, and it did look at times like he had forgotten anything else to say.
You have to admit it.
But what nobody else talked about is how did Christie look on the attack?
And did that help him?
And then there's another question if you're going to go this route.
And it's a serious question as well that nobody can answer.
Okay, let's say you assume that Rubio's performance in the debate with this repetition of his claim that Obama is not incompetent and what he's doing is not accidental.
If that's going to hurt Rubio, who's going to end up being helped?
If that is going to cause people voting for Rubio to not vote for Rubio, where are they going to go?
Does it mean they're going to go to Christie?
Well, this is what you would be led to believe by post-debate analysis, that if in this confrontation, Christie, if this is the way you look at it, exposed Rubio, then isn't it natural Rubio would pick up the Christie vote, or Christie would pick up the Rubio votes that Rubio is going to lose, because I don't think that's the way it works.
I think if Rubio actually loses votes, you know where they're going to go?
Ted Cruz.
They're not going to go to John Kasich, and they're not going to go to Christie, and they're not going to go to Jeb.
But depending on what you want to happen, if you're an analyst on television or radio after one of these debates and you have a desired outcome, which they all do, silly for people to deny it.
If indeed Rubio screwed up and lost his support, where does it go?
Where does a disappointed Rubio voter go?
And they make the automatic conclusion they're going to go to Christie because Christie's the guy that exposed him.
And I don't think there's any evidence of that at all.
And I don't think there's any formula that would be predictive of something like that.
I think if you want to answer that, you have to say, okay, why do Rubio's supporters support him and who's closest to him if somebody gets soured on Rubio?
And then you figure out where they go.
Might they go Carson?
No.
I mean, how many people are going to knowingly vote for somebody they know is not going to win this thing?
You realize four or five candidates are going to get votes from people who know they haven't got a prayer.
There is an intricacy and a complexity to this that makes predicting it by virtue of what you think are missteps in a debate impossible to do.
I'm still, I am still not convinced that Trump had a problem in Iowa because solely because he didn't go to the debate.
It may be a factor, but it's not the sole factor.
By the same time, same token, Trump in this debate was, for Trump, he was awesome.
When the subject of eminent domain came up, when something that Trump believes in passionately comes up, get out of the way.
There isn't going to be anybody change his mind.
There isn't anybody going to make him question what he believes, and he's going to destroy anybody who disagrees with him.
And he firmly believes in eminent domain.
Now, many people on the Republican conservative side immediately withdraw from eminent domain because they think it's nothing but big government times 10 stealing and taking people's property, not compensating them fairly.
And here's the leading Republican candidate extolling the virtues of eminent domain in a way that most voters have never heard.
Because most candidates would not dare promote, defend, advocate eminent domain.
But Trump, as a builder and somebody who encounters the need for eminent domain throughout his business, has hands-on experience with it.
He says, you want the pipeline, you couldn't get 10 feet of it without eminent domain.
You want your highways, you want your roads, your bridges.
I hear everybody talk about infrastructure rebuilding.
You can't do it without eminent domain.
If somebody, and here's the kicker, if somebody gets screwed in a deal, it's because they didn't do a good enough deal with the government when the government came in and wanted their property.
If the government comes in and wants your property, make a killer deal.
They've got an endless supply of money.
You hold them up.
You don't give it away.
You hold them up.
And he ends up blaming the people who get screwed by eminent domain for making lousy deals.
Who does that?
There's Trump out there being Trump full and full through and through.
And Jeb Bush decided to get into it with him on this.
Say, well, the difference is that, yes, Donald's right when you're talking about public sector and government eminent domain.
But Donald Trump is not that.
When Donald Trump wants your property to build a casino or when Donald Trump wants your property to build a road or a bridge, that's when you're going to get shafted.
And Trump's sitting there making faces and acting frustrated and poo-pooing Jeb away.
And then shushes him up.
Just be quiet.
You don't even know what you're talking about.
Jeb, he's trying to look big again.
Jeb trying to look tough.
It's not working, Jeb.
It's not working.
Here's another shining moment for Trump.
Trump's getting booed throughout this whole thing.
And after a while, he gets fed up with getting booed because he thinks he's making brilliant points.
He's making points that normally bring the House down with standing ovations.
He's getting booed.
So he finally decides to give it up.
And he tells everybody, the reason I'm getting booed in here is because the only people in the audience are a bunch of donors.
I tried to get tickets from my supporters, and they said you can have 20.
That's why I'm getting booed.
You got people in here who don't like Trump.
You've got the donors.
You've got the lobbyists.
You've got the K-Street people.
You've got these people who want Jeb.
You've got these people who want all these moderates in here.
And that's why I'm getting booed.
My fans were not allowed in here.
Place boo, but nobody denied what he said.
They might have ripped him for blowing cover, but nobody denied what he said.
I mean, it was filled with, this debate was filled with great moments for many of the candidates.
But if you rely solely on the post-debate analysis for your cues, you're going to miss because some of it doesn't register with them.
Like when they were asked to define conservatism.
I guarantee that question, that's when I would venture to say that if any of the professional political people in the audience at TV networks, moderators, analysts, they might have taken a couple of minutes off during that answer because they don't think it's relevant.
It doesn't matter.
What do you mean, define conservative?
That's not it.
But the viewing audience, that's everything to them.
Who is and who isn't a conservative and who can and cannot explain why.
And as I say, some of these candidates botched it big as possible.
Some of them nailed it.
Let's take a brief time out.
We will come back.
We will continue here on the EIB network right after this.
Don't to the phones we return to Lee in Queens.
It's great to have you with us.
Greetings.
Hello.
Rush, thank you for taking the call.
You bet.
Marco Rubio will absolutely ensure Obama's agenda will continue directly because of his support for amnesty.
And amnesty is the one single umbrella issue under which the left will get whatever it wants because they have the votes.
Well, and if Obamacare isn't fully repealed, yep.
Obamacare, health care, socialized medicine, single-payer, whatever, and amnesty, those two things happen, and it's success for Obama's transformation.
It's over.
That's what it is.
So, what you're seeing, what I think is you're seeing in Rubio is the Limbaugh theory on display.
He's going to claim to be against all of this stuff, but the moment he is for amnesty, that's it, because he knows that the left are going to get the votes.
Well, he's got a problem here.
I mean, there's no question he was part of the gang of eight, and he's got to explain that to the satisfaction of primary voters to whom it is everything.
So that's part of his history he cannot erase.
It's true.
So you believe that whatever he's saying now is not true, that he secretly harbors amnesty, something he agrees with, and if elected president, will make it happen.
His history says so.
I mean, he's extremely well-spoken.
Obama's extremely well-spoken.
But once you start, once you support amnesty, you're supporting the left.
That big, you're giving them the votes.
And then after he supports amnesty, after he supports the agenda of left, he can turn around and claim to be against these issues.
He could even claim to fight them, like the theater that we've been seeing all these years.
But it's not going to mean anything because he gave him the votes.
Okay, so I just want to make sure I understand you.
You think that whatever he's saying about his role, a gang of eight right now to erase it is not true.
That if he is nominated and if he is elected president, that he is going to make sure that all of the illegals in the country are granted amnesty.
You think that that's what Rubio wants to do?
If I believe his actions over his words, yes.
He supported the Gang of Eight, period.
So Rubio is out for you.
There's nothing.
1 million percent.
100 million.
Who are you supporting?
I'm supporting Trump.
Trump is the only guy that came out against immigration with talking about immigration.
Look, I'm not trying to light any explosions here, but have you heard what Trump has said that he plans to do?
What I heard is he's going to build a wall and it's going to have a door.
And he's going to stop the Muslims coming in from the countries who support terrorists.
Yeah, but he said that the people he deports can get back in if they come in.
If they can do it legally?
If they come in.
And then it's controlled.
Okay.
All right.
I'm just passing along things that I've heard.
I've heard that too.
He hasn't said he was going to close the border.
He said he was going to control the border.
Right.
No, nobody said he's going to close it.
He's going to have Mexico build a wall.
Right.
Well, we don't want them to build.
They're going to pay for it.
Yeah, I've heard that too through his trade agreement.
It'll have Trump watchtowers on it that you can probably rent as luxury suites overnight for a week or whatever and see right over the wall, see right into Mexico and see that there aren't any more illegals getting through.
And you can pay $10,000 a night.
Stay in a Trump suite high atop the Trump wall.
Hey, don't laugh.
And I'm not offering it as a criticism.
I appreciate the call, Lee.
Who's next?
Joanne in Henson, Pennsylvania.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Hi.
Thank you, Rush, for taking my call.
You bet.
My comment goes to the definition of conservatism topic during the debate.
I thought the debate was great.
I vote for lots of them.
But my comment is about John Kasich.
And he really believes, and he's promoting himself as a conservative with exceptions.
And the exceptions that he's pointing out is that he's a conservative, but he's a nice guy conservative who's running a positive campaign.
Rush, I was yelling at my TV because none of the terminates disagreed with his premise that conservatism is synonymous with negative, mean, nasty people, which is just perpetuating the liberal narrative of conservatism.
Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait a minute.
I'm not sure what your point is.
I'm going to guess.
She not like Kasich.
That's what I thought.
And you're upset that nobody was exposing Kasich as being, that's because they all agree with him.
Joanne?
What he said about conservatism, it needs modifiers.
It needs nice people.
It needs compassion.
They all agree with him in the Republican establishment on that.
That's why we'll be back.
All right, we're going to get back to the audio sound by turns just a jiffy, but I want to grab one more phone call.
It's Jill in Alexandria, Virginia.
By the way, Jill is one of my all-time top 10 favorite female names.
It's great to have you here.
Hi.
Hey, Rush, thank you so much.
And I am a first-time caller.
I'm very excited to get through.
My first try.
My comment is I wanted to agree with you that the base, the conservative base, doesn't really care about Rubio's so-called, you know, per-poor performance on Saturday night because we know what he was trying to say.
You know, we believe what he was saying.
And maybe he should have said it a little differently, or maybe he could say it differently going forward.
But it's not so much about experience, it's about what you believe.
Because look what Obama believes in.
And he is using the power of the presidency to act on those beliefs.
And so that's, you know, I think that's what he was trying to say.
I mean, I knew it instantly, felt it.
I am not the least bit convinced that, you know, Rubio is not going to work out as president.
I'm not necessarily for him.
This is my point.
And Jill, I'm glad you said it the way you did because what I've been trying to say is she's a committed Rubio supporter.
So whatever happens Saturday night, it's not going to make her question her support.
She's committed.
It's no different than if you're a, let's say you're a fan of Carolina Panthers.
You're not going to abandon them next year because of what happened yesterday.
You know that that's a one-off, or you hope or think it is, that they're a better team than that.
Now, I'm not trying to equate the importance of supporting a football team to a candidate, but I'm simply saying that the analysis of all this and the way voters make up their minds does not track with the way the professional class analyzes these things.
Yeah, it was not Rubio's best night.
He came out of Iowa with roaring momentum.
And every debate prior, he had been the epitome of in control and optimistic passion, great articulation.
And in this debate, he seemed stuck.
It wasn't that he repeated himself four times.
It's that he seemed unable to come up with anything else.
So said the critics.
And then the critics say, that's going to cause a lot of voters to question their support for Rubio.
And I don't think it does.
Maybe some that may be on the fence and maybe people that don't support Rubio obviously would not be inspired to after that.
But to have something like that be this major upheaval in the, I just, I don't, I don't see it because there are too many other factors.
Who's to say that some people not mad at Christie for the way he went after Rubio?
I mean, don't forget, even on our side, there are conservatives and other Republicans who think that Christie may have been too mean, might have been too oppressive.
Who knows?
There's just a whole bunch of factors that are involved in this that I think make it impossible to track voter support minute by minute in a debate.
I don't think, let me put it this way.
I don't think anybody goes into a debate after first five minutes, you know what?
The opening statements, best opening statement, Bush!
I'm Bush's guy.
And then the next five minutes, somebody says something really important.
You know what?
Screw Bush.
I'm with Carson.
And then Carson fumbles around the next point.
That's it for Carson.
You know what?
I think I'll go to, well, I'll go to Trump.
Trump looks good.
I don't think it happens this way.
Do you?
It does not happen this way.
So to analyze these debates that way, I think kind of misses the point.
If voters actually change their minds as frequently as the analysts tell us candidates screwed up or did well, like I could make the case that Ted Cruz had a bang-up debate Saturday night, and I could offer you evidence that he got hardly any discussion in the post-debate analysis.
Well, yeah, Rush, so how does that mean he did well?
Well, let me tell you, going in, you know that most Republican establishment types and moderates and centrists do not like the guy at all.
You know it.
I don't even have to tell you.
Ergo, if Cruz had had an off night or if Cruz really screwed something up, that would have been the main thing they were talking about.
But Cruz didn't even get a mention until deep into the post-debate analysis.
And the consensus analysis of Cruz was he had a solid night.
He didn't hurt himself.
He didn't help himself.
He maybe went a little long talking about his sister.
Like, okay, there were people going to vote for Cruz, but at 25 minutes into an answer or 25 seconds into an answer on his sister, you know what?
I don't like this.
I'm not voting for Cruz.
This doesn't happen that way.
The way people vote or even acknowledge support or lack of support for candidates does not track with the way these things get analyzed, answer by answer, question by question.
But they have to do something here to analyze it, and they have to do something here to illustrate their expertise.
Let's go to the audio soundbites.
I think maybe I can give you an idea of what I'm talking about.
This is a montage of a bunch of analysts from Saturday, Sunday, and Monday on Rubio somehow squandering whatever grave tasse that he had going into the debate Saturday night.
Will Marco Rubio be painted now forever as a robotic candidate?
Robotic quality.
He's already been portrayed by a lot of us as a fairly robotic candidate.
It was like when a robot gets water poured in it.
Rubio is simply too programmed, too robotic.
He was shown to be too robotic, that he's robotic.
This narrative that he's robotic.
Robotic and repetitive.
He looked robotic.
Robotic talking points.
He is some kind of over-rehearsed robot.
Now, I don't have anything other than anecdotal.
I have seen a little videotape of voters talking about Rubio.
And I have gone to comments sections of websites.
And I haven't seen one voter talk about how Rubio was robotic.
They've had other criticisms, and they've had other praise, but I haven't seen this Rubio was robotic.
The media consensus, and by that's a cross-section of every network that we have, at least one person on every network, Rubio was robotic.
Now, I watched the debate.
I never thought Rubio was robotic.
I thought Rubio got stuck, had brain freezes.
I've had them.
It's rare, but I've had them.
I've had them in the middle of Rush to Excellence performances, and I've had to vamp for two minutes trying to remind myself where I was.
It just happens to people that it is robotic.
It's not that this is the only thing he knows to say.
How do you say he's robotic when we've got how many debates that we've already had where everybody, every one of these people thought he was great?
He was super.
The guy was articulate.
He was this.
He was that.
And now one debate, and all of a sudden he's become robotic.
Sorry, it doesn't work that way, particularly in the minds of people who vote.
Now, I'm not saying it's not insignificant with voters.
I'm maybe threading the needle here too thin, but I'm just saying they don't look at this as robotic.
They might have looked at it as they were nervous for him or he seemed the opposite of robotic, just frozen, stuck.
And then they might say, why?
What got to him?
Why was he flustered?
Was he really bothered by the Christie?
That's what they're going to ask.
Here's Christy and Jeb on Sunday echoing that Rubio was robotic.
Christie's on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace.
So this is going to go on for a while, these bumper cars with you and Rubio.
Last night, what they saw is instructive.
It's instructive.
It needs to be seen.
And my strong leadership needs to be seen.
And Senator Rubio's robotic performance needs to be seen, too.
Well, who can disagree with him in the drive-bys?
They're all saying the same thing.
Interesting, that.
Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace talking to Governor Bush, said, Governor, how bad a night for your former protege, Marco Rubio?
Well, you know, he's so scripted.
He's so gifted.
He's a great speaker, but he came across as totally scripted and kind of robotic.
There it is again.
He was robotic.
Snerdley, you watch this.
Don't mean to put you on the spot.
Is robotic the way you reacted to this?
I didn't either.
I didn't, and I don't have a dog in the fight yet, folks.
There's any number of these people.
If they won, I'd be cool with it.
But robotic is not how I saw this.
Well, though that's in fact, Snerdley is reminded with the last half of the debate, Rubio was back to normal.
He was doing a great job, like all the other previous debates.
He was in command.
He was articulating what he believed, fine.
It was the first half of the debate.
It could be nothing more complicated, and he knew everybody was going to be coming for him.
And just nerves, I don't know what it is.
And we'll see, well, Rush, if it's that, my God, we can't elect somebody's going to get nervous or something.
I understand.
Folks, I'm not trying to tell you how to react to it.
I'm just suggesting that the professionals here.
I'm going to repeat this again.
What Rubio said, forget how many times he said it.
What Rubio said, he and Marco Rubi, he and Cruz are the only two saying it.
I'm telling you, folks, this is fundamentally important.
The characterization, the analysis of Obama.
Most of the people, Trump, Jeb, Christie, don't know about Carson, Kasich, guaranteed, do not think that Obama has ill designs in America.
Why, no, don't be so silly.
He's just in over his head.
He's just not qualified for this.
And this is why we can't elect senators.
This is why, precisely why we have to elect these brilliant, seasoned governors, because these senators that haven't even served a full term, why they're so over their head that they just make a mess of everything.
And Rubio's point is he's making a mess of nothing except the way this country was founded, and he's doing it on purpose.
Ted Cruz, as I say, is the only other guy who consistently makes this point because it happens to be true.
And most Republican primary voters believe it to be true.
Hell, it's even beyond believe it to be true.
They know it to be true.
The real question is why are the others not saying it?
Why will Jeb not say?
Why will Chris Christie not say that Obama is purposely undermining this country as founded?
Why will John Kasich not say it?
Why will Trump not say it?
Trump is a unique answer here, but the other guys, I'll tell you why they won't say it, is because they've all worked with him.
Well, Jeb hasn't, but Jeb would have if he had been in position to.
The Republican moderates, the Republican established McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, has announced that there will be no disagreement with the Obama agenda this year because he doesn't want any argument or disagreement with Obama to be a negative impact on the Republican presidential campaign.
So the Senate majority leader has just said there'll be no stopping Obama's agenda because to criticize Obama makes us look bad.
What the hell is his campaign going to be about if not that?
My point is that these guys that will not characterize Obama as doing this on purpose can't because they've all worked with him one way or another.
They've all sought his assistance or they have joined him one issue to another.
And they can't therefore say he's undermining the country as founded because that would make them complicit.
Since they've worked with him, the only thing they can say is he's a bumbling idiot and incompetent.
And I'm telling you, that's not the case at all.
Here's George in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Great to have you, sir.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Hey.
There is a Trump voter that drives me nuts.
And that is the guy that says, I'm for Trump because he's not under the influence of politicians.
He doesn't have anything to gain by going into this.
Wait a second.
If Genghis Khan had all of Asia, did he stop there or did he want to conquer Europe?
And if he had nothing to gain, why was he writing $100,000 checks to Democrats?
The same Democrats that were advancing the garbage policies that have gotten us into this hole, why was Trump writing checks to them?
See, here we go.
If you're a Rubio supporter, you've got people telling you, you're making a mistake.
The guy's for amnesty.
If you're a Trump supporter, you better be careful.
A guy's giving money to the Clintons.
The Clintons were at his wedding.
He's giving money to Schumer.
He says he doesn't need money.
He doesn't want donations.
He's got enough money.
Your theory, Genghis Khan had enough money, had a whole continent.
It didn't stop him from wanting all kinds of power.
So you distrust Trump.
So any number of people will be coming at you, trying to make you question your support for any of these people based on the fact that one or all of them is lying to you.
What are you to do?
What do you do in that circumstance?
The answer is easy.
Listen to me.
You know, find out about Genghis Khan, Genjis, sorry, Gengis Khan.
We'd have to ask John Kerry, the haughty John Kerry, seems to be the expert in Genghis, Genghis, whatever, Khan.