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March 16, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:50
March 16, 2016, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Time Text
News expressed by me, the host on the show, documented to be almost always right, 99.8% of the time.
And we meet and surpass all audience expectations every day here, the EIB network.
It's great to have you.
Telephone number 800-282-2882.
The email address, LRushbo at EIBNet.com.
But back to the audio sunbites here in just a second.
Establishing my premise that the Republican establishment seeks a contested open convention to give the nomination to one of theirs.
But we've got to go back here to Matt in Lincoln, Nebraska, who wasn't quite finished.
You were talking about all of the excitement surrounding the cruise guy, your cruise supporter, but you compared the excitement to the Trump campaign to the Obama campaign.
And you were suggesting that part of Trump's allure is the media constantly harping on him just glues his supporters to him even tighter, right?
Right.
And, you know, if you looked at with Obama, when Obama ran, we had all these negative stories about Obama, but the media would just give him a pass.
So people are so upset with how the media tries to dictate everything in our lives and tell us what is good news, bad news, that nobody cares.
Nobody cares what they have to say about Trump.
And, you know, the disheartening thing about this with the establishment is that if you remember, as you would remember, Rush, Bill Clinton never got 50% of the vote when he ran for president.
He got 42 his first run, 42nd his second, or 49 his technic run.
And Hillary is not even a fraction as popular as Bill Quinton.
She needs a third party.
And she needs a contested election.
Otherwise, she cannot win.
And then we end up with Screech as president of the United States.
Okay, look, we have a third party.
Good point.
And I'm going to get there.
Because if things happen the way people promise, then Hillary is going to get her third-party candidate.
And I'll get there in a minute.
But I want you to tell me, curious, you're a cruise guy, but you've acknowledged all this excitement around Trump.
And I imagine you think this excitement's infectious.
I mean, you think the excitement itself is drawing people to Trump.
What is it about Cruz?
Why are you a Cruz guy?
Well, you know, I had the privilege of meeting Cruz, ironically, a couple years ago at the Mar-a-Largo Club with Donald Trump in Bank Arthur.
And, you know, I had a brief conversation with him, and he just, you know, very complimentary of one of our senators from our state, Deb Fisher.
But just, you know, anything I asked him, he just right out, you know, would answer.
He's the real deal.
No, he just was the real deal.
Trump wasn't that way.
Trump was very engaging when I met him.
He was extremely generous with the people around him.
He never pushed anybody away, never refused somebody taking a picture with him.
Nothing.
Well, no, but when you're talking about policy ideology, you don't have any doubts.
You have no doubt that Cruz is going to be true to his pledges, true to his commitments, because you know he's a guy.
Absolutely.
Ideology, Cruz is where I fall in line with.
And you, because of that, Cruz is your guy, and you think Cruz actually could make the changes necessary to reverse the direction the country's going.
I don't know if anybody honestly could, but I think that he's one person I trust in that office.
Well, how does Cruz, how does Cruz overcome what you've accurately described when you talk about the excitement around Trump?
I mean, this excitement is infectious.
It's the kind of thing that a lot of people think they want to be part of.
How does Cruz overcome this or deal with this?
How does he counter it?
Well, you know, unfortunately, the way this election has gone, I don't know that that can be done right now.
I think it'd be nice if the party would get out of it, John Kasich would get out of it.
He has no chance.
Please not going to get out of it.
Right.
But it'd be nice if they could just sit there and let these two go at it.
Now, unlike a lot of people that I've heard from in the state, including a senator, if Trump is the nominee, I'm voting for Trump.
You know, who wants Screech in there?
Who wants somebody that's going to sit there and change the balance, complete balance of our courts to, you know, something that is going to change what the Constitution, you know, it's already, they're already changing what the Constitution means, and it's just going to get continually worse if we sit there and we allow Screech in there.
Well, thanks for the call, Matt.
I appreciate it.
Takes me to this.
And it's a politico story, but that doesn't make it untrue.
In fact, it is true.
Top conservatives gathering to plot third-party run against Trump.
Three individual leaders of the conservative movement have summoned other top conservatives for a closed-door meeting tomorrow in Washington to talk about how to stop Trump and, should he become a nominee, how to run a third-party true conservative challenger in the fall.
The organizers of the meeting include Bill Wichterman, who was George W. Bush's liaison to the conservative movement.
I never mind.
Bob Fisher, I never heard of the guy.
No, I shouldn't have said that.
Doesn't mean anything.
I'm just, I didn't know W had a liaison to the conservative movement.
When I needed to talk, they just called here, not a liaison.
Don't anybody misunderstand this.
I didn't mean anything against it.
I just, I was caught.
I didn't know there was this position.
That's all.
When I say I never heard of the guy, I mean I didn't know that W had a liaison to the conservative movement.
That's all I'm saying.
Okay.
The second name, Bob Fisher, South Dakota businessman, longtime conservative convener, and Eric Erickson, the outspoken Trump opponent and conservative activist, and who founded RedState.com and occasional guest host here.
They wrote in an invitation obtained by Politico: please join other conservative leaders to strategize how to defeat Donald Trump for the nomination, and if he is the Republican nominee for president, to offer a true conservative candidate in the general election.
Meeting is scheduled for Thursday.
One person involved in the gathering described it as in the embryonic stage.
It's not like there's a royal grand plan that's going to be unfurled, said the person.
People aren't giving up on the Republican Party yet.
Bob Fisher, the South Dakota businessman in 2012, helped bring together a group of more than 200 conservatives from across the country to unite around Rick Santorum's candidacy, an event in Houston.
He put together raised $1.8 million in a day, the event for Santorum.
And Erickson, who has sparred publicly with Trump for a while now, said that, quote, I will not be voting for Donald Trump at all, ever.
So it looks like these guys are committing themselves to a third party, because I don't know what, unless they come up with a magic bullet strategery here to stop Trump.
But that puts them right in line with the establishment, which is trying to stop Trump.
And I'm telling you, folks, I'm worried about boring you by repeating things over and over.
But I just, I'm telling you, I know what these.
Let me do it with the soundbites.
I mean, enough of that.
Let's go back to the soundbites here.
I want you to rehear Bob Schieffer this morning on CBS with Gail King as they're talking about this, talking about Kasich staying in, Kasich, the last great hope of the Republican Party.
That's why it was all hanging on Ohio last night.
Now, you've got to understand, Bob Schieffer is establishment.
He's a media.
The establishment is made up of people of both parties, made up of accredited members of the mainstream media, and there are conservative media people in the establishment.
It's not just elected officials.
It's not just lobbyists.
It's the entire political class in Washington.
But not everybody in Washington's a member.
Not everybody in politics in Washington is a member.
It's a closed club.
It's not something that you get into by virtue of merit.
You don't climb the ladder of success in whatever industry you're in and get noticed by the establishment and then they welcome you and say, hey, why don't you come join?
It doesn't happen that way.
It's about things that are much deeper and personal and things that are in common.
It's kind of like old money versus new money.
The old money people who have inherited their money, great wealth from back in the day, like the railroad people and the cash register machine people, like the Vanderbilts and the Goobermans.
I mean, pick your name, Pierpoints, John Pierpoint, Morgan.
They hate new money because it was earned by virtue of work.
And that means working class.
Do not doubt me on this.
The blue bloods, old money, inherited wealth from way, way back long ago.
The current practitioners, the main thing they do every day, start sipping gin and tonic at 4.30 in the afternoon.
But they are old money.
And if you're new money, if you're a tech entrepreneur, if you're a sudden billionaire because something pay, you oftentimes are not admitted in the old money club.
It is, well, yeah, it's phony, but it is what it is.
And the political establishment is much the same kind of structure.
So you have media people in it, and the establishment has its own rules.
For all we know, the agreement that the establishment has been operating under for the last 10 or 15 years is that the Democrats are going to be dominant for this period of time for whatever.
But it doesn't matter.
My whole point is the Republican members of the establishment profit and prosper whether the party wins or loses, which is what they don't want to give up.
As long as they maintain their positions, as long as they have their contacts, their networks, as long as they are accredited, approved members, every benefit accrues to them.
Their turn to win elections will come down the pike.
But it doesn't matter.
They still have access to the things that provide their standard of living, whether their party wins or loses the White House.
Now, they do.
Remember when the Republican, at the very outset, the Tea Party, and all these candidates sprung up in the primaries that the establishment hated, like Sharon Angle in Nevada and Christine O'Donnell in Delaware.
They were routinely opposed.
They didn't, the establishment wanted no part of them, but not for the reason that you think.
At that point, the Republicans wanted to win the Senate because it was their turn to hold the chairmanships of the committees.
The way to look at the Senate is you are one you own and are in charge of one one-hundredth of the federal budget.
You get to spend one, and if you run the committees, then you have a leg up.
You have even more power in how that money is spent.
And how the money is spent can determine in large part how much of it comes back to you in any number of ways.
These are the things that the establishment just doesn't want to give up.
They don't want to let Trump and his crowd run in and all of a sudden take over stewardship of the party.
It's not in the cards.
That's why they're so shaken here.
So Bob Schieffer's one of these people.
And by virtue of being one of these people, he talks to them.
He's privy to their thinking.
He is aware of the scuttlebutt.
Those are his buddies.
Those are the people that he talks to.
Other establishment guys, Republicans, Democrats, lobbyists, bankers, Wall Street people.
The establishment's made up of a whole different slew, wide slew of people.
That's why what he says here is interesting to me.
He's talking to Gail King, and Gail King is asking him about Kasich winning Ohio.
And he's only won one race here, Bob.
I mean, why is he hanging around?
All that says is that that makes it a possibility that they can block Trump from getting a majority of delegates before they get to the convention.
I think Paul Ryan will wind up as the nominee if they get it to the convention.
I would bet that what would happen then if you had Paul Ryan as the nominee, he would put John Kasich on the ticket as the vice president.
No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio.
Okay, now seriously, where is that coming from?
Of everything you have heard, here's Bob Schaefer, retired CBS News on CBS this morning, speaking confidently, assuredly, knowingly.
Yeah, I think that if we don't have a nominee by the time we get to the convention, I think you're going to see Paul Ryan will wind up as the nominee.
Where the hell is that coming from?
Well, we know that Boehner put his name up.
Boehner said, hey, I know I'm retired, but I'm going to raise my hand.
I'm nominating Paul Ryan to be president.
Ryan is saying, I don't want it.
I don't want any part of it.
Naturally, you would say that.
But where is this coming from?
In what universe, who in the world, like last night on TV, nobody was talking about this last night on TV.
Bob Schieffer speaks about it.
It's like, oh, yeah, fait de compli.
They go in there and open a convention you watch.
Ryan is the nominee, Kasich, the VP.
He's not nuts.
No, no, no, no.
The point is, I'm not trying to say this guy's so out of touch.
It's good that he retired.
No, no, no, no.
He's in touch.
Move forward to sound bite number five.
Last night, Fox News Channel, Chris Wallace, speaking with Carl Rove about the race.
Chris Wallace says, okay, I want you to put yourself in the position of Ted Cruz's campaign manager.
Does Cruz and his team, do they want Kasich in this race or not?
There's something to the multi-candidate theory.
We have a bunch of Western states where Ted Cruz is probably likely to do well.
But we got a lot of Northeastern states where he hasn't been doing well, where John Kasich has done well, gets us to an even more contested convention.
In chaos, his opportunity for the little guy.
Kasich being discussed here as viable?
He's won one state with what, what, what, now, 63, whatever, what delegates, 100 delegates.
And we're speaking here of his viability in northeastern states.
Okay, take a quick time out here, folks.
Hang in there.
Be tough.
Be ready.
Now, wait a minute.
Let me clarify.
I'm not saying the established is going to succeed at any of this.
If anybody has misunderstood that, I think they're going to fail royally.
I'm just telling you what they're going to try.
That's all I'm saying.
They're not going to succeed, but they're going to go down in flames.
They're going to go down trying.
They're not just going to sit idly by and watch the reason for their existence taken away from them.
Just isn't going to happen.
But I'm not saying be scared, be alarmed.
They're going to succeed.
I'm saying it's going to be fascinating to watch.
Now, some question about what happens to Rubio's delegates.
This is all wrapped up in bound and unbound delegates.
Now, I think Rubio's got 156.
And a lot of people are under the impression that even if Rubio got out of the race, that on the first ballot, those 156 automatically go to him.
But if he suspends the race, if he suspends a campaign but does not end it, then those delegates remain his.
But if he actually files papers and gets out of this and does more than suspend, if he actually cancels, resigns, makes it affirmatively finite, well, then the delegates become unbound and they get thrown into the pool, which can be, I mean, there are people behind those delegates.
Those delegates are people from the Florida delegation.
And they are, they can be wined and dined and negotiated with at various stages.
That's right.
The saga continues.
Okay, Rubio has only suspended his campaign, which means he holds on to his delegates.
I misspoke.
I said the 156 are from the Florida delegation.
He didn't win any in Florida.
They're from other states, but he still controls them.
If he actually gets out of this thing and makes it official, they become unbound and then can be wined and dined and assigned and fought over and competed for and all that.
And that may happen.
Or he may throw them to somebody at some point.
There's going to be a lot of people with leverage here as we get to the process.
Now, before we get back to the soundbites demoing, demonstrating to you that there is something going on here with Kasich staying in from the establishment standpoint, I have to share this with you.
Mark Halperin, who is the producer of this Showtime show, we played the soundbites from yesterday with the establishment Republicans at dinner complaining about Trump.
The guy can't talk.
He's not articulate.
He doesn't have a straight body on what he's doing.
All he's got is a bunch of damn votes.
Well, Halperin was on MSNBC yesterday morning.
And he said that Donald Trump is the most talented candidate for president he's ever seen.
Mark Halperin, well-known leftist mainstream media guy, said Donald Trump is more talented than Barack Hussein.
Oh, and Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post, was stunned.
He couldn't believe this.
He said, you don't include Obama in the list.
Halperin said that Barack Obama was in third place.
Trump is one of the two most talented presidential candidates any of us ever covered.
The other one is Bill Clinton.
He said, look at what Donald Trump does every day to defy.
It's just in terms of pure political skill.
He said, you cannot overestimate.
He said, Trump doesn't have advisors.
He doesn't have strategists.
You know, David Axelod and Pluff worked for Obama.
And Clinton had James Carville.
Trump doesn't have anybody.
He is his own foreign policy advisor.
He is his own domestic advisor.
He's got a media person.
He's got a spokeswoman.
He's got somebody who deals with the media for him.
And that's it.
Everything is him.
He doesn't have any analytics people.
He doesn't have focus group research.
He doesn't do polling.
Everything is raw political instinct.
Halperin says.
He's got no backrooms.
He's got no career-oriented consultants.
He's not running an ad campaign.
He's not spending any money.
And he's running rings around everybody.
That's Mark Halperin.
And all of that's true, by the way.
And it's another reason why there's such frustration.
Trump has blown up every rule.
Just stop it from the consultants' angle.
Look at the political consultants' business.
One of the most famous political consultants, who what's the guy's name?
Snurdly that ran John Kerry's campaign.
Bob Schrum.
Bob Schrum has never won a race.
And Bob Schrum is reputed to be one of the greatest campaign consultants on earth.
He ran Kerry's presidential campaign.
He's run a bunch of them.
He's been on TV as an expert analyst about campaigns.
And then you've got Mike Murphy on the Republican side.
But these guys are all over the place.
And they get rich.
They place all the advertising and they usually get 15% of all the budget.
That's the agency commission.
It's what they get.
That's how many of them get paid.
So the more money the candidate raises, the more money the candidate spends, the better the consultants do.
And these guys are the experts.
Mike Murphy, for example, when Sharon Angle and Christine O'Donnell, he's out there.
So, okay, all right, fine.
You think they're going to win?
They can't possibly win.
They don't know what they're doing.
And have anybody like me running a show?
And he was pretty much being truthful and honest.
I mean, but it's a closed club, and these guys go from candidate to candidate to candidate.
Trump doesn't have one.
Can you imagine?
In football terms, this is the equivalent of having a quarterback so good like Peyton Manning.
You don't need an offensive coordinator.
You don't need a coach devising a scheme.
Your quarterback's good enough to do it.
So these consultants, just them alone, oh my God, my job's in a little line.
He got a candidate here showing we're not needed.
It's this kind of stuff that's on the line here, folks.
Trump can't win.
If Trump wins, it makes so many of these establishment people look and seem irrelevant.
In jobs, they have succeeded in convincing everybody are necessary to the point that everybody just accepts that they are.
I have a minor way of relating.
I started doing talk shows.
Everybody and their uncle said, well, you have to have guests.
No, I don't.
Well, you can't.
You can't do a show without guests.
What do you mean?
Everybody does it.
I said, that's why I don't want to.
But you can't.
Even when I started in Sacramento and didn't have guests and the ratings started coming looking good, there were still people saying, you know, this is going to last.
You've got to have guests.
They were still trying to get me to.
And they finally said, why don't you, why don't you want guests?
I said, for one simple reason, everybody else does.
And there's no guest that cares anywhere near as much as I do about the success of my show.
And besides, these guests are going to be on every other show.
And why are they on their shows?
They're not on those shows to promote the shows.
They're on the shows to be promoted.
They're on those shows to sell a book.
They're on those shows to hype a TV movie episode, what have you.
So I was never, plus I wanted to, it was make or break time for me.
I needed to find out if I could be the reason people would listen to the radio, not a bunch of guests, not a bunch of promotions, giveaways, contests, records, this kind of stuff.
But the point is, I was fought for three years on it.
You have to do guests.
And I said, I don't want to.
And I was, one of the most fortunate things that happened to me was to have a program director back then who backed me up on it.
It's rare.
Well, that's what's happening here.
There's so many things that are just assumed that a candidate has to have employees, staff.
You've got to have a foreign policy.
You've got a bunch of advisors.
You have a consultant, you've got to have this.
And all these people come from the establishment.
Not Trump.
There's a lot of stuff threatening.
Let's go back to the audio sound bites, continuing to make the point.
Here is a montage furthering my point.
Scott Pelley, CBS, Shepard Smith, Mark Thiessen from the AEI, Republican consultant and strategicist Mike Murphy, A.B. Stuttard, David Fluff, Pluff, who ran Obama's campaign, Steve Schmidt, who ran McCain's campaign.
Do you notice these guys win or lose?
They're always back the next election.
And Lisa Stark of Al Jazeera.
And they're talking about Kasich's primary win in Ohio.
Listen to this.
In Ohio, it was Kasich at the bat, and he did not strike out.
He keeps his hopes alive.
Big news of the night.
John Kasich has won.
This is the one that means the Republican race will go all the way to the convention.
Donald Trump came this close to putting this whole thing away.
And Kasich stopped him.
Kasich is very electable in the general election.
He has the best numbers against Hillary.
Kasich would be the strongest candidate.
Kasich is down to the final three.
Can he be the character in temperament contrast to Donald Trump, and can he carry that campaign out?
When Governor Kasich finished speaking, there was a huge flow of confetti, red, white, and blue confetti.
It reminded me what happens at the end of conventions after they pick a presidential nominee.
This is the only primary he's going to win.
He had 30 what-some-odd delegates if that going into this?
It was Steve Schmidt.
I'm sorry, it was Mike Murphy who said Kasich is very electable in the general election.
Folks, do not doubt me on this.
When I saw that headline yesterday, that's why it became the focal point of yesterday's program.
The fate of the GOP hangs in Ohio.
It's right here in this bite.
Steve Schmidt Kasich, he's down the final three.
Can he be the character and the temperament contrast to Trump?
Can he carry that campaign now?
Come on.
Is everybody delusional, including Kasich himself last night, Berea, Ohio?
That's the Cleveland Browns training complex, by the way, is located in Berea.
Here's some of what Kasich said last night.
Tonight, we arrived and we went to a restaurant.
When we walked through, people started to cheer.
My reaction, please don't do that because you're going to make me cry.
My father carried that mail on his back, and his father was a coal miner.
And in my mind's eye is the need to forget the politics.
That widow, who was married for 50 years, who no one calls anymore, you want to change the world?
You take her to dinner on Saturday night.
She'll wear that dress she hadn't worn in six months.
You know what?
Look, this is all I got, okay?
My father was a Democrat all his life.
I'm getting ready to rent a covered wagon.
We're going to have a big sale and have the wind blow us to the Rocky Mountains and over the mountains to California.
All right.
And hang on.
Hang on.
Here we go to today's show today.
Savannah Guthrie talking, Governor Kasich.
Congratulations on your big win.
It's a big one.
And I know that you were hoping to win.
It was a must-win for you.
Any part of your feeling this morning a big sigh of relief?
Let me tell you, neither Cruz nor Trump can win the general election.
You know, they can't come into Ohio with the philosophies they have and win.
You can't win Ohio.
You can't be president.
Nobody's going to get enough delegates to win at the convention.
Everyone's going to fall short.
And that was what was so big about Ohio.
I'm not out to stop Donald Trump or stop anybody else.
By winning yesterday in Ohio, I've dealt him a very, very big blow to being able to have a number of delegates.
What the hell are you talking?
What do you mean I'm not out to stop Donald Trump or anyone else?
And then by winning yesterday, I've dealt him a very, very big blow.
What?
We're stuck in the middle of a bunch of people here who are truly delusional.
Now, we go back to the Fox News channel, their election coverage last night.
Dr. Gdoudhammer is seeing this clearly.
Cruz is a true blue conservative.
Some would say too conservative.
And that might hurt him in a general election.
Trump is a populist.
So the Republican Party is going to be deciding whether it wants to continue to be the conservative party or whether it's going to take a chance with populism.
Now, I don't mean Krauthammer sees it clearly by it's one of these two guys.
Krauthammer all night long was saying it's delusional to think it's not going to be Trump.
It's not going to be Cruz.
It's going to be one of those two guys or else you've got chaos that you can't believe.
But Cruz is too conservative.
He's a true blue conservative.
Some would say too conservative.
It might hurt him in a general, whatever.
Look, they're not happy out there.
They're not happy with Cruz.
They're crazy not happy with Trump, but some of them can read the handwriting on the wall and realize what others are stuck in it.
Can you believe?
I told you, a guy that wins one state is now being treated.
I told you yesterday this was going to happen.
He's going to be treated like all of a sudden the most important guy in the race, and it's happening before your eyes.
Also, Standby Soundbite 25.
I want to get that in if we can before we split today.
But here's James Lima, Ohio.
Great to have you, sir.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, how are you?
Good, good, good.
Thank you much.
Hey, my point was, and I watched, I've been watching Kasich a lot, and I saw him on Henry the other day, and he's just, to me, seems delusional.
And the only thing I can garner from that is there must be a lot of people behind the scenes making them a lot of promisers.
Well, I don't know.
Yeah, I think, A, he doesn't need that.
He's...
He's self-sufficient in this regard.
But I do think that he's aware now that people are going to have a lot invested in him from the establishment side.
I don't think there's any question about it.
Again, folks, I'm not saying it's going to succeed.
Don't misunderstand me.
I'm not warning you of some giant secret conspiracy where they're going to be able to steal everything away.
I don't think they're going to succeed at all.
I'm just warning you what they're thinking and what they may try.
And who knows, they may endorse this third party bunch privately and secretly.
Remember, these people, if they have to lose elections to maintain their positions in this club, that's fine.
They 2010, 2014, it's easy to spot.
That's why you're hearing some of them say that they would vote for Hillary before voting for Trump or Cruz.
Those two guys can't win as far as they're concerned.
Before we go, Trump has put out an anti-Hillary Clinton ad on Instagram.
Now, most of it's video, but I can play enough of the audio that you get the drift.
It's 15 seconds, and it starts out little music, and there's graphics when it comes to facing our toughest opponents.
And then there's video of Putin practicing judo.
There's video of a masked Islamist with the words, Democrats have the perfect answers.
And then it morphs to Hillary barking.
And it ends with Trump.
We don't need to be a punchline.
Trump make America great again.
So the only thing you're going to hear here that makes sense is Hillary barking.
We'll post the link to this ad at rushlimbaugh.com so you can see it.
But this is how it goes when it comes to facing our toughest opponents.
Here's Putin judo, masked Islamist, Putin laughing, and then the graphic.
We don't need to be a punchline.
Trump make America great again with Hillary barking.
Just first ad, 15 seconds.
People are going to eat it up.
We'll be back.
That's another thing is Trump produces ads that people like, think are funny.
Imagine all the free airtime Trump's ads are going to get as well, even though he'll buy some.
But we'll link to that ad.
It's really, it's good.
And it's just 15 seconds, but you'll love it.
And we will see you tomorrow.
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