{"id":223700,"date":"2017-03-01T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-01T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/?p=223700"},"modified":"2017-03-02T16:41:31","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T21:41:31","slug":"the-democrats-have-no-bench","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2017\/03\/01\/the-democrats-have-no-bench\/","title":{"rendered":"The Democrats Have No Bench"},"content":{"rendered":"

RUSH: So there\u2019s always the traditional response when there\u2019s a State of the Union address or any other joint speech, joint session of Congress speech, the opposing party always gets a chance to respond. I think this started with Nixon. I think it started in the early seventies. And the reason I say that — it could have been earlier — but I was working my first job away from home. I grew up in Missouri, my first job away from home was in Pittsburgh.<\/p>\n

I was working at a suburban Pittsburgh station, and it was an oldies station, so I was a disc jockey playing oldies, salted rot and mold. They called it Solid Rock and Gold. Anyway, one night I\u2019m watching Nixon do a State of the Union or something and there\u2019s the Democrat response, I said, “What the hell?”<\/p>\n

I went on the radio the next morning complaining and whining about the Democrat response, and I got suspended for a week for injecting politics into the program. “We don\u2019t do that here. We don\u2019t talk about politics. We\u2019re here to spin the tunes, play the records. We don\u2019t do that.” I said, “Okay.”<\/p>\n

The response is something that is fairly recent. I mean they didn\u2019t do it back in George Washington\u2019s day. It may precede that, but not by much. And the response, whoever draws this, it\u2019s a no-win situation, because you\u2019re coming out of the pomp and circumstance of the House chamber and the full-fledged media coverage, and especially if the president is a Democrat, the media is orgasmic during the whole thing, so the response just never has a chance. It never has a prayer.<\/p>\n

\"\"But the way it has traditionally been used by political parties is as sometimes a showcase or as an audition by up-and-coming, potential, hoped-to-be political stars. So the party hierarchy will choose somebody based on one of two things. Based on, you know, do we really want to pick a big gun and have it bomb out and have it hurt their career. Or do we want to pick somebody up-and-coming, go in there and deliver a hell of a speech and get noticed? And you may forgotten this, but Rostenkowski was chosen once to do the response. Dan “Rosty” Rostenkowski. And it was a home run. The media went bonkers over Rosty.<\/p>\n

I remember John McLaughlin on the McLaughlin Group the following Sunday (imitating McLaughlin), “Rosty, Rosty,” you know how he spoke. It helped that he was a Democrat. He was ways and means. He was just a perfect, ideal Democrat, and because of that his response was always gonna be given a lot of weight. I forget, it might have been Reagan that he was responding to. I don\u2019t remember the substance of it, I don\u2019t remember what it said, but it was folksy, it was real, he had the ability to smile.<\/p>\n

This is the guy that could take you out to a steak dinner, rob you blind while you\u2019re sitting there, and you don\u2019t know it. And then when you discover it, you\u2019re honored. He was from Chicago, and he was a Chicago machine politician, and he had it down pat. But other than that, I don\u2019t remember a response that is — well, his is the only one I can remember here. And that\u2019s going back 40 years now.<\/p>\n

So last night, imagine you\u2019re the Democrats, and you believe all day long that Trump is a buffoon, he shouldn\u2019t be president, that the Russians arranged it, that it should be Hillary, you\u2019ve got sour grapes, you\u2019re ticked off. Everything you\u2019ve tried to do to destroy Trump hasn\u2019t worked. He still has loyal support, you\u2019re ticked off about it, and you can\u2019t possibly imagine Trump hitting a home run. And so you\u2019ve got one of two ways you can go.<\/p>\n

You can either decide that you put somebody in there to do the response that does not have a political future because whoever\u2019s gonna do this isn\u2019t gonna have one anyway. And you don\u2019t waste somebody on your bench who has a future by putting them in a no-win situation like this. Or, you go out and you choose somebody that you think is a perfect retort or response to Trump based on what you think of Trump.<\/p>\n

Now, the Democrats went and got a former governor of Kentucky who, at one time, was also a Republican. But he is defeated. They stuck him at ten o\u2019clock at night in a diner with a bunch of people behind him that looked like the walking dead. I\u2019m watching this, “Okay, what are they trying to do here?” This guy does not represent the future. I mean he looks like Captain Kangaroo. He\u2019s had his political day. He\u2019s not somebody up-and-coming that you\u2019re gonna vote for.<\/p>\n