RUSH: Emmy in Loveland, Colorado, I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: I can’t believe I’m talking to you. I just adore you.
RUSH: Thank you. Thanks very much.
CALLER: I’ve been wondering as it gets closer to looking like Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee, do you think the Clintons are going to resort to sabotage against Barack?
RUSH: Oh, I hope so. You know, I had the cigar in my mouth, it’s rude, I apologize. I’ve speculated all along, you know how badly she wants this. All of these last 35 years with Clinton have been oriented toward this. I mean there was an implicit deal, it’s a business arrangement, whatever else it is, marriage or what have you, and she kept his hopes alive, she kept his governorship alive, she kept his presidential aspirations, kept his presidency alive. That cost something.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: This is her turn. She’s earned this. She gave up all of her life for this to play second fiddle to some hick from Arkansas, and now to see it slipping away to a rookie?
CALLER: Yeah. They’re going to be really mad.
RUSH: Yeah, you’ve still got the superdelegates you can play games with. I mean the delegate math doesn’t look good, I have to admit, but there’s also the Florida and Michigan delegations. But even with those, you know, they’re not winner-take-all states. I don’t think both of them are. It may not be enough, depending on what the delegates — he’s, what, 153 delegates ahead right now, something like that? Yeah, depending on who’s counting. In order to do this legitimately, Emmy, she’s going to have to run the table here, and that’s going to be very, very difficult to do. These are not winner-take-all states. In Ohio, the Democrats divvy these things up, and Texas is really weird in that regard on the Democrat side, because they also weight minorities in the number of delegates they get in districts, not so much by total vote count. It’s the strangest damn setup. But all it leads to is there’s plenty of opportunity here for sabotage. Let me ask you, Emmy —
CALLER: Hm-hm.
RUSH: — you know these people.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: You’ve followed them. Do you see them just going away quietly in the night, graciously in defeat?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: No.
CALLER: And I’m picturing the day after Denver, you know, and Barack’s the nominee, they are going to be so mad.
RUSH: Oh, it ain’t going to get to that point.
CALLER: Oh, it won’t?
RUSH: No, no, no, no. They can’t sabotage him after that.
CALLER: They can’t?
RUSH: No. How can they sabotage him after he’s the nominee? They gotta stop him from getting the nomination.
CALLER: Well, I’m thinking they’d rather see McCain get the presidency if Barack beats them.
RUSH: What, maybe Hillary will come back in 2012?
CALLER: Possibly.
RUSH: Well, I’m sure that Hillary’s ambition is double or triple to the average American’s, and I’m sure that her level of entitlement to this is very strong and high, too.
CALLER: Hm-hm.
RUSH: But if she gets smoked here, I don’t know how they do this, because the next four years, they are not going to matter. He is going to be irrelevant. He’s finished, because whoever wins the Democrat nomination will run the party.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: And even if Obama loses, the Clintons — they might — I say try to take over the party. I don’t see her with the desire to wait four years and start this all over again, because you gotta start three years out.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Here’s what I see happening. If I were Hillary, this is what I would be doing behind the scenes. I would go out and get an insurance policy against losing this, even after my attempts at sabotage. If my attempts at sabotaging the Obama nomination fail, make sure those efforts don’t have my fingerprints, I try to maneuver myself as the vice presidential nominee on his ticket.
CALLER: Oh, wow.
RUSH: Yeah. And then, from there, from the vice presidency, she could undermine his administration every day and eventually lead the impeachment proceedings against him.
CALLER: Oh.
RUSH: So I misspoke. There is an opportunity for sabotage if Obama gets the nomination. She’s gotta be on the ticket. She may even be able to do this from the Senate. I know he’s not stupid enough to put her on the ticket, but you never know, if it takes that to unit the party. You don’t know how far this is going to go down the road. He may need to do it to hold onto certain segments of — like we heard yesterday in South Florida, Jewish voters have no intention of voting Obama, but if Hillary’s on the ticket? Hispanics, we don’t think a whole lot of Hispanics are going to vote Obama. So she might be of some value. Options are pretty open for the Clintons. But I just don’t see ’em coming back strong four years after — (interruption) yes, Mr. Snerdley, there are plenty of white women out there in the Democrat Party that Barack could choose from besides Hillary. We’ll just have to wait. I’m just speculating here. But I think if she was able to finagle her way in as vice president, she could undermine him from there. So that would be one element of sabotage, but I want the Clintons to be the Clintons. These are not the Clintons. These are not the Clintons I know, Emmy.
These people, they’re acting like they’re novices and they’ve never done this before. I know politics may have passed ’em by, we’re in a different era, and their way of doing things obviously hasn’t worked, but I think it boils down to the reason why it hasn’t worked is because they don’t have anything on Obama. If they had anything on Obama, they would have used it before Super Tuesday. She’s kind of hamstrung because she can’t call him out on policy differences because they’re identical. She’s tried the inexperience business, that’s not working. She’s tried plagiarism. That isn’t working. She tried the Bin Laden picture. That backfired. The Clintons are not used to having things backfire. Now the press is abandoning them in droves. Have you noticed this? There are stories in my stack here, there’s a great one, I think it’s from Mike Allen at Politico, I’m not sure. Somebody on a conference call with Howard Wolfson and Bill Singer and these two guys from the Clinton campaign were just berating the press left and right. Tucker Carlson’s talked about it, Chatsworth Osborne, Jr., over at DNCTV.
The press is no longer enamored. The press used to cover for these people. The press used to marvel at the way the Clintons lied; at the way they used to position things. They’re not marveling at it, they’re calling them on it. So they’re facing a road map they’ve not seen before. They think that they’ve always had acrimonious relations with the press, and that’s just absurd. The press helped them survive all during the nineties and helped Clinton get elected and so forth. They may have had their moments when the press was a little bit critical, but for crying out loud, for these people to think the press has always been against them, they’re not living in any kind of reality. So I think their heads are spinning. I don’t think they know which way is up now. They cannot believe that every tactic they’ve tried has backfired, and they don’t know what to do next. And so that’s where the sabotage comes into play.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Jennifer in Fresno. Thank you for waiting. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Well, hi, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Fine. Thank you. Jennifer’s one of my all-time, top-ten favorite female names, by the way.
CALLER: You’re so sweet. That’s one thing people refuse to acknowledge about you. But just don’t tell anybody my middle name is Khadafy or else they may not like me.
RUSH: Just our secret, nobody will know.
CALLER: Okay. The reason I was calling is because I really think that we underestimate Hillary if we think that she hasn’t managed to dig up anything about Obama. I think if you go through someone’s past thoroughly enough to find out about what they did in kindergarten, you’re liable to stumble upon anything that may be there.
RUSH: That’s just what I’m saying. They’ve done it, and they don’t have anything. It’s getting late to use it out there, Jennifer.
CALLER: Well, I think that they are waiting until right before the convention, because these things are all about timing.
RUSH: If she loses, if she’s down, if she loses Ohio and Texas, that may be too late.
CALLER: It may be, but then again, she may use this to go into the superdelegates and say, ‘See, we have a flawed candidate.’
RUSH: What do you think it is? What do you think she’s got?
CALLER: I have no idea, but I remember something that you said, it was either the day before Thanksgiving or two days before Thanksgiving, and you said that the Drive-Bys had a big story about one of the candidates and they were trying to decide whether or not to use it.
RUSH: Yeah. Yeah.
CALLER: And that right there tells you it was not about a Republican because then there wouldn’t be any discussion about whether or not they were going to use it, it would be when.
RUSH: That’s true. The conventional wisdom is it was about the Breck Girl.
CALLER: Yeah, but now that he’s not in there, why wouldn’t they use it to sell papers? They don’t have any loyalty to him.
RUSH: They didn’t want to use it in the first place, and now the Breck Girl is not a factor. If the Breck Girl comes out and endorses somebody — by the way, I’m just telling you what I’ve heard from Drive-Byers. I don’t know who this story was about. I’m just telling you the scuttlebutt inside the Drive-By community is it was about Edwards. But I don’t even know what the details of it are. I have no clue.
CALLER: I think it’s possible. Maybe I’m cynical, but —
RUSH: You know what’s happening to you, Jennifer?
CALLER: What?
RUSH: You have this — like I’m a sports fan, and let’s say I was a New York Giants fan going into the Super Bowl. You just have this thing that the Patriots don’t lose, they just don’t lose, that’s how you’re looking at the Clintons. You’re looking at all this history of media idolatry and worship, they got and succeeded at everything they did, they got away with everything they shouldn’t have gotten away with, and you’re still believing that they’ve got the magic and it’s just a matter of time before they pull it out here, and I don’t think that’s true.
CALLER: Well, I don’t think that it’s magic. I think they’re just that underhanded.
RUSH: Oh, that hasn’t changed. I think they’ve tried being underhanded a lot in this campaign. It hasn’t worked. Everything’s backfired on them, and they don’t understand it.
CALLER: That’s true. Well, we’ll see. If anything happens the week before the convention, then you’ll know I was right.
RUSH: You think that Obama could wipe her out in Ohio and Texas, and effectively wrap this up and she could still unload something the week before the convention and take it away from him?
CALLER: I think it really depends on the magnitude and the type of thing that it is. I think if it’s something that’s big enough that she thinks going into it she can put doubt into the minds of the superdelegates, and I think that’s why she’s still not pushing —
RUSH: The timing on this, if you’re right, the timing would have to be crucial, because if she waits too long people are going to get mad at her for doing it in the first place.