RUSH: Let me sum up where we are right now. We’ve got 22 days to go, and I think the clearest way to look at where the campaign is, is to conclude that Senator McCain is now campaigning on Obama’s terms. Now, Senator McCain did have a firebrand speech just now in Norfolk with Governor Palin, and he came out swinging on some things. We’ll see. We have a big debate on Wednesday night where Senator McCain says he’s going to whip Obama’s you-know-what. Now, my preference is that when you have a marketing plan, you don’t announce it, you just do it. And besides, how long is it going to be before somebody in the Drive-Bys says, ‘That’s a racial comment.’ Says he’s gonna whip poor Barry and poor Barry’s you-know-what. I predict to you, my friends, it will not be long before that association is made, and this is what I mean. The clearest way to look at the campaign right now is to conclude that McCain is campaigning on Obama’s terms. Obama has dictated what McCain can campaign on and how he can campaign. He did the same thing to Hillary. If McCain or his supporters step outside the box that Obama has built for them, then they’re viciously attacked as racist or whatever. I mean yesterday, Anne Kornblut in the Washington Post comes out with this big — I mean, the headline all across the front page, ‘Race Interjected into Campaign.’
It is clearly an attempt to shut people up. It is an attempt to intimidate people, and right next to that story, by the way, at least on the website, is a story about some poor African town, country, village, or whatever where they say that the best thing that could happen to the people in this town is for every baby to be aborted because health care is so bad and so forth. And that’s of course not a coincidence. That’s designed to support the pro-abort position of Obama and Biden and to cut into Sarah Palin as well. So what you have to do is you have to accept Obama’s terms and his reality and you have to engage as he demands. He can throw any punch he wants from any direction, but McCain has to play by the Marquess of Queensberry rules. And the greatest example of that — and we’ve got audio to back this up coming up — is the notion that McCain’s crowds are raucous, prone to violence, getting dangerous out there, and some of these people are saying, ‘Senator McCain, we want you to go out and fight for us.’ (doing McCain impression) ‘We’re going to do that, we’re going to do it with respect.’ He praised Obama’s judge selections over the weekend, did you hear this? He said, ‘I’m sure Senator Obama will make fine choices for the Supreme Court if he wins.’ It’s almost like McCain was endorsing Obama over the weekend.
So like I told you last week, folks, we’re going to have to try to drag the McCain campaign across the finish line and we’re not going to quit for the next three weeks. Now, a lot going on this weekend, and I’m sure a lot of you may not have heard some of this. There was a story that just popped up over the weekend. ‘After consulting with Sen. Barack Obama, Democratic leaders are likely to call Congress back to work after the election in hopes of passing legislation that would include extended jobless benefits–‘ because, of course, the economy is going to continue to be rotten, ‘– money for food stamps and possibly a tax rebate, officials said Saturday. The bill’s cost could reach $150 billion, the officials said. The officials stressed that no decisions have been made. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they did not want to pre-empt a formal announcement. House Democrats have announced plans for an economic forum Monday ‘to help Congress develop an economic recovery plan that focuses on creating jobs and strengthening our economy.”
Now, there is not one element of Barack Obama’s stated economic plan that will accomplish either of those. You do not raise taxes on small business; you do not raise taxes on individuals, the producers of the country; you do not raise capital gains taxes and punish risk-takers and create jobs and strengthen the economy at the same time. You do just the exact opposite with Obama’s plans. Now, something that I was thinking about over the weekend, yesterday afternoon, if most Americans are so poor, why did the Democrat Congress, including Obama, vote to increase the FDIC insurance to $250,000 per account? Why? Why did this happen? And that’s per bank. So if you got a $150,000 or $200,000 in one bank and the same amount in another bank, they’re both insured. That has to be. Why raise it to $250,000 per account? Why raise it if everybody is so poor? And I finally figured it all out. Now, it’s going to take me a little while to ‘splain this to you, and I’m going to give it my best shot, because it’s somewhat complex. One of the abilities we have here is to make the complex understandable. That figure, $250,000, is everywhere you look in Obama’s campaign. He is going to raise taxes only on people who make over $250,000 but in truth, he has voted to raise taxes on anybody who makes over $42,000 a year. But in terms of his campaign rhetoric, there’s that figure of $250,000.
Now, if you go back to 1984, Mondull, Walter Mondull, in a debate with Reagan, promised to raise everybody’s taxes while saying that Reagan was going to as well, ‘it’s just that Reagan won’t tell you, and I just did,’ Mondale said. Then Mondale said for the ‘rich,’ somebody said, ‘Well, what’s rich?’ He said $60,000 a year. Even if you adjust for inflation for the last 24 years, you don’t get $60,000 becoming $250,000. $250,000 is the magic number that Obama and his campaign have decided on that fits perfectly when they throw the class envy card. Now, if most Americans do not have much money, and yet we’re going to ensure bank accounts, FDIC insurance to $250,000 per account, why not just bail out those homes where the mortgages are $250,000 or less? I’m asking this rhetorically. Stick with me; hang in there with me on this. It goes even further. Because Obama is telling a bald-faced lie about defining small business. What is a small business? Obama and his surrogates have been saying that most small businesses don’t earn over $250,000 a year. But the Small Business Administration has a different view. I looked at a post at Patterico.com that explains a lot about Obama’s tax plan and small businesses.
Now, this figure of $250,000 and his claim that most small businesses do not earn over $250,000 a year is a lie. But there is the number again. What he’s trying to do is go after as many employees as he can. He knows damn well that most employees earn less than $250,000. He is counting on the fact that the Drive-Bys will not report the total fabrication, the lie of misinformation about the value, the worth, the income, the receipts of small businesses. So that figure of $250,000 is out there. To most employees who don’t earn anywhere near it, if he says that 95% of all small businesses earn less than $250,000 a year, they will not be worried that the small business they work at will have a tax increase and therefore might have to lay off people. But he’s lying through his teeth about the number and I have the facts and the figures here to prove it. We’re going to go through this. The Nancy Pelosi comment that a post-election special session would require harsh measures and then Steny Hoyer — I don’t know if you heard this — Steny Hoyer said that as soon as the election’s over, they’re going to re-impose the ban on drilling offshore everywhere. Harry Reid has already done that in the Senate, he’s already said that.
The fight over taking away the right to vote in a secret ballot before being forced into a union is something else the Democrats have on their agenda after the election. So they are assuming they have this in the bag. They’re already making plans, legislative plans to raise taxes, to roll back the ban on offshore drilling, to redo everything they have done for political reasons during the campaign, they’re going to put it all back in place, they are going to have Obama approve all of this, and they’re actually going to start governing before Obama is inaugurated as if he already has been. You might say, ‘Well, wait a minute, Bush could veto it.’ They’re not going to send it up there for Bush to veto it. They’re just going to start working on this. Now, the poll spread today is again all over the place. It’s 11 in Newsweek, it’s 10 in TIME, it is 5 in Rasmussen, I think four in Zogby, and most of these polls are now starting to tighten. Some of you may say, ‘How can that be?’ Don’t ask me, but they’re starting to tighten. Now, remember, the pollsters at the end of this process, they want to be right for their own future credibility. I think some of them are actually honest. Some of them are still using the poll to manipulate public opinion. It’s not an 11-point race right now, it’s not a 10-point race, and of course we’ve got a great story here on these independents.
You know what you independents ought to do? You ought to put a McCain-Palin sign in the front yard and on the other side of the sign in the front yard but an Obama-Biden sticker. Then put both campaign’s bumper stickers on your car. They’re still running around saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, I can’t figure it out, I’m undecided.’ That’s a crock. Basically what you have here, and this is a sad thing, you got 40% of the American people who do not want the socialistic change Obama is proposing, 40% of the American people do. The other 20% are too disengaged while thinking they’re the elites and smartest people in the room to understand what’s going on. They’re the ones that get caught up, ‘Well, we gotta change things, well, I like the way the guy sounds, well, he sounds intelligent.’ So you add a percentage of that, 20% that’s the undecided, the moderates, the elites, whatever you want to call them, to the 40% who want to go socialist, and then of course you have a recipe there for potential disaster. It’s that group that McCain is afraid to offend by being partisan, by being forceful against Obama and so forth.