RUSH: Open Line Friday, to Miami, and Richard. Welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. It’s a pleasure to talk to you. Rush, I read on your website that we can’t expect McCain to hold Obama to the fire on many issues like ACORN, Fannie Mae, and his anti-American mentors. So I thought just as Obama is so ready to sit down unconditionally and is so brave to meet with these terrorists leaders from all over the world, I thought, ‘Why don’t you challenge him publicly through the liberal media and New York Times, full-page ad or something kind of the way the old boxers used to challenge each other to a one hour, no-holds-barred meeting with you.’ Let’s see if he has the guts to stand up to your conversation with him. That’s one point. I have another one if you have time.
RUSH: Well, if I were to do that, I wouldn’t go the showbiz route. I wouldn’t put an ad in the New York Times. I’m not going to spend a lot of money; I’m not going to waste a lot of money on what I know the answer is going to be. You have to understand something here, Richard. That is Barack Obama is more afraid of somebody like me than he is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
CALLER: Of course.
RUSH: Obama is playing prevent defense. You have to understand, he’s not going to be aggressive. That’s what made his appearance in Roanoke today so remarkable. The Obama game plan right now is to coast. Don’t do anything that could upset the applecart. Don’t anymore, ‘We want to just spread the wealth around.’ His whole philosophy is don’t make a mistake. Are you a football fan?
CALLER: Yep.
RUSH: Well, there’s a thing in football called the prevent defense, and let me explain to you. Do you watch football ever at all?
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: Okay. Here’s the prevent defense: in the fourth quarter, one team is up by two touchdowns, and there’s five, six minutes to go, maybe seven or eight minutes to go. The losing team gets the ball. The defense only rushes three weak guys. They put everybody back in the secondary, and they give up all the yardage in the world. They give up ten yard passes, 15-yard passes, but they don’t want to give up the bomb, the long bomb to the end zone that could beat ’em. But in the process, they give up all this yardage. They do give up all this ground hoping that the other team will take a whole lot of time to gain the ground and run time off the clock. The prevent defense, one of the things that people accuse is of is ‘preventing’ victory because it lets the other team back in. If you just play your standard defense, you do run the risk of giving up the big play but how often is the big play happen?
You want to go through and out, make ’em punt, give the ball back and then freeze the clock. Anyway, Obama right now is playing the prevent defense. He’s backing off. He’s going to let… Whatever McCain says, he’s not going to engage, he’s not going to get aggressive. He’s trying to run out the clock. Now, the danger in this is that he doesn’t have that big a lead to be running out the clock, according to two pretty reliable polls out today, and one out yesterday: the IBD (Investor’s Business Daily)/TIPP (T-I-P-P) poll, which has Obama up three. So he’s running out the clock, but I think he’s even slipping out of that because this appearance in Roanoke today, there was no smiling, and there was no fawning. It wasn’t the usual Obama appearance. He was responding in anger to things that McCain said last night at the Alfred Smith dinner and in the most recent debate. I didn’t get to see enough of it to see if he brought up Joe the Plumber, but he did yesterday, making fun of Joe the Plumber. His whole campaign is doing that, too.