RUSH: Newt Gingrich is the latest Republican — and there have been quite a few — who have advised other Republicans to back off on this, there’s no reason to be critical here of Obama. Obama had nothing to do with this. Republican National Committee shouldn’t be running these ads, it’s just a mistake here to focus on what might have happened. Now, I think this is an example here of the Republicans continuing to make a mistake in thinking that if they appear in a way that they consider reasonable, that somehow it’s going to result in people voting more for Republicans down the line than Democrats, which is disheartening because it means a continuation of the same flawed thinking that we carried into the election.
See, I am convinced that this is a center-right country. I’m convinced that the majority of the people in this country did not vote for the Republican candidate because the Republican candidate was not a right-winger, the Republican candidate was not a conservative. I’m convinced a lot of conservatives simply stayed home and didn’t vote. They couldn’t bear to vote for Obama, but they also couldn’t bear to vote for McCain, they couldn’t do that to themselves, they couldn’t compromise their principles in that way. So these election returns have created the impression that the country’s moved way to the left, almost irretrievably so and apparently a lot of Republicans think the only way to get back in power is to move a little bit to the left, not as far left as the Democrats have gone, and compete essentially on the liberal side of the field, and it’s a mistake. It is a huge mistake, but I’m not worried because Colin Powell has told the Republican Party not to listen to me anymore. They are not listening to me, period, but this notion that we can’t criticize Obama or we can’t raise questions about some of this stuff is like saying we ought to leave Barney Frank alone and Chris Dodd alone and everybody associated with the Fannie Mae debacle and the subprime mortgage debacle and we need to leave everybody in the Democrat Party who has anything to do with this corruption, leave them alone because it’s unbecoming and people don’t want to hear it right now. And that’s a mistake.
People need to know what’s ahead of them. If we want to continue this illusion that you have a cesspool in Chicago, Illinois, and out of this cesspool came Barack Obama, but none of the cess in the pool happened to stick to him, if that’s what we want to present — I know there’s one school of thought out there. I have heard this expressed. I forget who said this. Some Republican, slash, conservative thinker. Back off. Back off right now. It’s wasted to do this right now. At some point, all this is gonna come home to roost, and if the Republicans just hold their fire and appear reasonable here, and appear to be giving Obama a fair shot, we all must come together as peoples, and we all must come together as Americans for hope and change, we have an economic crisis, we have a recession, perhaps a depression, we have subprime mortgages and foreclosures, we have the automobile bailout, we have Bernie Madoff, we have essentially huge, big problems. We need to appear to be working together with the president-select so as to convince the American people that we are not partisan and that we are not small-minded and we’re not just picking fights to pick fights. Instead, we need to back off so that when all of these mistakes that Obama is going to make begin to pile up, that we will have a baseline of credibility and previously voiced support for Obama from which to launch our criticism, which will then give the criticism more credibility.
So the theory is that our criticism will only have credibility if we appear for weeks and perhaps months to love Obama, to support Obama, to want Obama to succeed because, for Obama to succeed, the country will succeed, and we want the country to succeed, that’s the tactic that we are supposed to take, and if we do, then our criticism down the line will have much more credibility because we will have shown that we really hoped for this to work out, we really wanted Obama to change America for the better forever, but alas, it didn’t happen and we are so sorry to have to say this now, but maybe he’s making some mistakes, that’s the theory. The theory behind this is that with the great unwashed, the so-called 20% of independents and moderates that we think we need to win elections, that we must appear — and remember, there’s polling data, the liberals and the Drive-By Media have run polls, all these exit polls, and they have said that the reason McCain lost was because he turned negative on Obama. I nuked this during the campaign, because it’s a silly notion. It’s absurd.
Here’s the proposition they put before us. You have these 20% or so moderate independents who hate partisanship. They literally despise it. And as long as Senator McCain was running a friendly and respectful and honorable campaign, they were willing to listen to what he had to say and perhaps give him their vote. But the moment — this is the theory, this is what our people are told, and they stupidly believe — the moment that our candidate appears to be critical of Obama, just critical, not even in attack mode, just critical, why, that’s it, that’s it, the moderates, they’re outta there, they knew it, it was too good to be true, the Republicans just can’t help it, they just become these mean-spirited partisans and they run for the Democrat Party, which is the most egregious, outraged, partisan, angry, deranged bunch of people in American politics in my lifetime. So we’re told that moderates look at Democrats as clean and pure as the wind-driven snow.
They’re never ‘partisan’ whatsoever. They don’t like partisanship, and that is killing us because we’re believing in this rotgut. It is partisanship, standing on principles and ideas that have long proven to work, that people want to respond to or will respond to. When you’re afraid to stand up for what you yourself believe in, why should anybody else believe in you? Our side is afraid to stand up for what it believes in because they’re afraid it’s going to offend people. So we can’t criticize Obama, can’t criticize the education secretary choice, because we want this to work, we want the country to improve and change for the better, we want Obama to really bring about this change and hope that he promised, yet many of us, we sit here and we cringe at that because we know who Obama is, and we know what his ideas are, and we know where it’s going to lead the country.
Somebody’s gotta stand up and say, ‘Hey, folks, maybe we can’t stop it but this is what’s headed your way and you should be prepared for it,’ which is why I spend some time here talking to you about those very things, and with examples of how the culture is deteriorating. I mean, when you get stories that say a school has discovered that one of the great ways to keep order is rules, I’m sorry, I do not feel like celebrating that. I do not think, wow, somebody’s come up with a great idea. When I see stories that say parents are in a dilemma over whether to tell their kids the truth about the economy this Christmas or whether to just go spend crazily, go further in debt just to shield the kids from the pain, I’m just incredulous, I’m incredulous. This does not bode well for the future that we’ve gotta whole political party that’s trying to foster this kind of thinking.