RUSH: This is Grant in Comfort, Texas. Nice to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Howdy. Dittos.
RUSH: Howdy!
CALLER: I’m just a guy out here in the Texas Hill Country trying to figure out how to best contribute to the un-remaking of my country, and it dawns on me to possibly run for office.
RUSH: What kind of office?
CALLER: Oh, well, heh. To be determined, but I’m thinking the House. It looks like we could use some help there. And I’ve been thinking about this for some weeks now. We’ve got a lot of bloggers on our side, we’ve gotta lot of thinkers on our side, we’ve got a lot of support from conservative radio, but in the end, someone…
RUSH: What do you mean? Hold on. You’ve already floated the idea to people and you’re getting positive feedback on your idea to run for office?
CALLER: No, actually this would be my maiden voyage.
RUSH: No, no. You say you’ve got support from bloggers. What do you mean? You’ve told them…?
CALLER: Well, I say ‘we’ as a conservatives have.
RUSH: Oh, oh. You got an army out there, a network of people that would support your candidacy if you theoretically decided to go for it?
CALLER: Well, I’m not entirely sure of that. What I know is… The point is, we got a lot of people on the periphery, what I call cheerleaders, and some of us have got to get on the battlefield; and, yeah, you know, I’m thinking about setting aside my private practice and taking a crack at it.
RUSH: What is your private practice? What do you practice privately?
CALLER: I’m a lone wolf consulting engineer, and I run projects for a living, among other things.
RUSH: Hmm. Interesting.
CALLER: Fifty-two-year-old guy, and, you know, got a wife and a dog and a business. But anyway, I’m listening to your monologue yesterday, and you’re hitting on budget points that mirror my own, all very encouraging to me. So I thought I’d call to get your take on my biggest dilemma about this. Well, the first biggest dilemma is what do I do to make a living if I’m not making a living. But aside from that, if I’m to do this, and if any citizen candidate is to do this, how is running as a Republican not a waste of time? And if it is a waste of time, and if a third party candidacy is even worse for conservatives, how does one proceed?
RUSH: Well, I need to ask you some questions here before I answer you.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: The first thing, how do you make a living when you’re not working? You mean when you’re doing your campaign?
CALLER: Exactly. I have two full-time jobs.
RUSH: Well, lot of other candidates have figured out how to steal. I think you should investigate that.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: (laughing) I’m just kidding. I’m just…
CALLER: I’m afraid I have a character issue there.
RUSH: I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding, just kidding.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: Well, it is a factor. You’re funding raising, you can’t use that for personal expenses until you get elected (laughing) and then you can when nobody’s looking. (laughing) I’m sorry. I’m just in one of these giddy moods here today. Do you have money in the bank on which you could live while you temporarily suspend your consultancy business?
CALLER: Well, sure. You know, I’ve done successful hard work in America, much to my discredit.
RUSH: Well, does make you a target of this administration. I sympathize with you on that. All right, let’s get to the nub of this. The district that you live in, in the Hill Country of Texas, is that district predominantly Republican, or predominantly Democrat?
CALLER: Well, that is another dilemma. I’m covered over with conservatives here — including, you know, the guy that currently holds the office in the 21st District; who I’m going to assume has got a dog and a parakeet and goes to church regularly and I’ve looked at his voting record, and, you know, it looks pretty good.
RUSH: Okay, so there’s nothing wrong with this guy, then?
CALLER: Well, the problem is he’s on his twelfth trip back to Washington, and my way of thinking at this point is he has no way to self-assess his own thought corruption with respect to his actions in Washington. I’m still evaluating this. This is serious. I’m seriously evaluating this, and the question is: You know, as a guy that’s been there 12 times, is he going to have the blood pressure necessary to push over the hump that’s coming our way in the next two years?
RUSH: Well, only you can answer that because you’re in his district. You’re monitoring how he votes and how he behaves. I have to think that if you’re thinking of challenging him in a primary race to run for his seat, you have to think that there’s something wrong with the way he’s doing the job, otherwise you wouldn’t engage it.
CALLER: Well, again, it boils down to a sense of how much vigor is there. I don’t see outrage in the Republican Party anywhere in Washington right now.
RUSH: I know. I spoke about that at length yesterday. The golden opportunity that exists, especially now, to contrast our views with theirs with this joke of a search for a Supreme Court nominee. I mean, this is even more ammo for our side. Look, I applaud you wanting to run. I have so many people e-mail me and call me saying, ‘You keep it up! You keep it up! What are we going to do about this?’ and, ‘What are we going to do?’ and I keep writing back, ‘What are ‘we’ gonna do? What are you doing about it?’
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Well, you actually want to grab something in your hands here, go do something about it. So if you do this, and you’re going to do this as a conservative, it’s going to matter what party that you’re a member of. But if you’re going to do this, do not hire a consultant or a campaign advisor or anybody who is going to talk you out of your conservatism as a means of ‘appealing to a broader segment’ of the electorate.
This is something famous going on in the Republican Party right now. ‘You’ve gotta reach out, gotta get some moderates, gotta get some…’ That’s not why you’re running. You’re running to stop Obama. You want to help the effort to stop Obama. You’ve gotta be who you are after you’re elected, too. You campaign as a conservative, I guarantee you you’ll have much more success turning out a fired-up base that wants to vote for you if you remain true to what’s in your heart and mind. And then if you do happen to get elected, when you get up there, keep it up. Don’t waver and don’t change. The pressure will be tremendous on you to ‘moderate your views’ and so forth, but, look, I really admire you wanting to actually get in the game and, quote, unquote, ‘make a difference’ because you’re so fed up.
But I’ve never run for office. I’ve never looked at seriously what that would take. I’m just a philosopher here on this kind of thing, that some might call me a strategerist in a way. But it’s like I said at this Milken forum the other night, there were three guys up there, Gillespie — and I like them all, Willie Brown and Harold Ford. They’re all politicians. They look at politics differently than I do. When you look at politics as getting votes, when you look at politics as a matter of getting policy passed, you have to have a totally different view of it than I do — and you have to pander to certain people and groups. Sometimes you have to say things you don’t really believe. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it the way it’s apparently done by most people.
And if you’re going to do it and you’ve got a fired-up reason to do it, then just follow your heart and mind as to where your motivation comes from. You’d be surprised at the success that you have. You can play up the fact you’re an average guy all you want but it’s going to be your issues. It’s going to be your opinions on things and what you claim you want to do with the power you will have when you get there that will really affect who votes for you. You can overplay, I think, this ‘average Joe’ thing, because every politician does it. They all came from wrong side of the tracks; they all came from poverty. They’ve all seen misery. They all say, ‘My daddy spanked me I can’t tell you how many times when I was growing up!’ It’s all part of the formula. Be genuine. Be genuine, and you’ll win in a landslide.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, a guy asked me just a moment ago — and I forgot, in advising him, if he’s going to run for office, I forgot the most important thing, sadly. It just goes to show you how my instincts are still naive on this. That is, ladies and gentlemen, the whole notion of money.
What was the man’s name, what was the man’s name? Grant in Comfort, Texas. Grant, you got to out-raise, you got to have more money than everybody else. I mean, the mayor of Indianapolis won with no money. It’s very rare, though, when that happens. But you do have to go out and raise money, and that’s another reason I couldn’t be in politics. To this day, I don’t like asking people for a ride because then they’re going to go ask me for a ride somewhere down the road. I can’t stick my hand out and ask people for money. I just would never, ever be able to do it ’cause they’re all gonna want to get paid back somehow. But that’s one of the requirements. He called the right person, nevertheless.