A Golden Opportunity for the GOP

RUSH: Here is Doug in Columbia, South Carolina. You’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Dittos, Rush. Thank you.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: During the last election when the Republicans lost a lot of ground, it didn’t seem that you or anybody else got the sense that that was coming. And I’m wondering, during this McCain presidential election that’s coming up, what makes you think this is so different?

RUSH: Now, wait. Are you talking about the ’06 midterm congressional elections?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Well, I thought we were in trouble there. Republicans in Congress had abandoned conservative principles, spending out the wazoo.

CALLER: Sure, you alluded to it, but you didn’t play it up, which is good, I wouldn’t expect you to.

RUSH: Then we had Mark Foley. That was it. We had Mark Foley, we lost the House. We had Macaca and we lost the Senate. But what I’m talking about here in this coming presidential election is the opportunity. What I have come to realize is that there’s no lock here for the Democrats. It’s not a juggernaut. It’s not just a matter of letting the time go by and then inaugurate Obama. That Obama campaign right now is in disarray, it’s falling apart. That party is not unified. Everything that we have been told about Obama has been proven false because he can’t even unify his own friends, he can’t unify his own party. He can’t even organize his own convention. He doesn’t even have control of this convention, and yet he’s going to make Ahmadinejad and all these world leaders become our best friends just with the power of his personality? And plus their stand with Pelosi now on abortion, and Obama’s foot in his mouth on that, and their unwillingness to help take steps to create a greater supply of energy produced in the United States. They’re sitting ducks if it is campaigned against in the right way.

CALLER: When I see the Drive-Bys do what they do and when I hear a lot of Democrats talk locally here, I wonder — I agree with everything you said — but to a lot of people, what relevance does it have? They’re going to do what they want to do anyway.

RUSH: What relevance does what have?

CALLER: The disarray that the Obama campaign is in and everything and the holes that we see in it. Others don’t seem to see or don’t have any regard for it if they do see it. A lot of people.

RUSH: Well, remember, 50% of the people don’t vote.

CALLER: That’s a good thing.

RUSH: So it depends if you’re talking to voters or not. And then depends whether you’re talking to likely voters versus registered voters. There’s a whole bunch of different people you could talk to for anecdotal evidence. See, you’re kind of making my point, in a way, and I mentioned this yesterday. Conservatives and Republicans for some time are just oriented toward pessimism. We just are. We’re oriented toward pessimism, defeatism, not because we don’t have confidence in ourselves; it’s that the people that we invest in always abandon us or fail to practice in office what they promise when they campaign. We’re in the minority in the House of Representatives for 40 years. So all of a sudden we won it. But it’s sort of like a person that’s been vastly overweight all his life, loses the weight, still feels fat for six months psychologically. We still were losers in our mind. We’re in the minority even when we were in the majority. We didn’t know how to do it. And of course the Drive-Bys treated us like the minority even when we were the majority ’cause they resented us being there.

So I think we have to work very hard to defeat this pessimism and to think that we’re up against a juggernaut that can’t lose, that does not ever make mistakes. And so I would encourage you not to be pessimistic about this. This is a golden opportunity here. And the McCain campaign, I have to give ’em this, they are coming back fast and furious with some great ads, with humor. It’s almost like I was putting the ads together myself, using the Democrats’ own words to laugh at Obama and to make points. The idea that Obama is not who he says he is, you say you can’t run into any people that seem to follow this. Well, he’s losing ground in presidential tracking polls, two different tracking polls since his convention started. He didn’t get a bump out of Biden. He’s not getting a bump out of the convention. He’s not even in control of his own convention. You trust me on this. People are starting to pay attention now. I’m not saying that it’s in the bag. I’m saying we have a golden opportunity, and I also am saying that the conventional wisdom is that this is a Democrat romp here, this is the Democrats’ year of the twentieth century, twenty-first century combined, and I don’t see it. Just don’t see it. I always oppose conventional wisdom on principle, because conventional wisdom is nothing more than a bunch of people conforming. Who needs that?

Blake in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, you, sir, are next. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. I have another reason for us to be optimistic about this election season.

RUSH: What’s that?

CALLER: I was watching the convention last night and one thing I heard them say a couple of times, ‘You show me a good loser and I’ll show you someone that’s always a loser.’ I’m listening to this and I’m saying, ‘That doesn’t sound very unified.’ And I’ll tell you the reason. What it is is identity politics has backfired against the Democrats.

RUSH: That’s right. Their policies, if they last long enough, will always come back and bite them.

CALLER: That’s right. Because right now they have two candidates that are pretty much, on the issues, carbon copies of each other. So you have two identities, the white woman and the black man, and that boils down to pretty much almost a religion, where you choose your faith and then you’re just stuck on that because you have no substantive reason to change what you believe.

RUSH: Yep, that sums them up. Identity politics is a good way to describe the Democrats, identity victim politics. The reason they do this is it’s intrinsically who they are, but never forget, folks, they can’t be honest about their message, they just cannot be honest about it so everything has to be masked, camouflaged, and packaged as something that it isn’t. The latest example is Michelle Obama. That’s not who the woman is. She is not June Cleaver raising those two little girls, staying at home every day. She works. She’s on leave from a hospital job, University of Chicago Hospitals, $310,000 a year. She’s from Harvard and Princeton. But she had to throw all that away in that speech because Democrats think Michelle, you can’t go out and be who you are because the American people won’t like you. And Obama, it’s much the same thing.

So you keep that in mind and you’ll make a lot of ground. You’ll go a long way to understanding what it is the Democrats are trying to do. This is why it’s important, folks, to keep hammering the point that this Democrat ticket, you put Biden on it, you’ve got Obama, these are two extreme leftists, and one of them is a radical, and that’s Obama. His associations are with radicals, hate-America radicals. They were his mentors. They still are close friends. This is a radical, radical leftist. Biden’s voting record is just as leftist as Obama is. There is nothing new. There is nothing novel. There is nothing unique. Biden is a northeastern liberal. Northeastern liberals do not get elected president or vice president. And even if they try to convince people that he’s really from Scranton, Pennsylvania, he’s still a Northeast liberal.