RUSH: Here’s Tony in El Cajon, California. Hi.
CALLER: Good morning, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: How are you? Rush, you know, you and I have been friends for 20 years?
RUSH: Really? Thank you.
CALLER: I’m not in your phone book or anything like that, but there are three things I wanted to talk to you about because this will be the last time in this lifetime I get a chance to talk to you.
RUSH: Maybe not.
CALLER: Well, I got some things going, so I can’t discuss ’em on air ’cause some people may be listening, they haven’t been informed yet. Anyway, listen, Obama’s gonna lose at the Supreme Court tomorrow because it was poor arguments by the solicitor general. It will be a 5-4 decision. The mandate has got to fail. The government has no federal right to make me buy a commercial good. Now, the rest of the law will probably stand, ’cause the Feds can tax. You know, I found that was real funny, what you said, four white guys and an Uncle Tom, and a lot of us black folks will take offense with that. But, Rush, I’m gonna tell you something —
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait. Oh, if Obama uses that as a campaign tactic you’ll take offense?
CALLER: Well, they’re gonna take offense at you because you used it, okay? You know, Rush —
RUSH: No, no, no. I’m just saying that’s what I expect the Obama campaign or the media to say.
CALLER: Oh, of course. Of course. You know, I’ve been called an Uncle Tom for a long time in my life. I’m an ex-Reagan Republican. I’m an independent now. That brings up the second point, why Obama’s gonna lose the election. You know, I voted for the only black man in my lifetime that I’d have a chance to vote for, but he squandered his chance to fix the economy. He forgot what being president was about and he squandered his chance by dealing on this single topic health care. And the Democratic Senate, they haven’t even passed the budget. He has no vision of the future. His poor record on domestic policy. Okay, he killed OBL, that was great, that was great, the drones, you know, and the foreign action, that’s fine. But he hasn’t done anything here. And more importantly, I think he’s lost the conservative black vote, and I’m gonna tell you something as a black guy. You and I have talked.
RUSH: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute wait a minute. Hold on, Tony. I have to take the aforementioned commercial break. Can you hang on through the break?
CALLER: I’ll be here.
RUSH: Good. Don’t go away. This is Tony in El Cajon, and I can tell he’s nowhere near finished.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now back to Tony in El Cajon, California. You were a Reagan Republican. You’ve switched to an independent. You voted for Obama. By the way, he’s African-American. You voted for Obama. You’re disappointed. Obama squandered his presidency, focusing on health care and neglecting the economy. That’s where we left off with you.
CALLER: Well, let me correct just one thing. I’m not African-American. I’m a determined America. I was born in Nuremberg, Germany.
RUSH: Oh, okay.
CALLER: I’m black. My father was black. My mother was born in the Virgin Islands. But I’ve never been to Africa. I’d love to go, but I’ve not. I’m a black civil rights activist from the sixties. I lived in the South and went through the “colored only” signs. Like I say, you and I are only a year off, I’m a year younger than you, and in the late fifties en route to being stationed in Panama, my old man was in the Army 30 years, we lived in Jackson, Tennessee, and I went through the “colored only” signs, and I got, you know, the racial thing out there, white people against black people. It happened to me personally. It happened to my mother. So I understand all of that. But for all of that, Rush, let’s be real about something. About a third of black folks are conservative. Now, they were Abraham Lincoln supporters. And I don’t know what happened to the party —
RUSH: Well, wait. I need to ask you a question about that, if that’s true.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: I’d like for you to be right about that, but how, then, does the Democrat candidate always end up with 90% or more of the black vote?
CALLER: Well, we’re talking about the old Jesse Jackson, old Al Sharpton type. Now, let me show you what the difference is. Okay. The reason I changed from being a Democrat — as you know, most people are whatever their parents are. And the reason I changed from being a Democrat was when I realized that the Democratic Party — and when they put their people in as president, they never did anything for black folks. I mean, okay, Kennedy did a lot. But I’m talking about in the political structure itself, they never put black people in charge of anything. Ron Brown got as high as anybody because he became secretary of commerce.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: He got killed in an airplane crash. But look at the record of the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan took a black man and made him chief of staff of the armed forces and then national security adviser. That man was Colin Powell. Now, that man is spotless. If he had run instead of Barack Obama, the entire nation would have voted for him.
RUSH: The titular head of the Republican Party.
CALLER: Exactly. But, you know, like I said, you and I, we’re in our sixties, there was only one black guy running that stood a chance based on what he said. He talked about change, he talked about hope, started sounding like Lincoln, okay, they all jumped in, but you remember that woman that said, “I’m getting tired of defending you?” I mean it’s on YouTube video.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Everything that you got on the world now is on YouTube. You can go back and listen. Everybody’s lips. No longer just have to watch the news channel. You can go to YouTube and find it. Anyway, that’s what started it. And so I joined the Republican Party, and I wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan. Reagan wrote me back. It got in the news in LA. I was on the front pages of the newspapers in LA, and the next day I went to work and lost a bunch of black friends. (laughing)
RUSH: That’s cool. That’s very cool.
CALLER: But what I told him in my letter was that I believed in him because the man was convinced of what he spoke. At that time it was anti-communism, it was getting the country back together. It was putting America as a shining city on the hill. And, see, a president has got to sound like that. So then we come down to the Bushes, and what do the Bushes do? Okay, I went with you with Clinton. Clinton was the wrong guy to be the president at the time, and that’s when I really started listening to your program. That’ll bring me to my third point here in just a second. But I believed what you were saying about Clinton, and then Bush came in, and Reagan came in, Bush came in as president, and Bush put Colin Powell further into the structure as national security adviser, and then George W. made him sec state. Now, come on. That’s the fourth position under the Constitution that takes over if the top three people should die.
RUSH: And then Condoleezza Rice after that.
CALLER: And then Condoleezza Rice, the first and only black woman that’s been the highest one in this governmental structure. Rush, if McCain had taken Condoleezza Rice or Snowe and run with them instead of Palin, McCain would have had this locked up, especially with Rice, because black folks would say, “Hmm, we want to vote for a black woman, or do we want to vote for a black guy?”
RUSH: You think anybody was gonna beat Obama in 2008 coming off what the media had done with the war in Iraq, convinced everybody that the world hated us because of Bush?
CALLER: Well, yeah, but, you know, there wasn’t that much love for McCain in the first place, either —
RUSH: I know. There was a lot of love for hope and change. There was a lot of love for hope and change and what Obama was selling.
CALLER: Exactly. See, that’s what we bought into. But let’s understand something. The civil rights days are long in the tube. There’s still racism in America, to be sure, but younger people aren’t paying attention to Jackson and Sharpton like in the past. You know, Jackson had that out-of-wedlock birth, Sharpton got tied up in that Tawana Brawley, and he runs out there at the lacrosse people thing. And, you know, he’s gotten real tainted by hanging out with the wrong folks, and he’s trying to back from his very vociferous anti-white position that used to be in the past. Now, let’s understand something. Even Malcolm X, before he died, said, listen, you know, white people ain’t devils. He found out what the true Muslim movement was when he went to Mecca and of course black folks said, well, at least the Nation of Islam said, “You know what? We can’t have this. We gotta have black unity, black power, so we need to get rid of him,” and Malcolm is gone.
RUSH: By the way, speaking of Reverend Sharpton, he said he has secret activities planned for the congressional vote on holding Eric Holder in contempt.
CALLER: But, you know what, nobody’s listening to that, Rush. I mean Cory Booker got out there, and he’s a moderate black man. You got Shelby Steele out there. You got Alan Keyes out there. You got Colin Powell out there. About one-third of black folks, it ain’t generally known, but about one-third of black folks are conservative. Now, they don’t agree with race and I don’t agree with race and I don’t want a cop stopping me because I’m a light-skinned black dude driving the street. Okay. We understand all of that. But there’s a larger issue here.
RUSH: Which is…?
CALLER: The economy of the United States. The excellence of the United States on this planet. The country that put the first man on the moon. You can go to YouTube and there’s a video there about B-29s, it was on the Discovery Channel, I guess, just watched it last night. They’re showing pictures of this thing being built, and its whole history. Do you know there were black women building the B-29? I didn’t know that.
RUSH: Yeah, but they never let any of them fly one.
CALLER: Well, they didn’t let women do much back in those days. (laughing)
RUSH: (laughing)
CALLER: We ain’t gonna go there ’cause you already got a problem with some of your women listeners, but the important fact is that black people are not a monolithic brand.
RUSH: But they are. In a presidential race, Tony, they are. Monolithic is 90, 92%.
CALLER: Artur Davis, congressman just quit.
RUSH: Well, yeah.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: He gave a good reason, and he’s from Alabama. Come on. That’s as far south as you can get.
RUSH: Okay, so what do you think’s gonna happen on the mandate?
CALLER: Oh, the mandate’s gonna get struck down. The mandate’s gonna get struck down. The rest of the law will stand. All right, but Rush, let me — ’cause I can’t take up all your time. I want to come down to the final point which is important to me. I gotta give you personal thanks, personal thanks because you’re the first public person to personally voice the suggestion to work for yourself rather than somebody else. Remember when you were talking with the guy about baking cookies and whatnot?
RUSH: Yeah, the bake sale guy.
CALLER: You discussed your personal success and failures from the time you were a baseball team staff member. And one of the other things that you did was that you taught me that there’s always two things, which I taught my kids. I got three daughters, they’re all grown, out of college, kids and the whole bit, but you said there were two things, and it began when you discussed how an increase — when they say they’re making a cut in the budget, it’s not actually an actual cut in what they’re spending, it’s a cut in what they’re planning to spend.
RUSH: Baseline budgeting.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: You remember that.
CALLER: I’ve listened to you — and the same thing you’ve done today, same thing you do all the time. You say, listen, there’s always two things. If you go down the street and you see a bunch of apartments for rent, there’s two things, the obvious thing is that there’s apartments for rent. But the second thing is there’s a reason those apartments are for rent. Maybe they got roaches. Maybe they got gangs. Maybe they got crime. Maybe they got fire hazards, whatever, you gotta pay attention not to just what you can see, but you gotta pay attention to what you’re not seeing. You gotta pay attention to the second thing that is so blatantly obvious, but you can’t see that. It’s like, you remember Weekly Reader used to be think harder on that last page when we were in school, elementary school?
RUSH: Yeah, I remember it.
CALLER: I never could figure that out, because I didn’t know how to think of two things. And so that’s what you taught me. I personally thank you for that.
RUSH: Well, you’re more than welcome. I really appreciate it. You’re fascinating. Is Obama gonna win reelection, do you think, or not?
CALLER: No, I don’t think so. Now, you know what? Unfortunately, the Republicans got Romney, and he’s like a weather vain, whichever way the wind is blowing. I wish Chris Christie would run. I really do.
RUSH: Well, he’s back in the mix as the veep. And the wind is not gonna move Chris Christie.
CALLER: If you put Chris Christie on the ticket for the general, I think you got it made.
RUSH: All right.
CALLER: Now, last thing, Rush, I want to thank you for your bumper music ’cause you’ve always played some of my favorite music. I wish you well, God love you, God bless you.
RUSH: Tony, hang on, I want to send you an iPad. I gotta send you an EIB engraved iPad. So I want you to hang on. Snerdley will get your address so we can FedEx it out to you so you’ll have it tomorrow, okay?
CALLER: You take good care of yourself.
RUSH: I will. You do the same. That’s Tony from El Cajon, California.