RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, if you live in a liberal city, I think you should avoid walking under tall buildings where liberals live. They’re jumping out the windows today like crazy. If you happen to know where Andrew Sullivan lives, don’t get anywhere near. I mean, it is really getting dangerous out there. There’s a new Pew poll out that suddenly shows Romney is up by four percentage points over Obama. Rasmussen now says that Romney’s two points ahead of Obama in 11 swing states. Now, for the record, Obama won those 11 swing states 53-46 back in 2008, and that was identical to his national margin, and he’s down two in those swing states.

I mean the polling data is all bad for Obama, no matter where you look. And the Pew poll is an amazing swing. It’s a swing of 14 points in this category, eight points in that category, seven points in this, it’s just amazing. Andrew Sullivan, who is well-known inside the glitterati of punditry. He’s a well-known leftist activist, and he’s concerned that Obama threw the election, just lost it in this debate. These polls are all over the place. Even in Pennsylvania, you know, there was a story that Romney’s pulled out of Pennsylvania. But yesterday and today, two polls are out that show Pennsylvania in play. Romney down by two. That’s the margin of error. And we think that Romney and the campaign that made the decision to pull out of Pennsylvania — well, they’ve announced they’re gonna do that, pull out of Pennsylvania, go to Ohio, reallocate the resources. It makes no sense, given the polling data.

The only thing that makes sense is that the Romney camp decided to pull out of there before these polls came out in Pennsylvania. So, anyway, it is fascinating to me to watch these people who swear by these polls. For example, I’m all hunky-dory, I’m fine with it, I’m not trying to throw cold water on it, but does anybody really believe — maybe I’m wrong, I could be wrong about this. Is it really likely, is it really possible, for example, that women, after the debate, change their minds to the tune of 15 percent of ’em? Is that really how people make up their minds in a presidential election? Are people’s opinions that fluid? Women or anybody? The only demographic Obama still has is blacks, 95 to three, in whatever poll you look at.

But you know me, I’ve always had an arm’s-length with these polls because I think they’re used to make news. But I’ve also said that once you get into October and, as you get closer to the election, the pollsters all start getting concerned about accuracy and their legacy for the next round of elections and so forth. So they always tighten up and they always get closer to reality as you get closer to the election. I don’t know anybody whose opinions are this fluid and volatile. I mean what is the old cliche, “Ah, debates don’t matter.” How many of you have heard that in past presidential elections? “Yeah, they’re interesting to watch, and they might affect a few swing voters. They really don’t matter because people have their minds made up long ago.” Now, all of a sudden, that debate is the single — see, my point is if we’ve got polling data now that shows Romney ahead wherever he’s ahead, I think he’s been ahead for months, or weeks.

I don’t think it happened overnight. I think we’ve been misled for whatever reason. I’m not even going to chalk it up to a conspiracy. And I’m not trying to talk you out of believing this one or these polls. I mean they’re all saying Romney is surging in most every demographic. You’ve got the Pew poll showing Romney ahead by four, but within that poll, you have massive shifts in certain demographics. Rasmussen says again that Romney’s up by two now in the 11 swing states that matter. And the two polls in Pennsylvania from yesterday both pretty much say the same thing, Romney down two, which is margin-of-error tied. That puts Pennsylvania in play.

You have these guys out in Colorado, we talked about ’em yesterday, that have not been wrong since 1980, and they put together their projection based solely on economic data. They don’t poll people, they don’t go out and sample the opinion; they just look at the economic data. They haven’t been wrong since 1980. They say Obama is gonna lose Pennsylvania. Romney’s gonna win Pennsylvania. They’ve got Romney at 330 electoral votes. And these guys haven’t been wrong. See, we’re watching an utter panic on the left because these polls are the Bible to them. It’s their polls. It obviously makes sense. They own ’em. They run ’em. And they report them. I have to tell you, I watch this with utter amazed fascination. We’ve got sound bites of the Drive-By Media in utter panic, and it is all centered around the debate, and they can’t believe that it happened.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Really, folks, who out there, given what’s going on, A, cares; B, believes that Mitt Romney wants to kill Big Bird? It’s one of these things that I know some of you think there are people that believe it, and there are. But it’s not a majority of people.

Now, I was talking about how I have a tough time believing these seismic shifts. For example, in this Pew poll that has Andrew Sullivan on suicide watch, Obama and Romney are tied among women at 47%. Okay, cool. Last month, Obama led Romney by 18 points among women, 56 to 38. That’s likely female voters.

And we are being asked to believe that the debate is what changed it all. Now, I’m sorry. I don’t believe that Obama ever had an 18-point lead in women. Those polls were oversampling Democrats out the wazoo. I don’t know too many people whose opinions are that flexible and fluid and malleable, particularly in presidential elections.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Pew poll. Democrats. Suicide watch. Something about this poll, because I just want to be complete in reporting it to you. There is a plus-five Republican sample in this poll. It’s one of the first polls that samples more Republicans. They don’t list the sampling, though. You have to discover the sampling by dividing the number of respondents. So it’s confusing.

Everybody seems to be coming up with different numbers. But the consensus… (ahem) The “consensus,” as in the global warming consensus… The consensus among political scientists is that they oversampled Republicans by 5%. Now, the Pew people are saying (paraphrased), “Wait, wait, wait a minute! We’re not oversampling anybody. This is just how people are identifying themselves in our sample,” which is a new one on me.

They are saying that because of the debate and because of the increased momentum for Romney, that more people are telling them that they are Republicans now than were admitting to it last week and the week before. I want to throw that in the mix, too, for you to consider. So the Pew people say, “It’s not that we purposely went out and found 5% more Republicans. It’s in our sample that 5% more people than previously said that they were Republicans.”

The numbers are 403 Republicans and 396 Democrats, registered voters in the Pew poll. So there wasn’t a whole lot of oversampling. For example, you ask, “Why would they, Rush? Why would they all of a sudden start oversampling Republicans if they’re doing it on purpose?” Folks, that’s not very hard to answer. I mean, take a look at this. This is maybe an indication. Voter registration ends today in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

And you can still register online before it’s too late. In fact, we’ve got a link. We put a link at RushLimbaugh.com if you want to go to our home page. I’ve got some big announcements about that, too. We’re going all digital on the Limbaugh Letter. Yep, all digital on nation’s most widely read political newsletter. I’ll have details on that coming up later. But we’ve got this link.

If you haven’t registered and you want to register online, you can do it at RushLimbaugh.com. The link is there. Now, Republicans, I’m hearing, have been registering online like there is no tomorrow. I’m hearing in places like Ohio that the requests for absentee ballots by Republicans is dwarfing the requests by Democrats. All of this is anecdotal, but some of it could be documented.

So why would the Pew poll have 5% more Republicans? Could it be that as we get closer to the election, they’re throwing out the turnout sample from 2008 and 2004, and they’re getting closer to what the 2010 turnout was? Or maybe they’re projecting. Because they themselves are telling us that there’s so much more enthusiasm on the Republican side. Remember, we had the sound bites yesterday from F. Chuck Todd at NBC.

He was clearly distressed over all of the Republican enthusiasm compared to Democrat enthusiasm. There’s a huge enthusiasm gap. With the polls, I’m not heralding this thing as though I all of a sudden believe it, because, folks, I think these polls are… (sigh) They’re too subject to games. They’re too capable of being doctored and messed around with. You look at some of these early polls that had Democrat samples of plus 11 and plus 10.

Now, I know the cliche. “Wait a minute, Rush. You say people don’t change their minds. Do you know women?” Yes, yes, yes. I know women change their minds on a dime. But I’m telling you, something like this… I told you three months ago, two months ago, and one month ago: If the election were held on that day — three months ago, two months ago — it would be a landslide Romney. I still think that.

I look at everything happening out there, and it all adds up to a Romney win, and I’m not looking at one poll to tell me that. I’m looking at other things. In no way can anybody say that the Obama campaign is doing anything positive. It isn’t surging. There’s nothing positive about it. There’s nothing infectious about the Obama campaign. There’s nothing inspiring or enthusiastic. You don’t see a bunch of Obama posters or signs out there.

The bloom is off the rose.

The thrill is gone or what have you.

We have a country in the tank! We have a country going down the tubes. We have a president who cannot cite one thing from his previous 3-1/2 years and say, “You want more of this? Vote for me!” Just the opposite. Nobody wants any more of this. Well, 30 or 40% do, but I’m speaking in a majority sense. All of the commonsense data that you can see by watching and reading and listening is pretty indicative to me.

But it’s risky. There’s nothing scientific about that. The polls claim to be scientific, but I just have never bought into this. You know, you’ve got an incumbent who’s not at 50% in anything. You know what the statistics on that are? Defeat. No president under 50%, no incumbent wins when their approval is under 50; when his poll numbers are under 50, doesn’t matter. This is Lord Obama. (interruption)

Well, he may not care about the statistics, but in order for them to cheat and have a chance at the cheating working, the race has to be close. That’s another burden we’ve got. We’ve gotta win and win big to keep the lawyers out of the aftermath. Our margin of victory has to be lawyer-proof, and I think it will be. I think it will be stunning. If these guys in Colorado are right — and they haven’t been wrong.

If they’re right that Romney ends up with 330 electoral votes, they’re not gonna go out and charge fraud. They might talk about fraud, but they can’t do anything with it. That’s just too big a margin of defeat to explain by fraud and cheating and so forth. There’s another poll that just came out. This one is Public Policy Polling, this liberal bunch out of North Carolina.

National poll: Romney 49, Obama 47.

This, by the way, is a switch.

That’s a six-point net swing from last week to this week. It’s the first time in this poll (Public Policy Polling) that Romney’s had the lead. Now, if you want to go all conspiracy on me, you can sit there and say, “Rush, none of this is real. These people, they’re purposely saying Romney’s in the lead, trying to get us all excited and all jacked. And then next week, after the next debate, the bottom’s gonna fall out.

“They’re gonna have Obama back at 52! He’s gonna be winning every poll. And us voters, us Romney supporters, we’re just gonna be so depressed that we’re just gonna throw in the towel.” There are conspiracy people who believe that that’s what’s happening; that we’re being set up with phony Romney-leading poll results. (interruption) If Obama loses the next debate? That’s entirely likely! It’s gonna be on foreign policy.

You saw Romney yesterday. You know what I want to do? I want to find a way… Koko? I was thinking about this last night, and I didn’t send Koko the note. I got distracted watching the 666th Monday Night Football game. Koko, we need a link to Romney’s foreign policy speech yesterday at VMI. We need to find where people can tune in and watch the whole thing. We played three sound bites.

But the media hasn’t covered the whole thing and it happened right before lunchtime. Romney was smart. He got out of there at noon, right when this program began. Bush was smart in that way, too. (They know. They know when to wrap up their official presidential stuff.) You need to see the whole thing. Obama on foreign policy is as vacuous and as empty as he is on domestic policy.

Now we’re hearing that Obama is gonna come out and he’s gonna get really feisty. He’s not gonna let Romney get a word in edge-wise. He’s gonna be really on the offensive. Here’s the thing to look out for. The thing to look out for is the moderator in the next debate, Martha Raddatz of ABC. I think she’s doing the next presidential debate, or is she doing the vice presidential?

Whoever. Whoever the moderator is is going to be under orders to stifle Romney and to cut short answers to questions or reactions to Obama. That’s where they’re mad at Jim Lehrer of PBS. Lehrer didn’t shut Romney down at the point in time (many points in time) when he was shellacking Obama. He didn’t enforce the rules on time limits and so forth. But that debate last week was not an anomaly in the sense that Obama had a rare night off and Romney had a day that he’s incapable of having again.

In that debate, both people were who they are every day.

That is Mitt Romney.

That’s who Mitt Romney is.

He’s not the guy in Obama’s ads about him. The guy in the debate, that’s who Mitt Romney is. I know him; I’ve spent time with him. That’s who he is. He knows his stuff. He knows the stats. He knows the details. He knows the facts and figures. He’s an upper-echelon manager. He’s an executive. He knows the stuff.

Obama doesn’t.

That’s also who Obama was!

Okay, so we got a foreign policy debate coming up. What’s great out there about foreign policy? Osama’s dead. Okay, and what? We got a dead ambassador. We got a debacle in the Middle East. We’ve got the Arab Spring totally misrepresented as to what it was. We’ve got a president doing everything he can to distance ourselves, this country, from Israel, which is our lead ally in the region. We’ve got somebody that doesn’t know what he’s doing. We’ve got somebody who does not think there’s anything special about the United States. We got somebody who doesn’t think the United States represents a solution to any problems.

We got a president who believes the United States is the problem. He’s gonna be up against Mitt Romney, who believes in the greatness and the exceptionalism of this country. What happened in the first debate was not something that can’t happen again. Quite the contrary. Something that has happened is much more likely to happen again than something that hasn’t happened is to happen itself. That is Pascal. Much easier to believe something that has happened will happen again than it is to believe that something that’s never happened will happen.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Candy Crowley, CNN, is doing the next presidential debate. It’s a town hall. Martha Raddatz is doing the veep thing on Thursday with Ryan and Biden and then Bob Schieffer is gonna moderate the final presidential debate, and that will be on foreign policy.

(interruption)

Is Schieffer older than Jim Lehrer? I don’t know. They may be the same age. Clearly the same era, Jurassic Park, the Jurassic era. But look, folks, this debate did more than change polls. I don’t deny that it changed the polls. Don’t misunderstand me. But it did something else. It ignited Republicans. There was leadership for the first time in I don’t know how long. For four years half the people or more of this country have watched Barack Obama get away with the fraud that he is, and he was called on it that night. That is confidence inspiring. And what we learned is that Barack Obama in front of 60 million people, 65 million people without a teleprompter can’t change who he is. He is who he is. He’ll be who he is in that next debate, and he’s gonna be up against Romney, who will also be who he is. We’ll see.

I want to go to the audio sound bites just to illustrate for the fun of it the panic over the polls taking place in the Drive-Bys. Here is a montage, last night and this morning.

DAVID “RODHAM” GERGEN: The polls are really hard to understand right now. We had one of the strangest days in polling.

JOHN HARWOOD: It’s a mixed verdict.

GLORIA BORGER: I look at the numbers where the gender gap is even, and I’m scratching my head about that.

CORNELL BELCHER It is as much an art as it is a science.

MARIA CARDONA: A poll is just a snapshot of the moment. In this very close election, polls will be volatile.

MARJORIE CLIFTON: These national polls don’t really matter at this stage in the game.

PIERS MORGAN: The polls are quite shocking today.

RYAN LIZZA: Don’t get too wound up in one or two polls. Wait for a week’s worth.

RUSH: That’s Ryan Lizza wrapping up. These people live and die by these polls, except now, “You know, it’s hard to explain. A lot happened. It’s really, really more complicated than you can understand. Only us professionals, we professionals can make sense of this. Just wait for a full week of this and it will be better.” Wolf Blitzer in crisis over the Pew poll. Wolf Blitzer and Gloria Borger are still in the loop they were thrown in.

BLITZER: This just coming in: A major shakeup in the polls. Only 29 days before the presidential election, Mitt Romney clearly riding very high since his strong showing in the first presidential debate, and now he has taken the lead in a closely watched and highly respected poll. Take a look at these numbers just released by the Pew Research Center. Mitt Romney now four points ahead of President Obama among likely voters nationwide, erasing the president’s eight-point lead before the first debate.

RUSH: Oh, no. And Gloria Borger is just as upset as could be, that damn debate gave Romney all that he wanted.

BORGER: Yeah, I don’t think the Romney campaign could have wanted to do any more with this debate than they did. If you look across the board at these numbers, Wolf, Romney has made gains in almost every area, including somebody who’s better able to improve the job situation. He leads — Romney leads Obama by eight points on that. So whether it’s on the economy, whether it’s on leadership, he’s now tied with the president, as far as leadership ability is concerned. So I think Romney got everything out of that debate and more.

RUSH: You hear how surprised she is that Romney is now polling as better able to improve the job situation? Why is she shocked at that? What has Obama shown in terms of his ability to deal with the job situation? Nothing. All he’s done is made it worse. Where is the thinking, the evidence that Obama’s the guy to fix the job situation? Obama’s the guy that caused it. It’s an example of the bubble that these people live in. They are beside themselves over this. Romney leading on jobs? That’s the common-sense reaction. And you don’t need a debate, Gloria, for people to understand that Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing on jobs. All you need is real life. He’s an absolute failure and buffoon when it comes to the economy. And people are living it. They don’t have to see it in a debate.

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RUSH: And now, folks, guess what? Suddenly it’s okay to question the polls. Yep. It’s okay. But just remember last week, Politico had a story making fun of me for telling you to ignore the polls, that they weren’t accurate. And now what they made fun of me for, they are doing themselves.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

Back to the audio sound bites. Let’s pick up here at number five. Gloria Borger has just explained that the debate gave Romney all he wanted and more. He couldn’t have expected any more. And Blitzer said to her, “Gloria, it certainly must be a huge wake-up call for the Obama campaign, these Pew Research poll numbers that have just come out. So what do they do now? They have got a vice presidential debate coming up Thursday night.” What do they do, Gloria? I mean, what’s Obama gonna do now? What are we gonna do, Gloria? Is there any hope left, Gloria?

BORGER: They still think they’ve got openings here, and, Wolf, they do. Anything can happen. You know, overnight’s a lifetime in politics, particularly when it comes to a close presidential race.

BLITZER: All those folks that thought President Obama had it wrapped up only a few days ago —

BORGER: Right.

BLITZER: — guess what? They’re not wrapped up by any means —

BORGER: That’s right, not so much.

BLITZER: Yet.

RUSH: Hmm. So they’re not happy. And they’re sitting out there hoping that the real Obama will surface and that the real Romney will surface, and what they don’t know is, that’s who Obama is. The Obama in the debate is who he is. Isn’t it amazing, folks? Really, now. You and I have been watching Obama for three and a half, four years now. He does a press conference or appears anywhere without a prompter, Q&A, it’s full of the hemming and the hawing and the pauses, the “uh” and it’s intellectual-speak. His speech pattern is one of the ways intellectuals used to define somebody’s intelligence. I picked this up long ago.

I learned to decode intellectual-speak. I was watching Firing Line with William F. Buckley. He had some intellectual on there — well, practically all of his guests were intellectuals. This guy had horrible teeth, a rotten bow tie, but he was somehow super smart, super intellectual, and his speaking pattern, after a while I start cracking up. It was filled with Obama-like pauses where deep, pensive thought is ostensibly taking place. Where the assemblage of cogent thought and sentences are taking place so that the hoi polloi can understand what the super-intellect is saying. And, in effect, it’s a phony affectation, and the left has bought into it hook, line, and sinker. We haven’t seen Obama’s transcripts.

I told you I went to dinner with some friends on Sunday night, and I got into a discussion with them about how smart Obama is. “I mean, Rush, you have to admit he’s really brilliant.”

“No, I don’t admit this. On what basis do you say that?”

“Well, he just is. You can tell by the way he speaks and way he comports –“

I said, “Now, wait a minute, we need to define smart. What has he done that’s smart, compared to what he says he wants to do?” He says he wants to grow jobs. He says he wants to grow the economy. I don’t particularly believe that, but that’s what he says. How smart is he at coming up with ways to do that? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, if he’s serious. He doesn’t know what to do. I think Obama is like pretty much every other highbrow intellectual leftist: closed-minded. They’ve closed themselves off from all but people just like them. They’re really not critical thinkers, either. But I know I’m whistling against the wind here because the popular conception is that Obama’s brilliant.

And I maintain, did you see brilliance in the debate? He said he’s gonna hire teachers. Yeah, when asked at the end of the debate, closing statement, you know, what does the Constitution mean to you? Well, I forgot the question was, but Romney had a great answer. (paraphrasing) “What freedom means to me, right back here, it’s on the wall, Constitution. What America means to me.” And Obama said, hiring 200 or 400 more teachers, or whatever it was. “Fair shot,” “fair play,” all these cliches. What Obama has to do is to hide what he really intends to do. That’s why all the hem-hawing and that’s why all the pauses where deep contemplative thought is ostensibly taking place. And that’s why they think he’s the smartest thing that’s ever hit American politics, and they can’t understand what happened in the debate.

The truth is, that’s who he is. That’s who he is. Take his teleprompter away from him, take away words written by somebody else, it’s who he is. And ditto for Romney. Well, intellectual-speak, it goes like this.

Question to an intellectual guest: “Well, would you say that the increasing polarity — better I should say polarization between admitted leftists and concerned rightists, and, of course, when we consider the great unwashed and the middle, would you say that the way to go about best approaching all these people would be a shotgun approach or would you suggest maybe targeted pistol?”

The intellectual (impression), “Well, it’s an interesting question. Ah, the first proposition you mentioned is the rightists. Rightists. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, rightists are really very, very close… I don’t even think that — that — that — that — yabba, yabba — that they’d even consider seriously, ah ha, what — what — what — what — what — what they think. Now, as far as the shotgun approach versus the pistol, both — as far as I’m concerned — should be outlawed! I think the world would agree and that you would agree!”

And from this we’re to conclude that we’re listening to superior intellect and brilliance and so forth, and all it is is a speech pattern that’s designed to fool people. Remember we had a sponsor in the very early days of this program called Verbal Advantage? Do you remember what their line was? I forget the line specifically, but they said, “People judge you by the words you use.” Yes, “People judge you by the words you use.”

The point of it was you could really fool people into thinking that you are, A, smart and B, educated if you had a good vocabulary.

It’s all it takes. And, of course, with liberals there is an arrogant condescension and an egotism. They’re all brilliant to begin with. They don’t have to prove it. They just are by virtue of being liberal. And they postulate all these theories and they propagate this stuff, and everybody starts believing how smart they are. When, in fact, I think they’re closed-minded bigots who don’t know half what they think they know — and in the real world, none of them have ever functioned.

They’re faculty lounge lizards.

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RUSH: I tell you what, Wolf Blitzer is gonna be interviewing Romney sometime today. He’s been promoing it on CNN. I guarantee you — I guarantee you — the left is hoping that Blitzer doesn’t let Romney get away with all of his “lies.” That’s exactly what they want. They’re sitting out there hoping. The bed wetters at Democrat Underground and the Daily Kos and over at MSNBC, they’re all totally invested in Wolf.

Wolf doesn’t even have the slightest idea the expectations he labors under today. The pressure that is on Wolf Blitzer is huge. Because Obama didn’t do it, it’s up now to Blitzer to expose Romney’s lies. The only problem is, Romney isn’t lying. The big problem for them is: Romney isn’t lying; they are. So Blitzer’s got this big challenge to not let Romney get away with his lies. Ha-ha-ha-ha!

The question, by the way, that they were asked was, “What’s the role of government?” The proper role of government. Obama said, “Well, uhhhh, I’d hire 400 more teachers, Jim.” And Romney turned around and pointed to the words of the Declaration and Constitution behind him on that wall and gave a brilliant answer to the question: “What’s the role of government in our society?”

Oh, yeah, will Wolf bring up the 47% that Jim Lehrer didn’t bring up? And then when Romney “lies” about it, will Wolf call him on it? Wolf’s got a chance to be a hero today! Wolf can level the playing field. Wolf can take away every advantage Romney got coming out of the debate, if he just doesn’t let Romney get away with his “lies” today.