RUSH: We’re gonna start in Cincinnati. This is Andy. I’m glad you called, sir. Great to have you with us.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, how are you?

RUSH: Confused. But I’m still here.

CALLER: Hey, first of all, I just want to say you are the inspirational leader of the free world.

RUSH: Well, gee, thank you, sir, very much. (laughing) I like that.

CALLER: I went to the Romney rally on Saturday up in Lebanon, Ohio.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: I live in the next town down, and I’ll tell you there was 10,000 to 15,000 people there. I would say 50% of them were seniors, and I got there at like quarter of two. He was supposed to show up around 5:15 so I had a lot of time to stand around and talk to people. And some of the first things I said to these older women, I said, “Have you guys heard about the War on Women?” And they laughed. And I said, “You guys listen to Rush?” And they go, “Oh, yeah.” “Are you Rush Babes?” “Yeah.” There were five of them that actually were signed up as Rush Babes.

RUSH: Did you ask any of them by any chance —

CALLER: I asked them everything you’d want to know. Go ahead.

RUSH: Did you ask any of them if they happened to be Democrats?

CALLER: No. No. No. There was one woman who did vote for Obama, but she didn’t tell me whether she was a Republican or a Democrat. She just said that, you know, she was younger, and she bought the whole —

RUSH: Well, let me tell you what I’m hearing. And I don’t mention this. I’m only gonna mention this to you, bouncing off your call. I get e-mails from people, as you know, I read them frequently. All over the fruited plain. And an e-mail is just anecdotal. It doesn’t really mean anything. Even if you get 15 or 20 of them, it’s a very risky thing to think that a couple, 15, 20 e-mails represent the thinking, say, of a whole state. But I’ve gotten so many of these e-mails from people, the Republican grassroots workers. You know, we’re spending a lot of time building up the grassroots with one of our sponsors here, FreedomWorks, and I’m hearing from a lot of people out in the grassroots, they’re going door-to-door, they’re already making phone calls, they’re knocking on doors, and they’re telling me that they’re running into a lot of Democrats and people who voted for Obama last time who can’t wait to go vote against him.

And we’re not seeing that reported anywhere. There’s no poll that’s telling us that. There’s no research that’s telling us this, other than this anecdotal little individual stories that I’m getting from states around the country. I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t want to invest, I’m not gonna sit here and tell you, “Folks, Ohio’s in the bag. I’m getting e-mails. Look at the size of those crowds. There’s no way Romney’s gonna lose Ohio.” I would not do that based on the anecdotal stories that people tell. But they are out there. And I do think that there is a tremendous number of Obama voters from ’08 who are going the other way this time around who are not telling people they don’t trust that story or that truth.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, in the ABC/Washington Post poll that I quoted earlier they’re getting close on some of this anecdotal stuff. They’re not reporting that there are people in the state who voted for Obama telling them they’re gonna vote Romney this time around, but they are chronicling the enthusiasm. They say in their poll today the enthusiasm for Obama is eight points lower than at this point in 2008. What that means is it’s 16%…

There’s no enthusiasm for Obama. Somebody show it to me. He can’t draw any crowds. They had to move indoors at the convention. They had to move indoors in Vegas a week later. Where is the enthusiasm for Obama? There isn’t any! You’ve got party loyalty and whatever percentage of voters who really do think Obama equals a new kitchen or a phone or whatever, but there’s no enthusiasm for Obama when it comes to ideas.

There’s no enthusiasm for more of what Obama has done. There isn’t any. So when the Washington Post says: “Well, enthusiasm for Obama down eight points over where it was in 2008,” it’s misleading. Because it presumes there is some enthusiasm for Obama. Do you see any? The enthusiasm is all for Romney. The enthusiasm, even if it’s not for Romney, is, “No more Obama!”

People from across the spectrum are fed up. There’s nothing in the Obama record that reasonable people (and that’s the majority in this country) want any more of. They don’t want anymore debt. They don’t want anymore spending. They don’t want a foreign policy that’s out of control and being run by a neophyte. They don’t want a president who can’t tell the truth about things. They don’t want a president who doesn’t believe in his own country.

They don’t want a president who goes up and tells people at the United Nations that a video is responsible for what happened, that we’re sorry for it and it wasn’t us; it was some wacko in California. That’s not presidential! That’s not what the American people think and want from a leader. I mean, the most enthusiastic Obama voter I have seen is the Obama phone babe in Cleveland. Outside of that, I don’t see it.

Other than the media.

I stand corrected. There is enthusiasm for Obama in the media, but that has almost become fear rather than enthusiasm. Anyway, the Washington Post story: Enthusiasm for Obama is eight points lower than at this point in 2008, and the enthusiasm for Romney is 30 points higher than McCain’s was fours ago. Now, they don’t say how the enthusiasm is manifesting itself. But if enthusiasm for Romney is 30 points higher than McCain?

I’m telling you that it’s made up of people who vote for Obama who are changing their minds. Now remember, that woman, the most enthusiastic Obama voter I’ve seen — the Obama phone babe in Cleveland — was being paid. Not with the phone. She was getting 11 bucks an hour with the SEIU. She was paying people to show up and dog Romney.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I was just telling Mr. Snerdley, I’ve got this big problem here. It’s an attitudinal problem. I’ve gotta be very, very guarded in things I think I have to be very, very guarded. I don’t have to be. I’m enforcing it on myself. I hear that Obama is gonna attack Romney on Bain, and I go, “Big whoop.” And I hear Obama’s gonna attack Romney on the 47%, and I go, “Big whoop.” And I hear that Obama’s gonna attack Romney on tax cuts and Wall Street and I go, “Big whoop.” And I go “big whoop” because Obama’s got nothing new. Everything that they say Obama’s gonna hit Romney on, he’s already been doing in ads. Now, he didn’t do it in the first debate, just sort of stood there.

And of course the question lingering on everybody’s mind is this. “Well, what happens if the exact opposite of the first debate happens tomorrow night? What if Romney comes out and looks like an absolute uninterested, arrogant, condescending, phoning it in kind of idiot, and Obama’s the one all revved up and ready to go?” What does that do? Does that change the dynamic again? Does that totally wipe out all of the Romney enthusiasm and does it rev it up for Obama? Does it take it back to Obama plus 11 in Ohio, as we were told it was two weeks ago, which it never was in Ohio. Obama’s never been up nine in Ohio. He’s never been up eight in Ohio. He’s never been up 11 in Florida. None of that’s ever been true. But it is a fear people on our side have. I understand it.

What magic does Obama have that he hasn’t used yet? What is it? Or does he just have to show up and be Obama, be the Obama of ’08? (Obama impression) “You elect me and this time I’m gonna make sure those sea levels do fall.” What’s he got? On the other hand, can Romney go out and screw it up no matter what Obama does? That’s a fear people have. And no matter what Obama does, Romney can do, say, or otherwise something stupid. And they’re legitimate fears and legitimate concerns. See, my problem is — “problem” in quotes — I don’t see any big Obama enthusiasm, and I haven’t seen any in over two years. Outside of the media, you just don’t see it. The media tells us it’s there, the media reports these polls and all this, but common sense continues to invade my mind.

We have an economy in the tank that’s getting worse. Every indicator of competence in running this country, domestic policy and foreign policy, is nonexistent. We have moratoriums on drilling for oil. It’s indescribable how bad things are and how bad they have been made by this administration. Plus, the magic that was Obama is no more, and that can never be recaptured. The Obama of ’08 can never be recaptured. I don’t care what happens in the debate tomorrow night. Obama can never go back to being The Messiah. He can never go back to being the empty canvas that people can make him be whatever they want him to be, because he is something. He’s a dramatic, big-time failure. And there’s no changing that. Life is what it is. Reality is what it is. And there isn’t anything that’s happened in the last 3 1/2 years that a majority of people want more of. And I will leave it at that.

I’ve been frustrated all day, ever since I played these sound bites of these yokels in the media talking about the magic in this debate being the 47% comment that Romney made. The only way Romney could make this work for them is if he goes out and harps on it, apologizes for it, and steps in it, and he’s gotten close to doing that on the stump a couple times. And Ryan in the debate acknowledged that he didn’t mean to say it. “Well, Mr. Vice President, I’m sure you understand that many times things come out of our mouths the way they’re not intended,” and so forth and clearly the implication is that Romney made a mistake in saying it. But I still don’t see it as the magic bullet that launches Obama back to where he was four years ago. I see all that enthusiasm now with Romney: Crowd size, enthusiasm among people at the crowd.

Byron York has a piece in his column at the DC Examiner: “GOP Hopes Soar as Romney Rolls in Ohio.” Now, you read this piece, and it makes clear what the Obama strategery has been, although that’s not what the story is about, but it illustrates it nevertheless. It’s a massive effort to depress Republicans. A massive effort to suppress Republican vote. A massive effort to convince Republicans that the race was lost a long time ago. That Romney has never had a chance. The never ending polls that oversampled the Democrats, combined with media reports that Mitt was losing.

And then all of these negative ads that people were supposedly believing, and Byron’s column here is that this all was working until the debate. Let me give you a pull quote, ’cause I mentioned it. I mentioned earlier that I’m getting e-mails from people who tell me they’re working the grassroots, they’re knocking on doors already, and they’re making phone calls, and they’re running into a lot of people who claim they voted for Obama who are not going to this time.

I receive all that with guarded suspicion because you can’t make projections from that, and people desperate for good news will take that and think it means something when we can’t know whether it means anything, nationwide or even statewide. But here’s a quote from Byron’s piece: “Danielle Low, a 22 year-old preschool teacher in Lebanon, is the quintessential Romney target voter. In 2008, she was newly eligible to vote, and she chose Barack Obama.

“‘But then I gave birth to my first son, and I knew we needed a change,’ Low said. ‘We bought a house in ’09 and we’re struggling every day, my husband and I are. I just want to see things turn around. I want to be able to afford to have another child. I want to be able to afford to buy a house where we want to live, and right now, with the economy the way it is, we can’t do that. I think President Obama tricked me into voting for him,’ Low continued in an impromptu discussion that could have doubled as a Romney ad.

“‘I feel like [Obama] lied to me. He made promises he couldn’t keep. He played on my young emotions. He played on me because I was young and naive. I didn’t know anything about the world.” There are people like this all over the country. This is a young person, and Byron says: I didn’t prompt her. She just launched. She said all of this on her own. There wasn’t one leading question asked of her.

She said, “I believed that he was going to give us a change. I just feel like he made a lot of promises — there’s no way he followed through with them.” The point is people bought into that in 2008. That’s what bothered all of us; let’s admit it. So many people bought the emptiness and the nothingness that was Obama in ’08, and that’s exactly what it was. And that so many people thought it was what drove us crazy. And it did!

Admit it!

We knew we were looking at a lying empty suit. We knew we were looking at somebody Svengali-like who was manipulating people, who had been set up by six years of intense negative media criticism of all things Republican from George Bush on down. People were war-weary with Iraq and they had been told for six years that a recession was starting when it wasn’t for most of those years. Then here came a guy who was Mr. Magic, who was the instant fix to all of it, and what did he say?

“I don’t see Republicans and Democrats; I see Americans. I don’t see red states and blue states; I see Americans,” and I knew. “This guy is a liberal. It’s a bunch of clap. He doesn’t mean any of this,” but people so desperately wanted it that they fell for it. And it bothered all of this. Empty suit nothingness was treated as substance. Well, see, the empty suit nothingness has been exposed now. And this woman has figured it out on her own.

Byron York’s whole piece is made up of people like this. This woman, though, admits that she was depressed. And there are a lot of Republicans in his column that he quotes who admit being depressed by the media’s coverage in the polls and so forth, and the debate turned ’em around. Which I totally believe and understand, but I don’t think those people were not gonna vote. They’re just now feeling confident.

What happens in the mainstream media is important whether we like it or not, and so it’s indicative that what Romney did in the debate was overcome the media; present a side of him that had never been presented before to people who only knew him the way people had been presenting him in ads. But there’s nothing new President Obama could do.