RUSH: Well, the Washington Post has a new story on their latest poll, and do you know what’s interesting about this Washington Post story on the latest poll? It’s that you have to read a long way into the story to find out what the poll says, and you can probably ascertain the reason for that. It ain’t good for Obama. The headline in this story from the Washington Post… It’s actually the ABC News/Washington Post poll, so this is actually an ABC story: “Enthusiasm Rises for Romney Ahead of Debate,” by Gary Langer.

“Rising enthusiasm and declining anxiety mark an energy boost among Mitt Romney’s supporters since he prevailed in the first presidential debate. But a persistent sense he’d favor the wealthy, combined with easing discontent with the nation’s direction, provide a retort for President Obama, raising the stakes for their second” debate tomorrow night. You ought to see here how far down you have to read to get to any numbers in a story on a poll.

In fact, this ABC article puts up two sets of good numbers for Obama before they even get around to reporting the most important numbers on who’s ahead if the vote were held today. And even then, the horse race number is presented in a highly confusing way. Here’s the deal. This is what I’m paid for. I went through this. I weaved my way through all the BS in this story. Romney is ahead of Obama in the latest ABC/Washington Post poll among likely voters 49 to 46.

That is a three percentage-point lead. It is even more significant when you see that the poll oversampled Democrats by 9%. Everything I just told you, you have to read at least half of this story to find. And then you have to almost translate it because they present numbers favorable to Obama first. But the bottom line is: In the ABC/Washington Post poll, it is Romney plus three in a Democrat sample of plus nine.

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RUSH: Okay, now I’m a little confused. The Politico is saying Obama’s up three in the Washington Post/ABC poll. Obama 49, Romney 46. The way I looked at it in this story was Romney up 49-46. Anyway, the crazy thing about this Washington Post/ABC poll, they oversample Democrats by nine percent. In their own poll they say that the enthusiasm for Obama is down 8% since 2008. And what they did, they replicated the 2008 turnout in their sample. The 2008 turnout is gonna be nothing like the turnout in 2012. They say that the enthusiasm for Romney is 30% higher than it was for McCain and that the Democrats only had a 7% advantage in 2008, yet they’ve got a 9% advantage in this poll.

It doesn’t make any sense. And all of this data is buried so deeply in the poll. The headline: “Enthusiasm Rises for Romney Ahead of Debate.” The bottom line is this. Two weeks ago, maybe even not that long, just prior to the last debate, how many polls we shared with you here, how many polling organizations said that the election’s over, that Romney doesn’t have a chance, that he doesn’t have a chance in Ohio or any of the swing states. Doesn’t have a chance. It’s over. I don’t know how many different polling units said this, but it was significant. Was over. Then the debate came, and if we are to believe the media, the debate fired up the Republican base. The debate gave the Republican base confidence. The debate gave the Republican base enthusiasm, and at the same time the debate quelled enthusiasm for Obama.

So the debate took what was a sure, in-the-bag victory for Obama and turned it into a toss-up. And since then, it has become almost over. If Romney wins tomorrow night’s debate decisively, many in the media think it’s almost over. Such is what they’re saying. And all it does is buttress the point that I have been making, that these polls are meaningless. In April, May, and June they are used to shape public opinion. They are used to move agendas. I want to tell you again, with as much enthusiasm as I can muster here without raising my voice, the whole point of every one of these polls prior to the present moment has been to suppress your vote, depress you, convince you it’s over, get you not enthusiastic, lackadaisical, perhaps not even showing up.

They have misunderstood throughout this entire period, there’s nothing they can do to keep you from voting. There’s no amount of suppression, no amount of depression, no amount of attempts to make you think it’s all over that’s gonna keep you home. This is what they have not understood. But they are still desperate to prove to themselves that they have this kind of power, and so they engage in efforts to do so, shaping public opinion every week, at least with these polls.

So The Politico is right. My first interpretation was wrong. The ABC/Washington Post poll has Obama up three. That is how poorly written this thing is. I tell you, you need a PhD in mathematics to translate this story. And even with Obama up three, it’s not demonstrated anywhere in this poll where that makes any sense. It’s a story overall about the enthusiasm that has built up for Romney.

Now, we move on to USA Today. Shocker. “Obama, Romney Nearly Tied in Electoral College.” Again, last week, two weeks ago, it was over. There wasn’t a way to victory for Romney, particularly he had no prayer in Ohio, and, without Ohio, it didn’t matter, nothing else mattered. Now they’re essentially tied in the Electoral College.

Let’s go to the audio sound bites. F. Chuck Todd this morning on the Today show. And I think given that these people all speak to each other and they all basically have the same worldview, all the media people, they all think the same way, this is pretty much indicative of what the real mind-set is behind closed doors out there. Savannah Guthrie talking to F. Chuck Todd, NBC White House correspondent, political director and so forth. She said, “You’ve seen the polls, Chuck, nationally tight, Romney leading. This is an election that’s gonna be decided state by state. How close is this race right now, F. Chuck?”

TODD: The numbers I’ve seen and in talking to both campaigns, something shifted fundamentally and it’s a dead heat but it’s one of these — even right after the debate, you had the Obama campaigning, “Yes, it’s a dead heat, but we’ve got all that fundamental advantages in the battleground states.” And the Romney folks would have conceded that. The numbers I’ve seen privately come over the last 72 hours, we are in a real dead heat and you see that shift. This means, Savannah, this debate couldn’t be more critical for President Obama. If he loses this debate, then you could start seeing momentum just continue to shift to Romney and he would pull ahead in a lot of states.

RUSH: The momentum could continue to shift, meaning the momentum is still with Romney. Romney’s crowds in Ohio, the Drive-Bys even reported that they are Obama-size crowds that Romney is drawing. Well, that’s been the case for a while. That’s been happening in Florida and a number of other states. They just haven’t been reporting it. This enthusiasm for Romney — look, I don’t deny that the debate buoyed everybody. I don’t deny that the debate jazzed everybody. And, in fact, I’ve got a story here from Ohio that talks about how people were depressed and they were down in the dumps, and they were down in the dumps and depressed because of what the media was saying. Then the debate came along and they’re all fired up.

My contention was, I don’t care how depressed they say they were, they were still gonna vote. They were still gonna vote because they tired of this. They don’t want any more of this. They don’t want any more excuses. They don’t want any more definitions of how 7.8% unemployment is the new norm. They don’t want to hear that 114,000 new jobs, that’s wonderful. They don’t want to hear that. They don’t want a president with a crumbling foreign policy. They don’t want a president that can’t protect diplomats. They don’t want a president that’s seemingly lost and clueless. You really have to stop — to use a cliche, how much of the bloom is off the rose of Obama. You go back and compare Obama in 2008, it was not and is not an exaggeration to say that he was messianic.

You go back and look at Grant Park on election night, look at the people in that crowd. Zombies, the walking dead. It didn’t matter what he said. It was what they wanted him to be. That’s what he was. That’s gone. There is none of that. All there is is a hard, cold reality that he was not what anybody thought him to be. Whatever it was that every individual that voted for this guy in 2008 made him out to be in their own mind, he’s not that anymore. And there’s no way of capturing it. There’s no way of getting it back. He’s got a record, and it’s dismal, and he can’t defend it. He doesn’t even want to talk about it. Even the New York Times, Jeff Zeleny, had to admit yesterday on Fox News that Romney is seeing massive enthusiastic crowds. David Axelrod. We’ve got the audio of this coming up. Axelrod refuses to say whether Obama met with the national security team before heading to Las Vegas. This is the Benghazi thing. What a disaster.

Pat Smith, this woman whose son died, still hasn’t gotten an answer. They’re still lying to her about why her son died, how her son died, what happened. She still can’t get a straight answer. We’ve got people throwing people under the bus in this administration. This Benghazi thing isn’t gonna go away. There’s nothing they can do to make it go away. And the way the administration’s handling it is to make excuses and to continue to hype a video and so forth.

It’s really amateur hour, and it’s apparent to everybody. I think this is… I have to be very, very careful here. But I think this is much further along than even F. Chuck wants to admit. The fact that F. Chuck says that it’s do or die for Obama in this debate tomorrow, what does that really mean? If it’s do or die — if one debate determines whether or not Obama wins reelection or not — what does that really mean? How far has Obama really fallen?

There is no enthusiasm behind Obama.

None.

There’s nobody who wants any more of this. I’m talking about majority numbers. I’m sure we’ve got people who think that Obama equals a free phone. Let’s just acknowledge as a given there’s 30% of the people who are either Democrats loyal to the party or who want big government to give ’em stuff, but I think we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. We’re nowhere near that. The majority of the country is nowhere near it.

I think we’ve learned that to this point. We got a presidential candidate, the incumbent, running for reelection trying to get a majority of the Moron Vote. We have a presidential candidate who ran a campaign that cast aside “white working-class voters” as of last November, and they said so. And since they announced that they were not gonna try to get the votes of white working-class voters — i.e., mine workers — they have been on a mission of depressing those people; suppressing their vote, not just ignoring them.