RUSH: Yeah, the Republican poll. I interrupted myself halfway through the first page. Let’s get back to that. Let’s get back to Republican poll. We left off at 70% of Republican voters say that they hear news of an economic recovery, but their own personal finances have not improved significantly. And, yeah, I remember I told you I saw this news over the break, one of the two things I saw, what a great mood everybody’s in.

Not that everybody is down in the dumps perpetually and dramatically, but I have not noticed this great mood out there. I mean, I do in some people, but I haven’t noticed a national great mood. Yet it was reported. It was polling data. The idea that the country is populated by people of great mood came from polls, and yet 70% of Republican voters say they hear news of this and the economic recovery, but it isn’t something that’s affecting them. “Twenty-three percent of Republican voters are confident that future generations of Americans will have a higher standard of living and better lives than we do today.”

That’s a low number. That’s horrible.

Only 23% of Republicans think that their kids are gonna do better than they did? I mean, that is striking, and that does not correspond to all the polling data of what a great mood everybody’s in out there. “Nineteen percent of Republicans say the government is working for the best interests of the people.” You know, Mario Cooomo, as his name was pronounced by the Reverend Jackson, passed away. Mario Cuomo was perhaps the most, the biggest, the most profound “What if?” candidate the Democrat Party has ever had.

Now, Cuomo became nationally acclaimed because of — well, two speeches, but primarily one. It was his speech at the Democrat National Convention in San Francisco 1984. The Democrat candidate — and, by the way, this dovetails with these two numbers, 23% and 19%. The Democrat candidate in 1984 was Walter F. Mondale from Minnesota, who went on to lose 49 states. The Democrat convention San Francisco 1984 was…

You want to talk about a time when America was in a good mood and was optimistic and was just beating the band and the country was growing, unemployment was coming down, jobs are being created? It was the eighties, and primarily it was the last six years of the eighties, but the two terms of Ronaldus Magnus. This was in the middle of this recovery from the Jimmy Carter malaise, in the middle it. I mean, we were just starting to boom employment, folks, to the tune of 700,000 jobs a month were being created.

Nobody was being cut back to 30 hours a week part-time so that the employers wouldn’t have to pay their health care. I mean, it was a totally different time, and it was upbeat, and the Democrat Party could not stand it. The Democrat Party could not permit it. So here came Cuomo, and I don’t even think he was the keynote. (Might have been. I can’t remember.) Jesse Jackson gave a speech then, too. I think it was his second, and it didn’t rate as well, or get the reviews that his first one had, whenever it was.

Anyway, Cuomo shows up, and he delivers the most pessimistic, dire, “We are screwed. It’s over. This country is in the twilight of our years. It’s horrible,” speech I have ever heard. And everybody said that it was that speech that launched Mario Cuomo! That speech had a lifespan? Well, what? Reagan went on to win 49 states! Just how effective could that speech have possibly been? But this is how liberalism and the media work. Cuomo goes out…

Reagan’s theme was “the shining city on the hill.” We’re a great country. We are just rolling. Reagan was optimistic about it. Nothing is holding us back. The Soviet Union is about to implode. I mean, we’re on a roll! And here comes the Democrat convention trying to deny all of this and tell everybody, “No, no, no. Don’t believe that because there’s an invisible America you don’t see where most of America lives, and it’s homeless and it’s jobless and it’s starving and it’s thirsty.

The media loved it, the Democrat delegates loved it, the Democrat Party loved it, but the country didn’t. Yet everybody heralded Cuomo as this great orator and so forth, but that speech couldn’t have had any impact. It didn’t help Mondale. Mondale went on to lose 49 states six weeks or seven weeks later, whatever it was.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Just to show you the difference, Mario Cuomo came out, it was a full-fledged attack, his 1984 speech in San Francisco that he was acclaimed for. You had to be there. I mean, it captivated the media, and all it was was an attack on Reagan, which makes sense. I mean, he’s a conservative Republican. The media hated them then as they do now. But it was also a portrayal of America as the worst of times in any Charles Dickens novel. And it wasn’t true. It was nowhere near true.

So just to show you nothing changes, except one thing. Back then, the Democrat Party attempted to make hay by making everybody miserable and telling everybody how they should be miserable, that if you’re feeling good, it’s a fraud. If you’re feeling good, it’s fake. Reagan’s a liar, Reagan’s a fraud, there isn’t any real good news. It’s all going to hell in a handbasket. Really, it was worse than you’ll find in any Dickens novel. This is how Cuomo portrayed it.

Now, the American people didn’t want to hear it. As I say, Reagan went on to win 49 states, but today that kind of portrayal of America everybody seems to want to believe. Everybody now signs on to it. There are victims everywhere. Forty years is not that long. Well, it is. It’s a generation and a half, I guess, but it’s striking how optimism carried the day with an inspirational leader. And the best the Democrat Party had to offer at the time, which was Cuomo, doing his best to tell everybody that it was all a lie. The problem, people were living the good times.

They had lived the misery under Jimmy Carter, and it was bad. So bad that there was a misery index to calculate it for people. Interest rates at 15%, unemployment was way up, 12 or 13. It was incredibly bad. And we were coming out of that, and there was optimism and Reagan made people feel good about being Americans again, made ’em feel good about the country, and here came the Democrat Party trying to wipe it all out. And it didn’t work then.

But it hasn’t taken them long, has it, to wipe out that sense of optimism from most people and replace it with a constant pessimism and, by the way, one of the things about Barack Obama — he wrote about it in his book, and I mentioned this — he admired Reagan in one way: Reagan transformed the country. And that’s what Obama wants to do. He hated Reagan, and he hated Reagan’s policies.

And I’m telling you, one of the things Obama is about, one of the things that animates Obama is destroying everything to do with Reagan. Reaganomics, the idea of tax cuts causing economic growth and a growing private sector, Obama is hell-bent on convincing people — and that’s what his tour here is about to start being. He’s hell bent on convincing people that the only way the economy can grow is if government does and if government’s running the show, if government’s making decisions, if government’s employing you, if government’s this. He’s out to wipe out every last positive memory of the 1980s. That’s primarily what is animating Obama.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Gary in Hazel Park, Michigan. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, what a wonderful way to start the new year, Rush. You’re one of about three living heroes of mine. Most the rest have been dead just about 200 years and are the main characters in your book series.

RUSH: Wow. Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.

CALLER: I agree with your premise that the betrayer-in-chief is attempting to eliminate any evidence of Reagan’s presidency, but I’d like to take it a bit further and say he’s trying to do the same thing to Bush with his precipitous retreat from the War on Terror which I believe he’s extended inadvertently a couple decades, at least.

RUSH: Well, where do you stop with this? Because I think you’re right. He’s trying to wipe all vestige of anything other than the Democrat Party for people —

CALLER: Well, to fundamentally change the United States, he’ll have to do that, yes.

RUSH: Yeah. Well, he’s intending to. By the way, this is just January 5 of the last two years.