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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: Here’s what I worry about on the Republican side. I told this to Ted Cruz. He asked. Don’t sweat it. I wasn’t volunteering things. He asked. One of the things I’ve noticed over the 25-plus years of doing this program, every Republican primary, doesn’t matter, every Republican presidential primary, there’s a series of candidates. Some are conservative, some are okay, some are bad, but they’re conservatives. Some have been really good. And we take ’em out one by one because they’re not perfect.

I’ll give you an example. One of the first days — well, recent first days. One of the recent days on which I was touting Scott Walker within the context of, “Hey, here’s a guy, we all talk about somebody needs to stand up to the left and not be afraid to do it, he’s done it. He’s beat ’em three out of four elections. They’ve thrown everything at him they throw at all of us, and he has beat them.” I’ve talked about Scott Walker as a blueprint, not just a blueprint building the building, but he actually built the building. He’s implemented his agenda. He’s shown that conservatism works in a blue state. I’ve been through all that.


I start getting e-mails from names you would know that I’m not gonna tell you. “Rush, be very careful. He’s not right on immigration.” I looked and I said, “Don’t tell me.” These were people who wanted me to walk back what I was saying about Scott Walker because he just wasn’t saying the exact thing they wanted to hear on amnesty or whatever it was. But that’s just one example.

With Cruz it’s gonna be something else, somebody, some conservative blog or some conservative host, some conservative media type somewhere is gonna find one thing that candidate X, conservative candidate X falls short on and they’re gonna say disqualifies him. And this happens. This is one of the reasons why the Republican Party ends up with the McCains and the Romneys as the nominee, because this quest for conservative perfection ends up doing great damage to individual conservatives in the race.

I think you have to go into this understanding that there isn’t a perfect candidate. There is not a single candidate who’s gonna be a hundred percent right on everything. I’ve always thought single-issue politics is our death knell, or it’s a huge problem. And it has been. It’s proven out. So I’m just gonna be watching all of that with great interest, too. ‘Cause, as I say, I mean, I’ve already been the recipient of people trying to talk me out of things. And I hadn’t endorsed Scott Walker. I haven’t endorsed anybody. And the way they did it was, “Hey, yeah, Rush, be very careful. You may not know, but Scott Walker is not,” blah, blah, whatever, “on immigration. I wouldn’t want you to embarrass yourself.”

What they’re really trying to do was to get me to walk it back, take back some of the enthusiasm, for whatever reasons they had, they chose somebody else, or they really thought Walker wasn’t as good as the conventional wisdom, what have you. My point is this quest for perfection, which sometimes descends into nothing more than single issue-ism, can be damaging and even destructive.

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