RUSH: I checked the e-mail during the break, and the Rand Paul people are out in droves, which is predictable. I should maybe more properly say the Ron Paul people are out in droves, and they’re accusing me of ignoring Rand Paul and his presidential announcement. I’m not ignoring it. He’s doing it when the program is on the air. We don’t JIP these guys.
We didn’t broadcast Ted Cruz live. We’re not gonna broadcast any of them live, including Rand Paul. You don’t do that. We don’t know how long they’re gonna go. I can’t afford to give up an hour of this program for 16 different people. We’ll get to Rand Paul after he finishes.
We’ll roll tape on it and if it takes us ’til tomorrow, we’ll do it. Just like we do with Ted Cruz and Scott Walker and all of the rest of them.
I love this. I just love this. They’re already accusing me of ignoring Rand Paul. He’s doing his thing right now, and just because I’m not JIPping (joining in progress) his announcement means that I’m somehow biased or somehow unsupportive of Rand Paul, when I haven’t announced my choice for anything yet.
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RUSH: Yes, we’ll get to Rand Paul, but maybe not ’til tomorrow. I’m not gonna get to Rand Paul ’til I got some sound bites. I have no idea what he said here yet, and it’s not my fault he did his announcement when the program is on. I can’t do two things at once here. All these other responsible candidates, they did their announcements around this program, either before it or after it. Rand Paul came here. He came here a year ago. Maybe not that long, but it was some months ago.
He was a very nice guy. He came by the EIB Southern Command and we met for an hour and he laid out exactly how he was going to win the presidency. He told me what his strategy was. He told me what the Republican Party’s challenges were. I’ll tell you one thing he said to me. He said the Republican Party cannot win anymore with just votes from its own members.
Another thing he said (paraphrasing), “Rush, you may not like it, a lot of people may not like it, but this is a country that is segregating itself into groups, and our party is gonna have to learn how to talk to each of these different groups. We can’t go out and speak to a collective America anymore. That’s just the reality.”
Well, I sat by, I politely listened. That’s what I was there for. I mean, he didn’t come here to find out what I think. He came here to tell me what he thinks. So I dutifully sat there and listened. Yeah, I asked some questions, but I didn’t get into arguments with him. That’s not what this was. He laid out his strategy, how he was gonna get this group and that group and that demographic and that demographic and where he thought the party was falling behind. It sounded reasonable from his standpoint.
He’s pretty much executed so far everything he told me he was gonna do. He told me the college campuses he was gonna visit, the areas of the country, the various states, and he’s been there. He hasn’t done anything that he didn’t allude to. That’s not quite true, because he didn’t tell me everything he was gonna do, but the point is that what he told me, he’s been consistent with his actions.
And so no, I was not issuing a cutting comment by pointing out that he’s the only one that announced during the program. Snerdley thinks, “Are you criticizing Rand Paul behind the scenes –” No, no, no. I’m just pointing out the reason I can’t talk about what he said here is ’cause he happened to announce when the program… (interruption) No, I think a seasoned campaign staff might have forced him to do it.
Look, these people aren’t idiots. They sit around, they’ve no doubt heard me praising Scott Walker top to bottom, back and forth, ditto Ted Cruz. I’ve met with Rand Paul and I have not entered into effusive praise, so the campaign staff probably said, “Well, we got nothing to lose here.” I’m guessing at all this. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that he did the announcement during the program. The only thing that matters is I can’t talk about what he said ’cause I don’t know it.
So until I have a chance to listen to what he said, read what he said and get the audio sound bites — I might get some of those today, but I can’t do it justice by talking about it. But two fundamental things he told me was the Republican Party can’t win with only its voters anymore and that the American people are segregating and have segregated themselves into groups and they have to be approached that way. There are voters who want to be treated as members of groups, not individuals.
He said (paraphrasing), “Rush, you may disagree with it, you may think it’s bad for the country, but that’s the way it is. I can’t deal with what I wish was the case. If I’m gonna get elected, then I’ve gotta approach the American people in the way they’re now living their lives and organizing themselves. And I can’t appear to be ripping them to shreds.” He was cool and he was very forthcoming, and he had it all figured out, by the way. He had his strategy, applied a considerable amount of thought to it, spent a lot of time thinking about it, and was well versed in it.
It was clear that it was his set of ideas and not a bunch of advisors that he was trying to remember what he had been told and what to say. It was clearly his ideas and his strategy and so forth. So we shall see how it all plays out. As I said at the top of the program, I think 16 or whatever it is candidates, it has the potential here to be fun. I mean, you talk about diversity, you talk about wide-ranging views.
The two things that concern me about this are things that concern me in every campaign cycle. And one is, when we get to the debates, they’re gonna be moderated by the George Stephanopouloses of the world who have as one objective, to take everybody on that stage out, one by one, and one at a time. So I hope that there are some changes and modifications in the way the Republicans decide to do all of these debates with all of these different candidates and who the moderators are and what the networks are.
The second thing — and I have mentioned this, too — the second thing that bothers, it does, it bothers me — is each one of these guys, be it Cruz, be it Marco Rubio, be it Rand Paul, be it Scott Walker, every one of them — and I don’t mean to be leaving anybody out. By the way, I’ll tell you who has grown some guts here recently, and maybe she’s always had them, I just didn’t know, Carly Fiorina is on fire out there. In California she is on fire and she’s calling ’em out. She’s calling the liberals out by name, and she’s not taking prisoners.
This is such a marked change from when she was in the McCain stable. I don’t want to say harem ’cause I don’t think that quite works. I don’t see McCain with a harem, but a stable, she was in there with Meg Whitman. I mean, she’s become a different candidate. She’s forceful and confident and not holding back.
So, anyway, what’s gonna happen is every one of these candidates is gonna have their totally devoted supporters, both in the general public and in the media. And here come the litmus tests. This is the thing, the single-issue crowd is gonna try to take out everybody who’s wrong on one thing. Might be a 98% perfect conservative, but if they’re wrong on 2%, they’re not qualified, and our own people will start trying to take ’em out. It happens. It just does. They’re impure. They’re not real conservatives. You know the kind of thing that I’m talking about.
So those are the two things. Those are the pitfalls. (interruption). Who, these candidates are young? Yeah. Compared to what’s on the other side, the other side is Jurassic Park, exactly right. I don’t care if it’s Hillary, if you’re talking about Biden — O’Malley may not be Jurassic Park. They’re trying to make him into JFK, which is not pleasing to the Clintons because Bill Clinton was always JFK. In every which way you could be JFK, he tried to do it. And now for Martin O’Malley to come along and be said to be the new JFK, that’s not gonna sit well with the Clintons.
But mark my words, before this is all over the Clintons are gonna get ticked off at being rejected again. Or the attempt will be made to defeat them and reject them, as opposed to the party supposedly being in unison love and adoration and support and devoted to Hillary. We’re gonna find that’s not the case again, just like we did in 2008. They were not totally devoted to Hillary in 2008, despite all the prepub, despite all the things we heard, Hillary was a lock, it was a coronation, the primaries were a formality until the first viable alternative came along and gave enough Democrats a chance to fly the coop, they did it. It’s gonna be the same thing this year. Somebody comes along that’s more attractive than Hillary — that’s not very hard, I didn’t say that — they’ll split the coop again. Thereby illustrating this whole notion that Mrs. Clinton is the lock and has the universal support of the Democrat Party, once again not true.
But our side, all kinds of different ideas, all kinds of different ways of fixing things, 16 different people. It’s supposedly what all the civics 101 people tell us they want. Wide range of ideas, diversity, mosaic, you know, all these surface things that people say are important. We’re gonna have Hispanics, women. We’re gonna cover it all. It won’t matter to the left, but still it will be visible to everybody.
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RUSH: Audio sound bites. I have the transcripts of the bites here (shuffling papers) in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. As I said, this happened this afternoon in Louisville at the Galt House Hotel. Here are… one, two, three, four, five. Six sound bites. Here’s the first one.
PAUL: I have a message. (cheers) A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We’ve come to take our country back! (cheers and applause) We’ve come to take our country back from the special interests that use Washington as their personal piggy bank! The Washington machine that gobbles up our freedoms and invades every nook and cranny of our lives must be stopped. (cheers and applause)
RUSH: And here is who he says that he’s going to take the country back from…
PAUL: I want to be part of a return to prosperity, a true economic boom that lifts all Americans, a return to a government restrained by the Constitution. (cheers and applause) A return to privacy, opportunity, liberty. Too often when Republicans have won, we’ve squandered our victory.
RUSH: I think they’re in the middle of the doing that now. He’s got a point there. I mean, do you see any signs of victory being exuded by Republicans ever since the midterm election since last November? In the next bite he points out here that Republicans cannot be Democrat Lite.
PAUL: In order to restore America, one thing is for certain, though: We cannot, we must not dilute our message or give up on our principles. (cheers and applause) If we nominate a candidate who is simply Democrat Lite, what’s the point? (cheers and applause) Why bother? We need to boldly proclaim our vision for America. We need to go boldly forth under the banner of liberty that clutches the Constitution in one hand and the Bill of Rights in the other. (cheers and applause)
RUSH: Now, I don’t want to split hairs here, but I think the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are the same document, and he said he was gonna have one in one hand and one in the other. Well, I know some might think I’m nitpicking here, and I’m not. I’m just… In fact, if you want to separate the Bill of Rights… Those are the first 10 amendments, for those of you in Rio Linda.
I actually had somebody from Rio Linda ask me (laughing) when I was back in Sacramento, “Well, if the Constitution’s so great, how come the first thing they had to do is change it 10 times?”
(laughing) “They didn’t change it.”
“Yeah, they knew they made some mistakes in it, and had to issue 10 corrections. Isn’t that what the Bill of Rights is?”
“No, sir, that’s not what the Bill of Rights is.”
“Well, the amendments are changes, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, they are. But these were additional expressions, additional declarations. These were the specific enumeration of the rights the people had and that the government did not.”
“Oh. Well, why didn’t they just say that?”
“They did. It’s just you may not have been taught that way.”
I ended up convincing him (laughing), but he was convinced the Bill of Rights were to fix what was wrong in the original document.
Here’s the next Rand Paul bite…
PAUL: The enemy is radical Islam. You can’t get around it. (applause) And not only will I name the enemy, I will do whatever it takes to defend America from these haters of mankind. (cheers and applause) At home, conservatives understand that government is the problem, not the solution. Conservatives should not succumb, though, to the notion that a government inept at home will somehow succeed in building nations abroad. (cheers and applause)
RUSH: There you go! There you go! That’s what the last caller was talking about. That’s this “retreatist,” if you will, foreign policy. There’s one more. I said there were six. There’s only five here. Here’s the last one, pretty much continuing his previous point.
PAUL: Let’s quit building bridges in foreign countries and use that money to build some bridges here at home! (cheers and applause) It angers me to see mobs burning our flag and chanting “Death to America!” in countries that receive millions of dollars in our foreign aid. (cheers and applause) I say, “Not one penny more to these haters of America!”
RUSH: There you have it. That’s Rand Paul. Those are the highlights of his announcement today that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. I just want to reiterate here that I think however many number of Republicans end up in this field… For some reason, the number 16 is floating around in my head. Whatever number it is, 14, 15, whatever the number is, I think… You know, I would love to be the consultant to all of them.
They’re all gonna have their own individual consultants. Fine and dandy. But I want to be the overall total campaign consultant with just one piece of advice: Never forget the enemy, the opponent is Hillary Clinton, and take as much time as every opportunity as you can to expose her, to educate the people of this country who she is, who her husband is, and what would be bad if she were to win, how it’d be a continuation of more of the same that we’ve had for the past 6-1/2 years.
There’s a whole generation or two of Americans have no idea the truth of the Clintons, particularly Hillary, and she is gonna be the opponent. If she’s the lock to get the nomination, she is going to be the opponent. Why wait until you’ve secured the nomination? Just start on it. With all of them every day telling the truth about Hillary Clinton, it could go a long way to making sure she doesn’t win, and in the process of doing so, I think kill two birds with one stone.
In the process of doing so, you define yourself. By defining your enemy, by defining your opponent, you, by natural extension, have to define yourself. And in the process of doing that, you draw a contrast between yourself and your opponent, and that really needs to be done. I’m still amazed at how the Republican Party at large has yet to really take advantage of the most far-left, liberal regime this country’s ever had to draw a distinctions and a contrast between it and what the Republican Party is.
Well, this primary season could offer that opportunity.