RUSH:  Okay.  We’ll start on the phones in Glastonbury, Connecticut.  Mike, great to have you, sir, on the EIB Network.  Hello.

CALLER:  Hey, Rush, great to talk to you again.  Mega dittos from Hillary’s basket of deplorables.

RUSH:  Thank you, sir.

CALLER:  I’m just calling to touch on the point you made earlier about when the Drive-Bys see Trump on the defensive, we see him attacking.

RUSH:  Yeah, exactly.

CALLER:  Yeah.  I agree with that, but I also think we feel like we’re being directly attacked by Hillary when she goes low at Trump.  You know, when she makes snarky remarks like Donald Trump lives in his own reality and flat-out calling him racist or how about that phony smile she was putting on all night.

RUSH:  That is an excellent point, by the way, and I think this is worth making as well.  Hillary is not attacking Trump alone.  When she goes after Trump in these “deplorable” ways, she is, by definition, attacking everybody that supports Trump, and that’s millions of people.  Look, her negatives and her unpopularity and her dislikability numbers are sky-high.  This woman is not adored, universally or otherwise.  She is highly suspected, and she is not respected in any way, shape, manner, or form. 

And so these insults that she throws out are directed at Trump’s supporters.  There is a way, if she wanted to attack Trump and exempt his supporters, she could do that, but she doesn’t because she means to.  She has already said that half of Trump’s supporters go in the basket of deplorables.  And the other half of Trump’s supporters just too stupid to know any better.  The government has left them behind, the government this, but they’re just too stupid to know how much the government’s actually trying to help ’em and so forth. 

I mean, what she said I think is much, much more condescending and insulting than anything Romney said with that 47% remark of his.  But it’s for this reason — and again, I’m gonna make this point ’cause I think it’s crucial to understand.  One of the first early themes of the postdebate analysis last night was, “My God, did you see how Trump was on defensive the whole time?  My God, did you see what Hillary did?  Hillary turned the tables totally.  Hillary was offense, and Trump, Trump the big braggart, Trump was on defense.”  And Trump’s supporters see Trump attacking when others see him on defense. 

He may be attacking from a defensive position, but he’s attacking.  He doesn’t just roll over like Republicans have tended to do for many of the recent past years.  He fights back, chews back, claws back, what have you, defending himself, his supporters, what have you.  And there’s a whole slew of Republican voters who haven’t had anybody fight back for themselves or their voters in a long time.  So it’s not the negative the Drive-Bys think it is. 

It is interesting to watch them analyze this stuff.  “Yeah, Trump lost a point here when he –” that’s not how people watch this.  What do you mean, Trump lost a point?  What, did Trump lose a supporter because he didn’t mention something that was a hanging curveball that Hillary sent him?  It’s not the way people score and watch these things.  Anyway, I appreciate the call very much. 

This is Kevin in St. Louis.  Great to have you with us, sir.  Hi.

CALLER:  Hi, Rush.  Thanks for taking my call.  I thought Donald Trump did great last night considering that he’s never had a one-on-one debate like that before.  You know, he defended himself.  He answered the questions. He had thoughtful answers on solutions he was gonna give and I really thought he did great.

RUSH:  Versus Hillary, who has a political lifetime of experience at this?

CALLER:  Yeah.  I mean, she’s an actress, basically. She does these referrals, memorizes what she’s gonna say.  She doesn’t have any solutions.

RUSH:  Well, that’s the point of my 30-year note.  What solutions?  All she’s got is the same list of complaints and problems for 30 years. 

CALLER:  Right.

RUSH:  But it’s interesting.  You want to cut Trump some slack and maybe give him some credit because here he entered a business that he has no experience in, he did something for the first time last night that nobody’s done in a long time and held his own, and you think that’s a big deal?

CALLER:  It is a big deal.  And now he’s got a flavor for what to do next time and he’ll be even better, I think.

RUSH:  Well, that’s interesting, too.  See, I guarantee you the Drive-Bys are not gonna see that.  There may be some Fox people that might see that and praise that, but that’s a good observation, too, to characterize how Trump supporters saw this last night.  I appreciate that, Kevin.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to go back to our first caller, who mentioned Hillary’s condescending smirk and smile and her attitude.  Folks, this is potentially huge.  The Drive-Bys are going to miss it entirely ’cause they don’t look at things like this.  They measure these debates by what people say.  That is how they score all of this.  And they miss the old creed:  People rarely remember what you tell them, but they never forget how you make them feel. 

Hillary Clinton does not and did not last night inspire feel good.  She doesn’t have it in her.  She was condescending. She was rolling her eyes at times. She was clearly insulting Trump by looking like she thought he was an idiot.  People notice this stuff, like Algore sighing throughout the first debate he had with George W. Bush.  And every Drive-By Media inside-the-Beltway establishment member is gonna miss all of this because they judge these debates on words, rhetoric.  “Who scored the most points?  Who got in the best zingers?” 

By tonight nobody’s gonna remember what anybody said specifically.  They’re not gonna remember any zingers.  There weren’t any good zingers.  There was nothing memorable last night in terms of what was said.  But there was everything memorable about how people were made to feel.  Attitude and personality is measured by demeanor and appearance.  And I’m just telling you, with that grating smirk, Hillary clearly communicated her arrogance, her hubris. Even Colin Powell talked about her hubris, her contempt and her viciousness. 

On the other hand, let’s look at Trump and Trump’s body language.  I saw Karl Rove today say that early on Trump’s hand gestures were fine, his fists were not closed and all that.  Then later he started pointing, he started pointing at her, and that’s off-putting. He didn’t say this, but it’s close to like Rick Lazio crossing the stage and asking Hillary to sign a piece of paper.  But for the most part Trump stayed within his boundaries, he stayed in control, he appeared unflustered.  He might have got defensive and mad about some stuff, but he was not flustered. 

He had a reassuring presence and a confidence. He had a nonverbal communication that has been Trump’s major strength from the get-go, alpha male.  Would you not agree with this, Mr. Snerdley? He’d recognize an alpha male easily, he is one.  So I don’t know, I’m gonna take a wild guess here that the postdebate polling is going to surprise people.  And right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers, U.K. Daily Mail:  “Majority of snap polls show Trump won debate by a landslide despite CNN’s overwhelming victory for Hillary in biggest official survey.”

We had a CNN poll, a CBS poll, TIME magazine poll, Cincinnati WCPO, San Diego Tribune, Slate magazine, Las Vegas Sun, Variety, NewJersey.com, Michigan Live, Fortune, CNBC, Breitbart, in every one of those Trump wins from 51 to 76%.  Hillary’s top number is 49%.  Her low is 19.  Las Vegas Sun:  “Trump 81, Clinton 19.”  Only in the CNN poll did Hillary win 62 to Trump’s 27.  In the Drudge poll, it was 81.5% for Trump and 18.5% for Clinton. 

And a McClatchy news service story.  “Presidential debate surprise as Clinton wins polls but loses votes in swing state.  Kae Roberts and Jay Eardly were leaning toward Hillary Clinton before Monday night’s debate.  By the end, they had both pulled away. John Kokos and Hank Federal were undecided going in, potential Clinton backers. By the end, they’d ruled her out. Indeed, while polls found that Clinton had won the first general-election debate with Donald Trump on Monday, she may not have won actual votes. And she may even have lost some, at least in the battleground state of North Carolina.” That’s where this story — four people that wanted to vote Hillary, after the debate they backed out. 

And then Salena Zito, again writing for the New York Post, “How Trump Won Over a Bar Full of Undecideds and Democrats,” in Pennsylvania.  And here is Ken Reed, a guy at the bar in Youngstown, Pennsylvania, watching the debate quoted as saying that: “Clinton came across as either smug or as though she was reading her resume, adding there was nothing on her resume that touched on his life. ‘I am a small businessman, a farmer, come from a long line of farmers and coal miners. The policies she talked about tonight ultimately either hurt me or ignore me,’ he said.”

Yeah, that’s the whole point of my 30-year comment.  Another pull quote from this story.  “Democrats here are more traditional in their values — they are pro-gun, pro-life, pro-coal, something today’s Democratic Party has left no room for.”

Salena Zito works for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review.  She has been basically studying and analyzing the state of Pennsylvania outside the cities.  And she has written frequently here of how Pennsylvania outside the cities is pulling for Trump in a surprisingly way, and another story here.  So we’ll see.  And again here’s this guy, Clinton came off smug, reading her resume, robotic.  The Drive-Bys don’t see any of that.  They see Queen Hillary.  They score these things and judge these things in ways that you do not.