RUSH: Can I give you the lay of the land on the Democrat side right now? I don’t know if the Drive-Bys are reporting this. I don’t know how honest they’re being.
Right now, Bernie Sanders is unbeatable. Bernie Sanders is gonna have a delegate lead after Super Tuesday that Bloomberg cannot buy or beat. If everything holds true, the way it’s lining up now be with Bernie Sanders is gonna — and then the thing to watch is gonna be, “What does the DNC do with superdelegates?” That’s how they kept him from getting the nomination in 2016. It’s not Biden. Right now, Bernie Sanders is sitting in the driver’s seat.
Even though Buttigieg is leading in delegates right now because of the Hawkeye Cauci and New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders — the way things are lining up right now — is going to soon (after Super Tuesday) have an insurmountable delegate lead. And if Bloomberg doesn’t do something about that — and last night did not get him off to a good start… There’s no way. This is still about who and delegates.
Unless the Democrats change the rules and throw out delegates and say, “We’re gonna give the nomination to the richest guy,” in which case Crazy Bernie would come in second. (laughing) He’s got three homes. Bloomberg has 11. Bernie doesn’t have a jet. Bloomberg has three. Bernie has a Podunk little fishing vessel. Bloomberg has six yachts. Well, five. One may be a dinghy to get back and forth from one yacht to the next. But Crazy Bernie would be number two in terms of number of homes. Of course, we don’t know how many Pocahontas really has, ’cause a tepee you can put one of those up anywhere.
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RUSH: The ratings are in for this debate last night, and they’re big. They are big, and the reason for that is all the hype about Bloomberg, the rich guy.
I’ll tell you something, folks. You really have to learn to ignore the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats destroyed themselves last night. The conventional wisdom is that Crazy Bernie… He is leading the pack and he is leading the delegates. By the way, one of the moderators last night asked every participant in the debate, “Do you think the Democrat with the largest number of delegates, even if it’s not the minimum requirement…?
“Should the Democrat with the largest number of delegates get the nomination?” Crazy Bernie was the only guy who put his hand up and said yes, ’cause he’s gonna have most of the delegates. Superdelegates, that’s when the DNC starts playing games to try to get rid of him. My point about the ratings is with a lot of people tuning in, the conventional wisdom is that these people looked like fools last night. To you and me, yeah.
But I’ll guarantee you that there are enough disaffected, angry, aggrieved people who think they’re victims who are gonna tune in and watch this thing last night, and if somebody impressed them? You just don’t count your chickens. You know the old hackneyed saying. But whereas the conventional wisdom even throughout much of the mainstream media is how… In fact, let me give you a sound bite of this. We put together a montage. (singing) Babadabba.
Yeah, here.
Grab number 5. This is a montage of the Drive-Bys reviewing Bloomberg and his performance. But the conventional wisdom is that this was a disaster for the Democrats last night — and some people say if the ratings were big, it’s an even bigger disaster. But I don’t think… What I have learned after 30 years of thinking, “Nobody’s gonna believe this leftist claptrap” — and I’ve watched the number of people who do grow and grow and grow — is I don’t discount anything. So this is not long. It’s about 37 seconds of Drive-By Media experts shocked by how disastrous Bloomberg was.
GLORIA BORGER: Bloomberg was awful. I’m sorry.
BAKARI SELLERS: The performance was godawful. It was one of the worst performances.
BRET BAIER: Bloomberg had a rough, rough go.
WILLIE GEIST: They tore the skin off him.
HOWIE KURTZ: You have to call Mike Bloomberg the loser.
SARAH SANDERS: He was definitely the big loser.
JASON JOHNSON: This probably was the most expensive night in Vegas I’ve ever seen. (chuckles) He lost everything. It was a very bad night.
MARC THIESSEN: An absolute flameout! What a disaster.
KRYSTAL BALL: It was an utter and complete disaster. He should have just stayed home.
VAN JONES: This was a disaster for Bloomberg. Bloomberg went in as the Titanic, billion-dollar machine Titanic. Titanic, meet iceberg.
RUSH: That’s Van Jones. Do you think they’re right? (interruption) You think they are right. You think in this case conventional wisdom has got it right? See… (interruption) I know. I know to us the guy looked like a doofus, deer in the headlights, didn’t know how to do things. But he still got all that money. And people are still fascinated by that. Especially Democrats. You know, don’t believe this garbage that Democrats don’t care about money. (Snort!)
They care about money more than you do, and they use it to gauge their stats and so forth. Why do you think most billionaires in America are Democrats? At any rate, here is Andrew Yang. Now, this is the guy, he’s out of the race. He’s a big climate change guy. He was telling everybody in the early debates we need to move people to higher ground because of climate change. He was on the CNN post-debate analysis, and somebody said to him, “Andrew, you know this field the best. You know what it’s like on that stage. What’s your take on what happened?”
Number 6. Three, two, one…
YANG: I don’t think he was coached hard enough. You coach him and you have him give you 60-, 75-second answers (claps his hands) over and over again until he can do it in his sleep. And the fact that he did not have those answers at his fingertips lets me know, categorically, he was not properly prepared for this debate.
BORGER: Well, they say they coached him on all of those issues, so —
BASH: And that he had extensive debate prep with —
BORGER: Exactly!
BASH: — with real mock debates with his aides playing all the roles of all the people.
RUSH: Okay. So how do you explain it? If they did coach him — and I told you, they did. If they coached him, and if he thus was supposedly prepared, then what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. He doesn’t believe the people who coached him. There isn’t anybody that can tell him any more than he already knows. He is one of these personality types, partly because he has all this money.
He thinks he’s smarter than anybody else and there’s nobody that can tell him anything. Nobody in politics can tell him anything. He’s been mayor of New York and he commanded, “You can’t have a soft drink more than 12 ounces!” He’s the expert. He’s the expert in how much sodium you should be eating, and nobody can tell him different. So, yeah, he went through the coaching, but it obviously didn’t take. Here’s more Andrew Yang as he adds to the analysis.
YANG: Donors who are on the sidelines right now, frankly, are getting phone calls from Mike Bloomberg saying, “Hey sit this one out; I got this,” and if you’re a donor, not donating is actually a pretty appealing pitch.
PANELISTS: (laughter)
BASH: Mike Bloomberg is calling donors saying, “Don’t give to my opponents”?
YANG: Mike Bloomberg is calling donors, saying, “Hey, just sit this one out. I’ve got this. I’ll bankroll the whole thing. Uh, just don’t donate to anybody.” I heard this from a major donor, a person who donates to a number of candidates, ordinarily.
BASH: Yeah.
RUSH: Ah, don’t you love that? He’s calling other donors, “Don’t donate to these people, I got it, I got it handled.” And then he watched the debate last night, “I don’t think you got it, Mini Mike, I don’t think you got it handled.” We’ll see.
Folks, talking about Democrats watching a debate, when the conventional wisdom says that Bloomberg stunk up the joint, it’s entirely possible that many Democrats watching loved it. Don’t doubt me. I’m not predicting it, but I’m just telling you I wouldn’t be surprised. When’s the last time you believed the media on anything, huh? (interruption) Who? (interruption) Mr. Snerdley’s asking me if I think the Democrat base appreciated Bloomberg talking about how he made his own money with hard work.
No. They think the game’s rigged. That doesn’t impress them. If Bloomberg was giving it all away, like the Kennedys pretended to do, he might have a little bit more — that doesn’t impress them. (interruption) Well, no, his best moment was when he told Crazy Bernie that “your conversation about communism is the best damn thing to get Donald Trump elected happening on this stage tonight.” That was his best moment.
We got one more Doug Schoen. Doug Schoen has come out of retirement. He’s been a Fox News political analyst ever since he got dumped by the Clintons. I mean, he left the Clintons. I’m sorry. Now he’s back with Doomberg. Doomberg has hired Doug Schoen. So Doug Schoen was on Fox News last night, and it was Mike Emanuel filling in for whoever. He said, “Hey, Doug, give me a winner and loser after this debate last night, please.”
SCHOEN: The winner tonight was Donald Trump. I mean, the Democrats forgot that the opponent is the president, not one another.
RUSH: No, they didn’t.
SCHOEN: The personal attacks may have sounded good to some viewers or some ideologues, but the loser are the Democrats. If we nominate a socialist like Bernie Sanders, who doesn’t accept capitalism or people who believe in massive tax increases, we’re gonna lose. It will be like George McGovern. It will be a blowout. Or like Mike Dukakis. Frankly, I was very discouraged with what I saw as a Democrat and as somebody who wants the party to win in November.
RUSH: Now, this is what I don’t get. These candidates all hit Trump last night. They also hit each other. What the hell are they supposed to do? Trump’s not the opponent right now. If you’re Mayor Pete, Klobuchar and everybody else is the opponent. Well, Bloomberg’s the opponent, Crazy Bernie. What are they supposed to do? They have to hit each other last night.
And here’s another thing. Doug, you have to forgive me. The idea that McGovern’s an outlier or that Dukakis is — how come your party keeps nominating socialist outliers? Your party keeps nominating socialists. Obama was. Obama had everybody cowed. You can’t have a bigger Trojan horse than Barack Obama. Obama gets elected, 40% of the white vote because they want to end racism. They’re tired of being called racists. And they think the best way to eliminate all this talk about America being a racist nation is to vote for the first black guy running for president.
So they did. And then what does Obama do? Here comes massive Obamacare, here comes all this big-time left-wing socialism. They didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was. There isn’t a Democrat on that stage who’s not a socialist. Bernie is a communist. But how in the world, Govern and Dukakis? Yeah, these are the standard-bearers. The Kennedys were the same way.
The idea that these guys are outliers is what’s wrong. The Democrat Party is a Socialist Party. You cannot conclude anything other than that when the leading frontrunner is a communist. Crazy Bernie. How in the world do you say he’s an outlier? Sorry, Doug. But the Democrat Party, when it had guys in it like — oh, who was that old guy from Texas? John Connally and then — (interruption) Who? (interruption) Well, Lloyd Bentsen, yes, but he’s not the guy I’m thinking of. There was a Democrat Party standard-bearer. Can’t think of his name. It will come to me.
But those days of the Democrat Party are gone. Mondale was a socialist communist. Look what he was talking about in 1984 when he was running against Reagan. The idea that this party is somehow some centrist bunch of mild, peaceful, harmless Democrats is a biggest myth in American politics.
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RUSH: Andrew Yang says that Bloomberg is calling other donors and telling them to sit it out. Right? Does that constitute rigging the election? If one candidate is telling other donors to sit it out, that he can handle it, and you’re another Democrat candidate, would you think that that is an attempt to rig the primary?
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RUSH: Here’s Chuck. Chuck’s in Tampa. Great to have you back on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. So I’m listening to our local affiliate here and they’re talking about a study that 30 professors and graduate students at USF did last night during the debate. They all wore monitors to see which candidate got the most visceral, pure responsive physiological reaction during debate. And their results were 100 percent inconclusive, which shows you just how lost this party is and how unexciting all these candidates are.
RUSH: Well, now, wait a minute. Did you say it was college professors and students or just college professors?
CALLER: It was students — it was graduate students and college professors —
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: — who got together to do this study last night. It was more than 30 of them. And they all hooked themselves up to monitors and they watched the debate. And they didn’t answer any questions. They just — throughout the course of the —
RUSH: Yeah, there’s the Frank Luntz thing. They register pro and con, heartbeat goes up, heartbeat goes down, urine fills up, bladder fills up, whatever, when they’re watching this up, bowels fill up, whatever happens and it shows up on the monitors, and what you’re saying is that there was nothing conclusive?
CALLER: There was nothing conclusive. There was no clear winner. None of them got excited enough to show that any one particular candidate walked away with it.
RUSH: Are you kidding? You mean there wasn’t even a universal agreement about how badly Bloomberg did?
CALLER: There may have been, but from what I’ve heard on the reports from it on the radio and in the small news blurbs that I’ve seen, it simply said that there was no clear winner.
RUSH: All right. Well, I need to get hold of this, get my hands on this. I need to study stuff like this myself. So you had 30 grad students, 30 academicians, elitists, strapping themselves to this gear. They’re not doing it for somebody else’s survey. They’re doing their own. And no clear-cut winner or preference from this debate last night.
Now, measure that against what the Drive-Bys are telling you about last night’s debate. What is the conventional wisdom about last night’s debate? That Bloomberg blew it sky-high. He may as well cram it, get out of it. He blew it. But not according to these egghead academicians. There is not even any agreement on that. That we know.
So let’s add to this. Grab audio sound bite number 9. This is last night, CNN’s post-debate analysis. Fredo Cuomo had The Punk, Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia. He said, “Hey, is tonight a step closer to beating Trump for the Democrats after what you saw?”
MCAULIFFE: No, no. Nobody, Chris, is going to go into our convention in Milwaukee with 1,991 delegates. It’s not gonna happen. Bernie is going to get, at 30% in every one of these contests going forward, he is marching toward the nomination. His goal is he’s got to have a big enough lead going in so no one will…
CUOMO: You don’t think he’ll have a plurality?
MCAULIFFE: He will have a plurality. He needs a big one. Because if it’s a close one, then I’m telling you Milwaukee, you can burn the house down. Donald Trump will be eatin’ popcorn, havin’ a great time.
BORGER: I know.
RUSH: So The Punk here thinks that nobody is gonna get the required 1,991 delegates to secure the nomination, which means brokered convention. Now, last night at the debate, the candidates were asked, “Do you think, at the end of this process, the candidate with the most delegates, even if it’s not the minimum required, should be the nominee?” Only Crazy Bernie raised his hand.
Now, The Punk is right. Crazy Bernie is leading in the delegate battle right now. He will continue to lead. If nobody gets to 1,991, the Democrats are gonna do something with superdelegates. You know, every four years one of the parties is said to be in such trouble that a brokered convention is practically guaranteed.
And do you know it never happened? We haven’t had a brokered convention since, what, the fifties. And yet they keep talking about it, they keep dreaming about it. The rules are set up to prevent a brokered convention. And yet here are the Democrats acting like it’s a foregone conclusion. Now, here is F. Chuck Todd. He was a co-moderator of the debate last night. And he is asking Bloomberg essentially if he should even exist.
TODD: Mayor Bloomberg, should you exist?
BLOOMBERG: I can’t speak for all billionaires. All you know is I’ve been very lucky, made a lot of money, and I’m giving it all away to make this country better. And a good chunk it of goes to the Democratic Party as well.
TODD: Is it too much? Have you earned too much money? Has it been an obscene amount of money? Should you have earned that much money?
BLOOMBERG: Yes. I’ve worked very hard for it. And I’m giving it away.
TODD: Thank you.
RUSH: Should you have that much money? Should you even exist? Are you going to give it away? “Yeah, I’m gonna give it all away. A lot of it is gonna go to the Democrats.” He’s giving most of it to the media right now. He’s buying all these ads. He’s giving most of it away to the media.
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RUSH: I’ll tell you one of the biggest problems the Democrats have out there, folks, and that is Trump fixed Obama’s economy, so much so that Obama’s now endorsing it. Obama’s claiming credit for it. And now the Democrats, they’re left to say that health care’s broken, which is Obamacare. So Trump fixed Obama’s economy. Obamacare’s broken; that has to be fixed. The past four years have been nothing but a repair and an improvement over everything Obama, and that’s a problem for the Democrats, ’cause there’s nothing to fix. The Democrats are offering solutions to things that don’t exist.
Therefore, the Democrats are trying to create imaginary problems in the minds of voters. Now, we got the numbers on the ratings for the debate: 33.5 million people watched. That is a big number, because the Democrats have barely been attracting two to three million for these debates. Now, why do you think that is, Snerdley? Why do you think 33.5 million…? (interruption) They wanted to see the rich guy. They wanted to see the rich guy. They wanted to see how Bloomberg would do.
Now, the conventional wisdom is that Bloomberg blew it sky-high.
But do we know that?
The way we look at it, yeah.
The way the Drive-Bys look at it, yeah.
But to conclude that Bloomberg blew it, you have to concede — you have to admit — that people like Fauxcahontas. Where’s the evidence of that? You have to think people like Mayor Pete, that people like Biden — and based on their poll numbers, not a whole lot of people do. So don’t be shocked. Here. I’ve mentioned a couple times that the best Bloomberg moment was when he lectured Crazy Bernie on communism, and here it is. We have two sound bites from the debate. Here’s the first one…
BLOOMBERG: What a wonderful country we have. The best-known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses. What’d I miss here?
AUDIENCE: (groans)
SANDERS: Well, you miss that I work in Washington, house one —
BLOOMBERG: That’s the first problem.
SANDERS: — live in Burlington, house two —
BLOOMBERG: That’s good.
SANDERS: — and like thousands of other Vermonters, I do have a summer camp. Forgive me for that. Where is your home? Which tax —
BLOOMBERG: But —
SANDERS: Which tax haven is your home?
BLOOMBERG: New York. New York City, thank you very much —
SANDERS: Yeah, well, you —
BLOOMBERG: — and I pay all my taxes.
RUSH: “New York City. Screw Vermont! New York City, thank you very much — and I pay all my taxes.” So here you have this socialist defending his three houses, and the billionaire proudly bragging about his 11 houses and all the taxes he pays. Then Hallie Jackson, the moderator, said, “Mayor Bloomberg, Senator Sanders has a proposal that requires all large companies to turn over 20% of their ownership to their employees over time. You own a large company. Would you support what Senator Sanders is proposing?”
BLOOMBERG: Absolutely not! I can’t think of a ways (sic) that would make it easier for Donald Trump to get elected than listening to this conversation.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
BLOOMBERG: This is ridiculous!
AUDIENCE: (applause and cheers)
BLOOMBERG: We’re not gonna throw out capitalism. We tried that. Other countries tried that. It was called communism, and it just didn’t work.
AUDIENCE: (booing)
RUSH: The audience boos! I’m telling you, folks: This audience booed capitalism. Do not make the mistake of assuming that nobody’s gonna fall for this crazy stuff because that’s what the Democrat Party is, is crazy, with countless millions of people falling for it. Now, here’s Bloomberg though, saying (impression), “This is ridiculous! We’re not gonna throw out capitalism. We tried that. Other countries tried that. It was called communism,” and yet when he talks about China, he talks about Xi Jinping — the dictator — as having “constituents” that he has to keep happy.
There’s some weird people on this Democrat side.
Weird people.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. We got time to squeeze in another call. This is Brian in Traverse City, Michigan. Welcome, sir. Great to have you here with us today.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Thank you so much. Hey, I wanted to point out the fact that I appreciated Bloomberg when Bernie Sanders was lecturing him on the fact that they need to change the tax laws, and Bloomberg… I don’t know if you caught it, but he said, “Well, you wrote the laws. You’ve been there for 40 years,” and it really stopped Bernie in his tracks.
RUSH: The tax law, you mean, talking about how long Bernie’s been in Congress and the Senate, the House and the Senate?
CALLER: Yep, that the tax laws had to be fixed now because of, you know, helping the rich. And he’s telling that to Bloomberg, and Bloomberg responded with, “Well, you wrote the laws. You’ve been there for 40 years and you’ve done nothing about it.”
RUSH: You know, it’s fascinating you say this, because I did not hear that. Now, I must admit I didn’t see the whole debate. There was a portion I missed. When I got off the airplane to get in the car, I might have missed five minutes of it. But even at that, nobody is talking about how Bloomberg made mincemeat out of Bernie last night. The Drive-Bys are not. That’s a fascinating thing that you caught that. Anyway, they’re eating their own in this primary, which has got all the bigwigs bugged.