RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I had a meeting after the program yesterday with a couple of people, and these people are very, very prominent in American business. I wasn’t surprised by what I heard, but I was shocked by the intensity with which they told me their story. And basically both these people were telling me that everybody they do business with is gearing up for an Obama victory by laying people off, by planning on layoffs. They are scared to death of the incoming new taxes that Obama is going to spread on everybody and the punishment that he is going to mete out in the form of economic sanctions, if you will, tax increases on businesses that are successful. They also went on to say that their banks that they’re dealing with are really tight on credit, and one of the banks — I didn’t get the name of the bank, I didn’t actually want to know the name of the bank because I didn’t want to make the mistake of saying the name of the bank here, but it doesn’t matter. Assume it’s a large bank. One of these guys’ banks is telling him, ‘I’m not going to lend you any money next year. You’re going to lose 20% next year, you’re going to be down 20% next year.’ And the guy I’m talking to says, ‘No I’m not. I’m going to do everything I can to avoid being down 20%,’ but the banks are telling him that next year, in their opinion, is going to be the worst economic year in the United States in who knows how many years.
This is the way the banks are operating and a lot of this is predicated on the outright fear that Barack Obama is going to be elected and is going to be disastrous for the US economy. One of the guys said to me — and I’ve been making this point throughout the campaign here — that the Democrats and their supposed devotion to the little guy and helping the little guy get ahead, you know, I’ve never understood how you make poor people rich by making rich people poor, but this is the standard operating philosophy of the Obama campaign and of the American left today, and it’s far worse than that. It’s not just economic radicalism. This is a cultural radicalism that is about to take over this country if Obama wins. We have been sitting here thinking that the sixties are fading away. I remember saying way back — it has to be a year and a half ago, when everybody thought that Hillary was going to be the nominee — I said that the election in 2008, whoever the Republican nominee was going to be, would be the last battle between the sixties radicals and those who want nothing to do with them.
It looks like the sixties radicals are about to take over the country vis-a-vis the election of Barack Obama. Yeah, you can talk about Bill Ayers and all these people. I saw Susan Estrich today on Fox and last night she was on Greta Van Susteren, and I was sitting there wanting to throw up. (doing Estrich impression) ‘It’s just not the John McCain I know. I just wish John McCain would drop the talk about Ayers. I used to love John McCain, but he is losing his dignity, and I hope that he would want to lose with his dignity.’ I’m saying, yeah, of course you want McCain to shut up about Ayers, of course you want McCain to shut up about Klonsky, of course you want McCain to shut up about Jeremiah Wright, of course you want McCain to shut up about all of Obama’s radical friends with whom he shares an ideology. These people are not people he knew on the periphery. These are people and people like them, that once and if Obama is elected, he’s going to populate the federal bureaucracy with career appointments of people like this, they’re going to be infested in the place, and there’s no getting rid of them.
We already know that there are career leftists all over several bureaucracies — the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon. It’s going to get even worse, and I was struck, folks, I was struck by how intense the fear is among these business people of Obama’s election and what it’s going to mean. They’re already facing pressure from some of their boards of directors to lay people off because of the circumstances that exist now. So the very people that Obama is intending to help here, the little guy, get even with the rich, get even with the rich and give him a tax cut and give all this — he’s going to get fired! The little guy is the guy who always gets hurt when liberals implement their policies with no check and no balance. When the guy told me that his bank is really tightening up on credit because they expect this guy’s business and a couple others to be down 20% next year just on the basis of their forecasts, coupled with Obama’s victory, I looked at these guys and said, ‘If you guys become sponsors of my program I’ll guarantee you you don’t have a down year.’ ‘We know, we know, we’re looking into it.’ So it’s palpable. It is palpable out there, the fear.
I look at the polls today. I look at Zogby, ten points, up from four points, ten points in one day, major swing, making it look like it’s over. And yet, ladies and gentlemen, there are other indications out there that say just the opposite. We’ve got the Battleground poll that came out yesterday at one point Obama. John McCain and the horse race here. This is from National Review Online. A post: ‘I continue to hear from my source on the ground in Ohio, who is seeing results for McCain that are surprisingly good. He puts it, ‘in a key bellwether section of Ohio, McCain continues to show internals that are exceeding the national pollsters’ results.” I don’t know who posted this, but it’s somebody at National Review Online. ‘My guy on the ground thinks this might mean that the internal polling is a leading indicator, and he’s noting that if McCain does as well among the key demographics in neighboring Pennsylvania as he is in Ohio, then the Democrats ought to be sweating about that state.’
And then we got word yesterday that Fast Eddie Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania, ‘has sent two separate memos to the Obama campaign in the past five days requesting that the Democratic Presidential candidate — as well as Hillary and Bill Clinton — return to campaign in Pennsylvania.’ Rendell made this statement to Gloria Borger at CNN. ‘Rendell said the McCain campaign is clearly making a push to win Pennsylvania,’ and he needs some help back there. ‘He wants Obama to appear in western Pennsylvania, Harrisburg and one more “large rally” in Philadelphia. Democrats generally worry that the race is significantly closer than what recent polls have suggested. According to Rendell, there is also worry among Democrats the McCain campaign has successfully raised the enthusiasm level among Republicans in the state.’ So Fast Eddie, a little nervous about Pennsylvania, wants Obama to come back. McCain has gained 12 points in a week in the Battleground poll. A week ago the Battleground poll showed Obama with a 13-point lead, 53-40. Yesterday, as we reported yesterday, it was 48 to 47.
The violence, the vandalism and the disruptions that the left — I mean, Norm Coleman’s garage, his garbage has been gone through, his garage has been searched, the guy’s car was vandalized. Code Pink got on stage at the mortgage bankers convention in San Francisco twice, two days in a row, tried to arrest Karl Rove, put him in handcuffs for treason and so forth. And you might say, ‘Well, what does Code Pink have to do with the crisis of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Why are they out at a mortgage bankers convention?’ Well, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae run by hard-core Democrats. What’s Rove got to do with any of that? It was Bush that called for reform. By the way, there’s an excellent piece, and I found this yesterday afternoon. Orson Scott Card, who is a Democrat, he is anti-gun, he’s a gun control advocate, and he thinks that southern Republicans are still very racist, has written a superb piece that is an indictment of modern-day journalism specifically as it relates to the way they’ve covered up rather than covered the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac mortgage scandal. It’s a great piece and I’ll share that with you as the program unfolds before your very eyes today.
My friend Andy McCarthy, National Review Online: ‘Another Communist in Obama’s Orb.’ You know, I’ll be honest. I read these things and I think, ‘Who cares? It’s not going to matter.’ You know, it’s not going to matter. Ayers doesn’t matter, Jeremiah Wright doesn’t, nothing matters as far as an Obama voter is concerned, nothing matters. I could go through this whole piece. This guy, Klonsky, and there’s another communist that’s a good buddy and mentor of Obama’s, Frank Marshall Davis. This guy is Michael Klonsky, he’s an Obama Annenberg millionaire. ‘The mainstream press steadfastly refuses to delve into Barack Obama’s radicalism, his Leftist revolutionary collaboration with self-identified communists from Frank Marshall Davis to Bill Ayers. The McCain campaign, moreover, has contributed mightily to the whitewash by ineptly seizing on the issue’s least important aspect: Obama’s abject dishonesty about the depth of his relationships with committed Leftists.’
He’s got a Jew hater among his good friends, Rashid Khalidi, and the Los Angeles Times has a videotape from this past April of Obama toasting Rashid Khalidi, Michelle and Barack Obama. They’ve got the tape, they’re not going to release it, they say it’s not germane. They both signed the guest book. He’s a committed Jew hater, just like Jeremiah Wright. None of this matters. You tell this to Obama people, they don’t want to hear it, it doesn’t matter, it’s irrelevant to them. George Neumayr has a great piece today in American Spectator. We’re looking here at the final successful attempt, if this election goes Obama’s way, of the 1960s radicals to take over the government and populate it. And once the sixties radicals take over, you know, these people are not friends of America as currently constituted and their objective has always been to either blow it up or to subvert it or to corrupt it via education, which is what Ayers is continuing to do. Meanwhile, Obama continues to go out and play off this little God’s gift to him that was thrown into his hands, the economy. So when you go talk to people and you ask them about this, they don’t care about it, they don’t want to know about these radical things that Obama’s got ties to. They don’t want to know about these people, because they don’t want to think, they don’t want to believe that such people will actually end up in important places in the US government. They don’t want to believe that their country would nominate somebody whose close friends, alliances, and associates are these very people.
So they focus on the economy and they simply say the economy is horrible, we need change. That one word ‘change’ is what’s inspiring most of Obama’s voters. That and race. By the way, this Colin Powell thing continues to effervesce out there and I don’t understand what’s so hard for you people on the left admitting that this whole campaign’s about race. And I’ll say this even to you people in the Drive-By Media. You don’t care who Obama is, and you don’t care what he stands for, and you don’t care who his friends are. You know all that. You know it would hurt so you’re covering it up. But to them this campaign is all about race. Admit it. It’s historic. What’s historic about it? He’s black. That’s what’s historic. And so they want to be involved in making history and creating this historical thing. For so many people on the left, it’s all about race. For so many white voters, it’s all about white guilt. For some pseudointellectual conservatives, it’s about them being tired of their party not being able to nominate people that can communicate so they simply listen to Obama speak and they feel like they got a kindred spirit representing them as president when he goes out and speaks and so forth.
There’s a lot of things here at work but none of the substance of who Obama is matters to anybody. Which is why when you get down to the economy the big challenge the McCain campaign has had, and they’re not going to do it, we’re going to have to do this, as we’ve been doing it, connect this economic disaster right where it belongs, to the Democrat Party. That’s what Orson Scott Card’s piece does today very well, and it’s circulating around the Internet. If you haven’t seen it, we’ll link to it at RushLimbaugh.com. So we’ve got American businesses scared to death, already planning on having to lay people off in order to stay in business next year if Obama is elected. Their banks are telling them they have no way of making a profit next year, and as such, the banks don’t trust lending them money. And speaking of the banks, one thing before we go to the break, when this bailout was first proposed, it was I and I alone, El Rushbo, who said, what if they don’t put this money into the market? What if they don’t lend it? What if they simply invest or deposit this bailout money?
Washington Post: ‘Banks weighing other uses for bailout money. Some may put it toward acquisitions.’ So some of these banks, rather than end the liquidity crisis, which is what the stupid damn bailout was all about in the first place, are banking this money, and they’re going to hold onto it and maybe buy other banks. And the Treasury is on board with this. The Treasury secretary is on board with cash-infused banks buying others that are in trouble. And let me tell you what this is all about. This is all about creating more banks that are down the road too big to fail. All these banks that got this bailout money are hoarding it now, they’re sitting on it. Some of them are. It’s like Fannie Mae, too big to fail, we couldn’t let it go under, Freddie Mac, too big to fail, we had to bail it out. Now we’re going to be bailing out these banks. And they’re holding the money, and they’re going to buy other smaller banks, make themselves larger so that they then will become too big to fail.