RUSH: Okay, Lennie, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, I’m glad you waited. We go back to the phones. It’s great to have you with us, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, I love you, brother, but, listen: I’m getting an eerie feeling now about these 2012 elections. You know, these conservatives out here, we need to know you’re gonna actively support our nominee. I’m getting a little deja vu. Your support for McCain was tepid, and it’s understandable that it was tepid. But I’m getting nervous that if Romney is the nominee we’re gonna get tepid support again. I think when this all shakes down, these primaries, we gotta come together, and I think you have to be the driving force.
RUSH: (singing) Come together — doo doo doo doo! — right now — doo-doo-doo — over me! Beatles. Do you know what the origins of Come Together were? John Lennon and the Beatles wrote that song in the support of Timothy Leary’s run for office. He ran for president, I think, and that was a song designed to support him. It was a campaign song for Timothy Leary and then Leary got busted for pot and embarrassed the Beatles. They pulled out the song and he never wound up running for anything. But that’s why they wrote Come Together. Let me tell you something out there, Lennie. (interruption) Yeah. Leary was running for governor against Reagan, is what it was. Timothy Leary was running for governor against Reagan, and the Beatles wrote Come Together as a thing to unify behind Timothy Leary’s 1969 campaign.
Anyway, yesterday on this program, Lennie, when I was — quite frankly, here — being beat up by my own audience for not making a choice, for not divulging for whom I was going to vote, I said to them (you, everybody in the audience yesterday), “When this is all over, I have to be positioned so that I can with credibility support whoever the nominee is, which is why I’m going to great pains to throw no one under the bus.” This is a fine line, because a lot of people want me to go pedal-to-the-metal to be responsible for picking the nominee they want. Going pedal-to-the metal would mean actively choosing one over the others and depending on how that went, if the one I chose didn’t happen to win, then where am I?
Depending on what I might end up saying in criticism of the guy who wins, what kind of credibility am I gonna have supporting him when I didn’t during this process? So what I said was back in 2008, on that you may have a point. I did say, “Get drunk and vote for McCain,” in 2008. I don’t see it coming to that this time around. I don’t think that will be my campaign slogan in 2008. But from the beginning of this primary season, I have said this. In fact, early on when I said this, Zev Chafets (who wrote the book on me, An Army of One) wrote me a note.
“So you know what you just did? You just endorsed Romney!”
I wrote, “What are you talking about?”
“You just said that whoever wins the nomination you’re gonna support ’em. Well, any of them could win. Romney’s the front-runner, so you just basically said if he wins you’re gonna support him. So it’s a tantamount endorsement.”
I said, “Well, tantamount shmantamount, I didn’t,” and I haven’t.
But rest assured: One of the reasons that I’ve not gone scorched earth has been so that — when the time comes — I can support the nominee with credibility. Because, at the end of the day, like I opened this program with: The objective is Obama, Lennie. That’s how we have to focus. That’s the fix for what’s wrong now, as I opened the program saying. “Okay, what now?” Everybody thinks, “Oh, my God, what do we do now?” All the non-Mitts, all the people think Romney’s not the guy. He’s not conservative enough. He’s not a good enough politician. All the criticism, “What do we do? Oh, no, Rush! What do we do?” We do what we should have been doing all along and focus on Obama, which has largely been what some of this program has been about.