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RUSH: I mentioned that Newt was great last night.  You know what struck me about the convention last night — and I don’t mean this to be insulting, it’s just an observation — how few genuinely good communicators are in politics anymore.  You look at Newt, Newt is an expert communicator, and Newt is experienced enough to know how to use a teleprompter to talk to a TV audience in a building where there are 10,000 people.

It’s a massive challenge.  You have two audiences.  You have the TV camera and you have 10,000 people, and everybody expects to get personal attention from you.  So you have to know how to combine looking at the camera and reading the prompter and looking people on the floor in the eye, or appearing to.  Laura did a great job.  She’s obviously a professional communicator.  But it’s stunning how in politics, it seems there aren’t that many anymore who are good.

You know, Reagan was king of the hill at it.  And it matters.  Bill Clinton is superb at this.  And it really matters.  Newt last night, I am sure his speech was on prompter, but he was on such a roll, I don’t know if the prompter could keep up with him last night.  There wasn’t one stutter. There wasn’t one mistakenly uttered word.  It was a work of art listening to him, and it was quickly paced, it was fast paced, it was just a grand-slam home run on everything that he discussed.

But the first thing that he did.  Now, this couldn’t have been in the prompter because it had just happened, the Ted Cruz meltdown had just happened.  I don’t mean the Cruz meltdown, but the convention meltdown where he’s booed off the stage for not endorsing Trump, where he had said “vote your conscience.”  Newt went out there and he said I’ve got to clean this up, I’ve got to put this back together, I’ve got to somehow keep this from becoming an absolute debacle, and this is how he did it.

GINGRICH:  Ted Cruz, who is a superb orator said — and I just want to point it out to you — Ted Cruz said, you can vote your conscience for anyone who will uphold the Constitution.  In this election, there is only one candidate who will uphold the Constitution.  So, to paraphrase Ted Cruz, if you want to protect the Constitution of the United States, the only possible candidate this fall is the Trump-Pence Republican ticket.

RUSH:  That’s ad-libbed, it’s ad hoc, it’s right off the top of his speech. It could not have been written on the prompter. It had to be quickly conceived.  This is why I said the other day, when talking about the responsibilities of vice president, first and foremost you have got to defend the nominee.  When he says something way, way out there, you can’t join the chorus of critics.  You’ve gotta explain it, you gotta promote it, you gotta tell everybody why they misunderstood it. And Newt can roll out of bed, no matter what Trump or any other nominee would say, no matter how outrageous, Newt could roll out of bed not even thinking about it and give you 15 minutes making you think you had just heard brilliance.

And that’s what he tried to do there with that whole episode with Cruz and the meltdown that occurred after he said “vote your conscience” and didn’t endorse.  It was really masterful, it was well done, and it illustrated how there just aren’t a whole lot of other people that could do it. Isn’t that one of our biggest beefs?  Hasn’t it always been, where are the people that can just, from their hearts, articulate what we all believe?

Where are the people that don’t need a teleprompter to do this?  Where are the people that can go out there and tell this country who we are, what we are, what we think, what we want, what we think of them.  I know, most of them happen to be in the media now, and it’s a stark realization that hit me last night watching Newt.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  I was wrong again, folks.  Newt Gingrich had seen Ted Cruz’s speech earlier in the day, and so he did not ad-lib his explanation.  It was on the prompter.  He apparently said this on Fox last night about 11:30.  So… I still maintain he could have done it if it had not been on the prompter.

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