| Michael Barone Salutes El Rushbo |
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November 12, 2004 |
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
I'm sort of not comfortable playing this for you, but I've got the entire staff suggesting that I do it. Particularly Cookie. Cookie has been leaning on me all day to play this. It was an interview yesterday after the program with Michael Barone, who is senior writer at US News & World Report. He also was working on the decision desk at Fox News Channel on the night of the election and he is one of the country's most esteemed political scientists. He's written a book that he updates every two years called the Almanac of American Politics and it's got everything you'd ever want to know about elections and vote tallies and where they came from and what they meant and the trends that are resultant from all of this.
It's really...400,000, 500,000 new pages that he writes every two elections and every two years. I think is what he said yesterday, and he's got five months to do it. He starts working on it, is working on it even now. But I interviewed him about all these things that went on in the election and in the campaign, touched on the media for the next issue of the Limbaugh Letter, and he said something to me at the end of the interview that caught me totally off-guard and totally by surprise, and as I say, Cookie's been leaning on me. My best instincts here were to just keep this between us, but Cookie has really leaned on me here and so it's Open Line Friday and I'm a little bit more relaxed and open with my iron-clad will over the direction of the program, so here's what Barone said: |
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BARONE: Well, let me just say this has been very enjoyable for me. I've been a listener for a long time and a fan, as you know. I mean, I wrote in '93 in US News, I said, you were going to be the voice of the Republican Party for a while, and for the not -- but I think you have made a very important contribution to American politics and American life, not just as an advocate but as a definer of conservatism. I mean, in the period when Clinton was in office, one avenue the Republican Party might have taken is the Patrick Buchanan avenue: Isolationism, negativism, dislike of other people who are different from you, protectionism. And you spoke out consistently against those things to the core audience that Buchanan was aiming at, and he failed completely, and you defined things in what I think is -- you know, is the sort of the -- the conservatism that I think can positively serve the country, and I think that you played a great role in shaping opinion in the 1990s. I don't know if you've thought about it in that way, but to me whenever my liberal friends start complaining about Rush Limbaugh, I make that argument, and a lot of them say, "Well, you know, maybe you got a point there." (Laughter)
RUSH ON TAPE: (Laughter) Well, you're very kind. You've made my day. Coming from you, that's a true compliment and I thank you very much for that. I sincerely appreciate it.
 RUSH: You can understand why I'm reluctant to play this, ladies and gentlemen, but as I say, I bowed to pressure and let you hear it. Normally we don't play audio from our newsletter interviews. Obviously we keep it. (studio interruption) Well, yeah, that's kind of tough. I was telling some people about this comment last night that Barone made and I had totally forgotten this, and he's right. I had forgotten. This was after the '92 race and Buchanan, and this has come up. People have asked me about it since and I have to tell you, I like Pat Buchanan.
He's still somebody I consider a friend and an associate, and I don't think Buchanan "doesn't like people differently from him." That's not something that's applicable to Pat Buchanan. But when he ran for president again, you know, he toured these textile mills and other places against NAFTA, thought we were losing our manufacturing jobs, and he did get he very protectionist. He wanted to kill NAFTA and roll back the progress there and not maybe build a wall around the country, but he clearly thought we don't need to be going around the world being policemen. We don't need to be worrying about freedom and democracy anywhere else because once the Soviet Union fell, that to him was the end of it.
I mean, that was our big enemy and once we defeated them, that was it. He wanted to just pull back and focus almost entirely on domestic issues, and I just disagreed with that, and I disagreed with all of the protectionism because I don't think it's realistic in the world as it exists today. But at any rate, the whole interview will come up in the next issue of the Limbaugh Letter and I wish we had time to play more. We talked to him for an hour, and it's going to be a masterful editing job to get all this in. It's just fascinating. We may. We'll put what we don't get of it on the website. We may do that, because you really should see it all.
END TRANSCRIPT |
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