RUSH: Drive-By Media is suppressing this news. Mark Steyn, I’m told, talked about it yesterday. It’s a Pew Research survey that shows that the partisan gap in the Obama job approval is the widest in the modern era. ‘For all of his hopes about bipartisanship, Barack Obama has the most polarized early job approval ratings of any president in the past four decades. The 61-point partisan gap in opinions about Obama’s job performance is the result of a combination of high Democrat ratings — 88% job approval among Democrats — and relatively low approval ratings among Republicans — 27%,’ which, I’m surprised Republican approval rating is that high.
But still, that’s a huge gap. ‘By comparison, there was a somewhat smaller 51-point partisan gap with George W. Bush in April of 2001,’ a few months in his first term, the same thing with Clinton, substantially smaller than what Obama faces. ‘The growing partisan divide in presidential approval ratings is part of a long-term trend. Going back in time, partisanship was far less evident in the early job approval ratings for both Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. In fact, a majority of Republicans, 56%, approved of Carter’s job performance in late March of ’77, and a majority of Democrats, 55%, approved of Nixon’s performance at a comparable point in his first term.’ Now, what does it tell us? Well, it tells us the country is polarized. I have said it: We are a bipolar nation.
The media, however, is not polarized, and this is important. The media is presenting a story of a unified nation enthralled and in near idolatry of Barack Obama — and the world, too — when, in fact, it’s not the case. Now, Barack Obama ran as the great unifier. Obama ran as the guy who was going to end all of this. Obama ran as the guy who was going to bring a new politics to Washington. A lot of politicians do, and it’s all BS, but people with Obama believed it. Now, what strikes me interesting about this beyond what’s obvious, is that we have — you know, on the Republican or the conservative side of the aisle we have — our own internecine wars going on among conservatives for who is a real conservative and what should the conservative movement be and what should the Republican Party be going forward.
We have all of these tea parties out there. These things are massive. They’re being totally ignored by the Drive-By Media. The tax day, April 15th, is going to see huge tea parties in major cities across the country. Some of the local communities are trying to pare them down because they claim to be a dangerous situation with so many people and so forth. They’re going to be big. It is obvious. You know, how many people voted against Obama? Was it 55, 56 million people voted against him? And I don’t think anything has changed to make those 55 or 56 million say, ‘You know, I made a mistake. This is a great guy. I mean, I really like what he’s doing to our economy. I really like what he’s doing to our country. I really like how he’s over there in Europe apologizing for us every stop he makes.’
I don’t think that’s happened. I think it’s just the exact opposite. Yet the, quote, unquote, ‘intelligentsia’ on our side, the elites of the conservative movement told us that Obama has a great temperament. ‘He’s very smart. He reads books, writes books, reads books. He’s really, really intellectual guy, and he’s the kind of candidate the Republicans need to put forward themselves — somebody who understands that the American people want an ever growing government but they want it growing and used in a smarter way,’ blah, blah, blah. Well, I look at this Pew Research data as a profound rebuke of people on our side who claim the future of the Republican Party resides in abandoning conservatism. And make no mistake. It’s what they’re saying.
Conservatism is what it is. Conservatism does not get modified. There aren’t three legs to it. We’re told that there are. We’re told, ‘Well, we got the social conservatives, and we’ve got the fiscal conservatives, and we have the Libertarian conservatives.’ Well, you know, a ‘social conservative’ is not really a conservative. A social conservative wants to say he or she is conservative but they’re really not. Conservatism is what it is. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t need to be moderated or modified. It is what it is. Now, if conservatism needs to be modified — if conservatism needs to be upgraded, updated, if you will, to the current issues of the day… See, I believe conservative principles apply no matter what the issues are.
But regardless, it doesn’t seem to me that this polarized partisan gap in Obama’s approval rating is any indication that the people that want to quote, unquote, reform conservatism have any idea what they’re talking about. Because if they were right, this partisan gap wouldn’t exist. Many conservatives would understand. ‘Look, we’ve got a guy using big government. We got a guy making the world think that he’s smart, smarter than anybody else, that the country is changing. He’s out there apologizing for America’s excesses, America’s bullying of the past generations and so forth.’ This is precisely the kind of candidate — erudite, well spoken and so forth, use of big government — that the conservative intelligentsia on our side has said is the future of the Republican Party.
Yet 73% of Republicans reject that notion. So it would seem to me that the Republican Party is out of touch with itself. The Republican Party is out of touch with its voters. The conservative element of the Republican Party, at the leadership level is, likewise. What these tea parties represent all over the world is the fact that there is no leadership, — either at the top of the conservative political movement or the Republican Party — that, encourages people to get behind. So they’re taking matters into their own hands to illustrate their grievance and their lack of approval of what’s being done to them and their country and their kids’ future. So, I look at all of this, and it’s great news, but the fact of the matter is, as far as the rest of the country is concerned — as far as the rest of the world is concerned — we love Obama. He is larger than life.
He has saved our country’s embarrassment, and we are all now proud as we can be as Americans to finally have a smart and brilliant and erudite president who’s willing to go around the world and tell the rest of the world we mean them no harm and we do not constitute a threat, that we have made our mistakes in the past. Why, Obama said, ‘Even in my own country it wasn’t long ago that most states didn’t even let people like me vote,’ which is an out-and-out lie. It was a few states that didn’t let people like Obama vote, and they were run by Democrats, and they were quickly overrun! They were beaten back and they were defeated. He loves to go around the world saying, ‘I’m Barack Hussein Obama. My country’s changed a lot. They’ll elect somebody with the middle name Hussein.’
He doesn’t tell them he couldn’t use his middle name during the campaign, and he doesn’t tell them that if somebody on the McCain side did that, McCain threw ’em under the bus. So the partisan gap in the Obama job approval is at the widest it’s been ever in the modern era, in the latest 40 years. Which means there is a lot of dissatisfaction with what Obama is doing and what his policies are. It is not being reported. In fact, it’s being misrepresented, and I had somebody ask me last night, ‘Why, Rush? I mean, why? You say the media is invested in Obama, but why are they going so overboard to present a picture of him that isn’t true?’ The answer is ’cause they know the picture they’ve presented all along isn’t true. You know, their credibility is as much at stake as his is.
So they have to continually pump up who Obama is as a human being, much less a president, in order to keep the truth of his relative average-ness and occasional incompetence and mediocrity from surfacing — and the way they do this… I mean, all the silly reporting on how Michelle Obama captivated Europe with her wardrobe and her sense of style. Notice that Michelle Obama didn’t say diddly-squat, just like Princess Diana never said much. The royal family knew, ‘Okay, put her out there. She looks great. Let her stand next to the poor kids, but don’t let her open her mouth or we’re cooked!’ It’s the same thing with Michelle. After the campaign, ‘I never loved my country,’ whatever she said, ‘until now.’ They don’t let her say anything. But she looks good. Now we’ve got a story from Advertising Age. Guess what? All these newspapers, magazine covers? They’re not selling.
The Michelle Obama magazine covers do not sell. It’s all a giant myth, this universal adoration and love. It’s a creation of the new Camelot, which also was a myth — and this is a myth that has been created for consumption of people in this country and around the world. The truth is quite something else, and it will manifest itself at some point. But I warn you again: Do not ever expect the Drive-By Media to change. They have to report above and beyond greatness. They have to report superhuman. They have to report everybody enthralled and bowled over, because that’s the image they created way back during the campaign — and their objective is to see to it that none of the reality of this guy ever sees the light of day in mainstream media or mainstream American thought.