RUSH: I’m looking at the latest Obama polling data. Folks, there’s a crack in the dike, and I don’t think there’s anything to fix it. A hole in the dike, a crack in the dike, or something. It is bad. And I don’t think that there’s anything they can do about it. They brought in John Podesta, they brought him in from his think tank that George Soros buys, Clinton’s former chief of staff, and all Podesta is is a hack. Podesta is a tactician, and he comes up with strategies and tactics to hopefully destroy conservatives and Republicans. That’s not gonna save Obama. The conservatives and Republicans don’t have anything to do with this.
What’s happened to Obama — and this polling data indicates it, but it’s all related to Obamacare. The bloom is off the rose. He’s now lost the trust. And you can blame the Republicans from now ’til the end of his second term, and that’s not gonna change. He has lost trust with the American people. There are people with cancer, one of them is Jim Hoft. Jim Hoft is at Gateway Pundit, and he’s out of St. Louis. And he’s got a post.
“Please Pray for MeÂ… I Am Losing My Insurance — In August 2013 I became very sick with what I thought was a cold. After a few days I lost vision in my left eye and I checked into the hospital. I soon found out that what I thought was a summer cold was actually Strep bacteria poisoning my blood stream. The bacteria blinded my left eye, ate a hole through my heart, caused five strokes on both sides of my brain and forced the removal of my prosthetic left knee.
“Dr. Lee was the surgeon assigned to perform open heart surgery. What was originally scheduled to last four hours ended up lasting twelve. My heart was severely damaged. Dr. Lee later told me the surgery was one of the most difficult of his career. He also said I only had a few days to live without the surgery. Thanks to the excellent insurance I carried I was able to receive life-saving medical treatment at St. Louis University.
“This week I found out I am going to lose my insurance. The company that carried me is leaving the Missouri market. I will have to find something else. I am one of the millions who will be looking for new insurance. God willing, I will be able to keep my doctors at St. Louis University. I trust them. They saved my life. Please pray for me and the millions of working Americans who are going through this same ordeal. Why is our government doing this to us?”
That’s it. “Why is our government doing this to us?” I have, in the Health Care Stack, another story. “Cancer Patient: I’m Devastated Over Obamacare.” It’s by Joan Carrico, a registered nurse. “I had a lot of trouble early on. I didn’t expect my insurance to be canceled, had numerous problems getting onto Healthcare.gov and gave up on the website. Since then, I have received assistance from an agent and a Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan representative. I have been stressed and scrambling to find an affordable policy that will ensure that I keep my doctors, chemotherapy drugs, etc. that are literally keeping me alive.
“Over six years ago, I was in a position where I needed to choose an individual health-insurance policy. After much research I chose a Blue Cross Blue Shield PPO that I anticipated would be short term. My plan was to return to work as a registered nurse and be eligible for a group policy. But, for the first time in my life, I got really sick. I’ve been battling cancer and fighting for my life for the last six years. So much for my plans. I thank God that I am alive and am eternally grateful to Blue Cross Blue Shield and all my doctors, especially my doctors at University of Michigan (UM), who refer to me as their miracle patient.”
She’s losing hers, too. “What is our government doing to us? Why is our government doing this to us?” This is the root of Obama’s problem. Not everybody has cancer, not everybody’s losing their doctor and their trusted insurance policy and all that. But a lot of people are losing everything. They’ve already lost their jobs. Many of them don’t really have any hope of getting a replacement job at replacement salaries, levels. And now after being promised for three years that they could keep their doctor, keep their insurance, they can’t. I’m amazed Obama’s at 40 anywhere.
I think the truth is Obama’s in the thirties, or maybe the high twenties. Still got people afraid to say so. This is outrageous what’s happening. They can bring in all the fixers in the world, and they can’t fix this. The Republicans are not responsible for this. The Republicans didn’t vote for this. The Republicans don’t have one fingerprint on Obamacare. Well, they didn’t until the budget deal. Now they’ve sustained it, the funding for it. But that’s beside the point for now.
The point is, there are people all over this country who have just simply lost faith with the president. Now it’s not a matter of listening to some guy on the radio warn them that you can’t trust this guy. Now they know it, it’s happened. They don’t have to be convinced, they don’t have to be persuaded, they don’t have to be told. Millions and millions of people no longer believe what Barack Obama says. This is the last straw. They can bring in all the fixers in the world they want; there’s nothing John Podesta can do to fix this.
Obama hasn’t lost his standing because of tricks played by the Republicans. He hasn’t lost his standing because the media’s not fair to him. He hasn’t lost his standing or his approval number because the media spent four years attacking him like they did George W. Bush. This is all on him. He owns every point that he has dropped in these approval numbers, and it’s devastating wherever you look. This was Mr. Hope and Change. This was a guy, folks, that everybody did trust. They believed that life was gonna get better, the country was gonna get better. There wasn’t gonna be any more arguing and rancorous partisanship. The world wasn’t gonna hate us, and there wasn’t gonna be any more terrorism, and there wasn’t gonna be so much income inequality and the sea levels and all that stuff, they believed it. And that’s what he’s lost.
NBC, Wall Street Journal. They’re devastated. F. Chuck Todd, they are reduced at NBC to actually on the air hoping that a recovering economy can bring Obama back. They’re all in the tank because they’re not journalists, remember. They’re Democrats and they’ve done everything they can to protect Obama. They’ve done everything they can to see that this kind of plummet did not happen. He himself has engineered the plummet. Now they’re hoping that something can happen, the economy, a recovery that maybe can bring him back.
“The federal health-care law is becoming a heavier political burden for President Barack Obama and his party, despite increased confidence in the economy and the public’s own generally upbeat sense of well-being, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll suggests.” They claim in this poll that a lot of Americans are upbeat finally, and they’re feeling pretty good about the economy, and it doesn’t matter because Obama is sinking, and it’s due to Obamacare.
The days of excusing Obama are over. The realization that we are in the midst of a sorry state of affairs that he has created. Why is our government doing this to us? Why can’t I keep my doctor? I like my plan. I like my doctor. And more and more we’re reading about people whose lives were saved by their insurance and their doctor, and it’s being taken away. Sixty-nine percent of the people liked what they had before. It’s being taken away. Why is our government doing this? This is profound, folks.
Nobody looked at Obama the way they now see him. There wasn’t anybody who voted for him in 2008 who ever believed they’d be asking, “Why is our government doing this to us?” These numbers are bad. “Disapproval of Mr. Obama’s job performance hit an all-time high in the poll, at 54%, amid the flawed rollout of the health law. Half of those polled now consider the law a bad idea, also a record high.”
This is an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. This poll is a lagging poll in disapproval of Obamacare. Most polls since the beginning have opposed Obamacare. This one’s been a lagging poll that’s now caught up.
The Quinnipiac poll: “Obama’s support among young voters has disappeared, with 49% now saying they disapprove of his job performance. Hispanics’ historic preference for the president shows signs of evaporating, with 43% opposing him. 52% of the voting public now says Obama is not ‘honest and trustworthy’ and 51% say he lacks ‘strong leadership qualities’.”
The Republicans didn’t do this. The media didn’t do this. This is not the result of tactics that have worked on Obama. These numbers he owns. He brought these numbers about. “Americans who want Republicans to control both houses of Congress now outnumber those who fear one-party control.” The generic ballot, the Republicans are cleaning clocks with the generic ballot. Charlie Cook, the dean of generic ballot analysts, says he has never seen this kind of shift in this short a period of time. In the generic ballot, who do you prefer, Republican or Democrat, Charlie Cook says he has never seen this dramatic a shift in this time, which is basically a year.
Now, the Republicans are looking at that and they don’t want to mess it up with a government shutdown. I guarantee you anything that causes negative press for them — and the government shutdown. They’re convinced that people love, adore, revere government, want it in their lives every day, and they’re not gonna do anything that would shut it down and be blamed for it. The generic ballot’s one of the things they’re looking at.
UK Daily Mail. This is the Quinnipiac. More details. Obama’s approval rating is at 38% in the Quinnipiac poll. Just 34% approval on Obamacare. Forty percent approval on Iran. It is devastating. The Republicans are basically saying, “You know what? We’re not gonna do anything. We’re not gonna say anything, we’re not gonna provoke anything. We’re just gonna let this all happen without any of our fingerprints on it.” Obama’s in the tank. His numbers are plummeting. They want to stay under the radar.
You and I, on the other hand, would say, this is the time to pounce. But they’re not of that mind-set, folks. They’re in a totally and purely defensive posture. But this piece from Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit, “Why is our government doing this to us?” There haven’t been too many administrations, there haven’t been too many presidents about whom people ask that question: “Why is our government doing this to us?” It’s worse out there than anybody inside Washington knows.
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RUSH: Dave in Gurnee, Illinois. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Merry Christmas, happy holidays to you first.
RUSH: Same to you, sir.
CALLER: Yes. You know, every time they roll out John Podesta, it’s because there’s something amiss with the Democrats and their administrations. Remember when they pulled him out when ABC/Disney made that video leading up to the attacks on 9/11 and how they portrayed Bill Clinton in that video? So they pulled John Podesta out to argue with Disney so they would cut out the most inflammatory parts of that movie.
RUSH: Yeah, I remember that. The Path to 9/11. The Clintons demanded that there be some editing and Disney did a little bit. There still hasn’t been a DVD of that. They still have not put that on DVD. It’s amazing. Now, Dave, there’s a piece here at Commentary magazine by Jonathan Tobin, and it’s headlined, “Podesta Cannot Right Obama’s Sinking Ship.” “The thought appears to be that if anyone can get the president back on track it is the guy who helped Clinton weather the Monica Lewinsky scandal and an impeachment trial.”
But here’s what Tobin says; he pretty much echoes what’s been said up to now. “Podesta is a skilled tactician, but it is a mistake to think the presidentÂ’s decline is a function of tactics or process. What we have seen in the last 12 months is a gradual dropping away of the sense on the part of most Americans that the president is a well-intentioned man whose word can be trusted,” and I’ll tell you, that is so true. It’s the kind of thing that we all hoped people would see from the get-go.
We hoped that people would believe us when we told them this is who Obama was, because we know liberals, but they didn’t believe it. They believed quite the opposite, but now they don’t. It’s no longer universally believed that Obama “is a well-intentioned man whose word can be trusted. … That cannot be fixed by more pushback against the opposition or by a pivot to the left to pursue liberal agenda items like income inequality.” Obama can’t fix this by extending unemployment benefits. He can’t fix this by talking about raising the minimum wage or whining and moaning about income inequality.
“Nor is it helped when the president continues to deny that he lied about Obamacare coverage or to dismiss genuine problems like the IRS scandal as merely the product of a right-wing conspiracy. If the presidentÂ’s poll numbers now match those of George W. Bush at a similar point in his administration it is not because of bad advice but bad policy, and a lack of honesty about it,” and that’s right on the money, and there’s nothing Podesta or anybody else can do.
There aren’t any words anybody can say that can get people’s trust in Obama back.
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RUSH: What Podesta can do is just say, “You know, to hell with Congress,” and just advise the president on executive orders and take executive action to move his agenda forward, which is no doubt what they have in mind.
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RUSH: You gotta be kidding me. Sebelius has asked the inspector general to investigate the Obamacare website. You have gotta be kidding me. They told us it was fixed. Oh. Now that it’s fixed, she wants an investigation to find out what went wrong. So it will never happen again. We know what went wrong. There’s nobody involved that knows what they’re doing. It’s just incredible. Let ’em keep doing it.
Let ’em just keep making fools of themselves, because right now everybody’s paying attention to what these people are saying and doing. And they do not know that they’re under the microscope now. They think that they’re getting away with all the stuff, the rhetoric and everything they always get away with, but they’re not right now. So now that the website’s fixed, which it isn’t, now we’re gonna dig deep to find out what went wrong so that it never, ever happens again when the next thing we decide to redistribute is going to take $600 billion to do.
You know, that is the question. What is our government doing to us? What is happening our country? Do you realize how many people are asking that question, and if they were only regular listeners here they would’ve known five years ago. But we can’t cry over spilt milk like that. People are just now coming to grips, starting to become aware of this. But it’s happened before, and they forget it, and they fall prey to the same seductiveness of government compassion that they always fall for, or Santa Claus, regardless. So it’s a never ending battle. It never, ever is won.
You know what it’s like, the battle against liberalism is like the battle against crime. You’re never gonna win it. It’s one of the reasons I admire people in law enforcement. They know they’re never gonna win. They’re never gonna wipe out crime. There isn’t a police force, a commissioner of police anywhere that thinks they’re ever going to wipe out crime. And we’re never gonna wipe out liberalism. But you have to keep fighting it to limit the damage and occasionally beat it now and then. And that’s what’s missing right now in the Republican Party.