SANDERS:  We need a campaign, an election comin’ up which does not have two candidates who are really very, very strongly disliked.  I don’t want to see the American people voting for the lesser of two evils.

STEPHANOPOULOS:  Is that how you would describe Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, “the lesser of two evils”?

SANDERS:  That’s what the American people are saying!  If you look at the favorability ratings of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, both of them have very, very high unfavorables.

RUSH:  Oh, man, the lesser two of evils?  That’s a Republican line!  That’s how the Republicans always complain about their election.  Here’s Crazy Bernie now assigning Hillary Clinton to it.  That’s another reason they’re ticked off at him. “What are you sounding like a Republican for, Bernie?  That sounds like your average conservative whining and moaning. Lesser of two evils?  What are you doing talking like that?” State of the Union, CNN, Jake Tapper talking to Crazy Bernie on Sunday morning said, “You’ve been calling for a revolution, Senator Sanders, in Florida.  Are you with [Debbie ‘Blabbermouth’ Schultz] or are you with her opponent?”

SANDERS:  Clearly, I favor her opponent.  His views are much closer to mine than is Wasserman-Schultz’s.  And let me also say this: In all due respect to the current chairperson, if elected president, she would not be reappointed to be chair of the DNC.

RUSH:  Look, you can understand why Crazy Bernie doesn’t like Debbie “Blabbermouth.”  Debbie “Blabbermouth”… You know, it’s a little late to be piping up about this now, I hate to tell you.  He should have piped up about this months ago.  He should have figured out what was happening when they’re scheduling debates on Saturday night.  Nobody’s gonna watch ’em.  It’s all part of the Hillary coronation.  He should have piped up then.

Debbie “Blabbermouth” Schultz has been acting as though the whole thing’s rigged for Hillary from the get-go.  So he’s made it plain that, if he’s elected president, he’s the head of the party, and she is gone.  Now, this next… One more bite, one more that might upset The Oprah.  Cokie Roberts on This Week on the roundtable.  George Stephanopoulos says to Donna Brazile, “Hey, Donna, it seems like that president’s almost itching to be Hillary Clinton’s communications director.  What do you think about that?”

BRAZILE:  Not only President Obama, but the vice president, Elizabeth Warren. There’s so many quote/unquote “undeclared Democrats” who are ready to get out here and litigate this conversation with Donald Trump.  She has to really focus like a laser beam on these Millennials.  She has to work on independents; have to work on white males.  At the end of the day —

ROBERTS:  It’s white women!

BRAZILE:  But the problem is —

ROBERTS:  White women will determine this election!

RUSH:  Ooh, she interrupted Donna Brazile to make the point here.  Donna Brazile was all set to say, “At the end of the day, she…” and Cokie Roberts interrupted. “It’s white women! White women! White women will determine this election!” (interruption) Yeah, I know, Debbie “Blabbermo…” (interruption) Well, she ought to be unpopular.  This is not… Debbie “Blabbermouth” Schultz is not a likable person, either.  My… Look, I’m gonna rein it in, but you guys know exactly what I am talking about.  There’s no way.  There is just…

Alimony would look good.

Anyway, Van Jones, the resident communist in the Democrat Party and over at CNN, said that he’d rather have Reince Priebus running the DNC than to have Debbie “Blabbermouth” Schultz running it.  Crazy Bernie’s saying the same thing.  Okay, there’s an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, in addition to this ABC/Washington Post poll.  Now, the ABC/Washington Post poll has Trump up two, 46-44.  This thing is, you have to read like 20 paragraphs to find it in their story.  They bury it. They actually bury it in their story in the Washington Post, talking about how this upcoming election is going to be one of negatives.

They try to focus on the disapproval numbers that both Hillary and Trump have rather than report Trump has assumed the lead in their poll.  It’s there, but they don’t headline it. They don’t trumpet it.  You have to go get it.  But there’s another one out, and that’s the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.  Now, Hillary still leads in that poll, but her lead has shrunken to three points down from double digits.  It wasn’t that long ago that every person in politics, Republican or Democrat, consultant, strategist, you name it… You’ll remember this.

Everybody was saying that Trump was gonna lose in the biggest landslide in the history of landslides, and it wasn’t that long ago that people were still talking that way.  Some Republicans still are, in fact.  But it’s not playing out that way.  Hillary is down something like 16 points aggregate, average, in these polls since March.  And Trump is up dramatically since on the trend line that you look at here.  “Hillary Clinton’s advances…” NBC News: “Hillary Clinton’s advantage over Donald Trump has narrowed to just three points — resulting in a dead-heat general-election contest with more than five months to go…

“Clinton … leads [Trump] 46% to 43% among registered voters, a difference that is within the poll’s margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.1 percentage points. In April, Clinton held an 11-point advantage over Trump, 50% to 39%, and had led him consistently by double digits since December.” And in every other poll, Hillary is trending the wrong way.  And it’s because of more people see her, the… This is true not just this campaign season. It’s true of her career.  The more she’s seen and heard, the more her numbers drop.

Consequently, conversely, the less that she is seen and the less she speaks in public, the higher her number goes.  It’s just true.  You could attach whatever meaning to it you want. I think it’s rather obvious, but I’m not gonna say it. I’ll leave it up to you.  It happens to be true.  Hillary Clinton’s numbers are headed the wrong way.  Now, in addition, remember the…? There were two exit poll questions in 2012.  Yeah.  In the 2012 exit polls, there were two questions that I saw in the first wave that told me…

No, one was the first Obama year 2008. In 2012… Two questions, two different campaigns.  When I saw the exit polls in ’08, McCain versus Obama… No, no, no, I’m wrong.  It’s both in 2012.  It’s both questions 2012, two of ’em.  In 2012, the exit poll question found 60-some-odd percent still blamed George Bush for the economy.  This after four years of Obama, four years of phony stimulus bills to rebuild roads and bridges that never happened and Obamacare and four years of us highlighting Obama’s economic policies and trying to explain that the plunging US economy was due to Obama.

But four years later, voters in the exit poll still blamed Bush.  So I had to examine that, and I did, and I found out that people just were unable to forget the crash of 2008 — TARP and all that — and they blamed Bush. He was president, and they blamed Bush for that, and they still did, and Obama was getting a total pass, which is why Clinton at the Democrat convention in 2012 went out there and said there was nobody — no former president, including him — who could have done anywhere near as Obama did, not as much good.

The second question that I saw that led me to believe it was over in the exit polls was the empathy question, the question: “Cares about people like me.”  Obama 81, Romney 19.  I saw that, and I threw the exit poll in the air and I said, “Forget it.  I don’t even need to watch the returns.  I’m gonna watch ’em, but I don’t need to watch ’em to find out what’s gonna happen,” ’cause that question right there, given the electorate, feelings and all this stuff, told me.  It turned out to be true.  So it’s a long way of leading up to the fact that the Drive-Bys are relying on this again.

Hillary’s in deep doo-doo.

Nothing’s going the way it was planned to go for the Democrats.

She was supposed to be cornoated by now.  Trump was supposed to have embarrassed himself out of the race by now.  It was supposed to be over.  So the Drive-Bys do whatever they can do to comfort themselves that no matter how bad Hillary gets, still gonna win.  And they’re doing it on the empathy question, and the assignment went to Chris Cillizza, our old buddy. We like Chris Cillizza. He’s the Washington Post.  His piece:  “Donald Trump Isn’t Empathetic. Is That a Problem? …

“As the nation turns its eyes to the general election, I have one question that continues to nag at me as I think about the possibility of Trump in the White House: Can he be empathetic? Like, at all? And does he need to be?” You see, “The race to be president is unlike other races for elected office. No one turns to a senator, a member of Congress or a governor when there is a mass shooting, or when a tornado devastates a community. … They do turn to a president.

“A president is expected to do many things in office, but perhaps the most important is to be both a cheerleader and a shoulder to cry on when moments of great joy and great sadness affect the entire body politic. … For all of his successes to date (and there have been many), Trump has consistently struggled on questions tied to empathy.  Asked which candidate ‘better understands the problems of people like you,’ 47% of registered voters in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll chose Clinton, while just 36% named Trump.

“On the question of who better represents ‘your personal values,’ 48%% chose Clinton, and 37% went with Trump.  That’s far from an outlier. Two-thirds of voters in a CBS News-New York Times national poll released last week said that Trump did not share their values. Seven in 10 said he did not have the right temperament to be president.”  So you see, there is a desire to hold on to this fact that people hate Trump, don’t think he’s feeling guy, don’t think he can relate to ’em, cannot be their father, cannot be their parent and so forth.  I would…

One thing I would disagree with Mr. Cillizza on: I think governors are looked to for this.  Look at Governor Christie after Hurricane Sandy.  So I think… But all that aside, I thought the problem with Trump — if I’m gonna read these guys right, I thought the problem with Trump — was that he could develop into a cult of personality.  He could become a strongman so loved and adored that he get away with all kinds of tyranny.

But now, it now turns out he could be a person nobody would ever like, nobody would ever relate to.  I think they’re missing this.  I think they’re missing the truth.  I think they’re totally missing this bond that Trump has with his supporters, this connection.  I think… You’re trying to tell me that Hillary Clinton is a more empathetic figure?  Hillary Clinton doesn’t have the slightest idea how people really live.  The only thing she knows is that she wants no part of it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s John in Yorba Linda, California.  John, what’s shaking?

CALLER:  Hey, Rush, how you doing today?

RUSH:  Good.  Fine.  Thank you.

CALLER:  Excellent, gotta be one of the closest things to being able to speak with one of our country’s Founding Fathers.

RUSH:  Wow!  Wow! Wow!

CALLER: (chuckling)

RUSH: Thank you so much.

CALLER:  In fact, I’ve gotta tell you I’ve got two daughters what aren’t even married yet and I’ve already two sets of your books here just waiting for the grandkids to come along.

RUSH:  Holy smokes! That’s great.  Thank you so much.

CALLER:  Listen, I’ve got a thought of how Obama can both preserve his legacy and extricate the party from it’s commitment to what has to be a fundamentally flawed candidate.  All he’s gotta do is let the DOJ indict Hillary.

RUSH:  You think Obama’s worried about that?

CALLER:  I don’t… Well, worried about which?

RUSH:  Well, I know he’s worried about his legacy.  You think he’s worried that Hillary could blow it?

CALLER:  I think he knows that Hillary’s gonna blow it.  I mean, I think anybody with a brain knows this isn’t gonna go well and I think what he can’t tolerate is having here lose to Trump.  He just can’t do that.

RUSH:  Okay, let me ask you a question.  The trend line right now — and by the way, the trend has been… Trump has been trending up since Day One.  People don’t want to admit it, but Trump has been trending up since he got in, right?

CALLER:  Yeah.

RUSH:  He may have the leveled off a couple of times but he’s been trending up since he got in.  Hillary has not.  Hillary, ever since Crazy Bernie got serious, has been trending steady or trending down.  What are the odds…? What, in your experience…? Is there some magic that’s gonna happen that the changes dynamic and all of the sudden, out of the blue, Hillary is gonna become become loved, adored, charismatic, influential, and is gonna create all of this energy which so far she hasn’t been able to muster in two presidential elections? What’s the likelihood?

CALLER:  No.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: I think absolutely not.  I think the more we see of her, the more we see what she’s really like, and I think we can just expect the trend to keep going to accelerate in the direction it’s already going.

RUSH:  So you think that Obama is going to eventually see this, and what? Let the DOJ have at her?

CALLER:  Yeah! ‘Cause just think, okay, so he opens up his library and he’ll have a big section dedicated to where he had the most transparent administration in the history of the planet ’cause he even —

RUSH:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CALLER:  — let a presidential candidate get indicted. And, you know, and then you look at a lot of biggest spots on his record. I mean, you’ve got Fast and Furious and all that. But some of the significant ones are you’ve got Benghazi and you’ve got the emails. So just think of how many then people will focus on those. And he’ll think, you know, the last thing they think about will be the thing that matters.

RUSH:  Okay, so in your theory Obama sends a signal over there to Loretta Lynch and says, “Okay, drop the hammer!” They indict Hillary, and then, what? We get Biden?

CALLER:  I don’t know! He might let Crazy Bernie take his run.  I mean, he’s looking at the poll numbers. You know, he doesn’t have to be create about what Bernie stands for but I think he’ll do less damage that than Hillary.  I don’t think we need to put anybody new in there. Plus, you know, there’s talk of people at the FBI being so convinced —

RUSH:  The scuttlebutt is that Biden is waiting and wants it.  You know, if that happens… You know, we were thinking similar things on the Republican side. “If the Republicans actually took it away from Trump there would be hell to pay.”  Well, if they indict Hillary, that leaves Crazy Bernie.  If they take it away from, do you realize what his people are gonna do?  And if they give it to Biden, who has not gotten a single vote, has not been in a single primary? Do you know what his people will do?  Donald Trump will win in a landslide with 80%.  I don’t know. That’s what they have to be calculating there. Crazy Bernie?  Whoa!  I have to run, John.  I appreciate the call.