In the late summer of his third year, as we move now to the present, George W. Bush is not trailing anybody. He is, in fact, wiping the slate with everybody. George W. Bush is in a stronger position than the last two presidents who have won reelection, Reagan’s approval rating was 44% in August of ’83. Bill Clinton – approval rating 45% in August of ’95. Right now, President Bush’s ratings, approval numbers are at about 60% in the most recent Gallup poll, in fact, yesterday. And they have remained high for a great, long while. He’s not trailing anybody. This is bucking a trend. Now, I know some of you are going to say, “Hey, hey, Rush, this could mean (something bad), because those polls way back then obviously weren’t accurate. No, they weren’t reflective of the final result. They may have been accurate at the time. That’s the point. The point is that first-term incumbent presidents? remember, Reagan, I mean the tax cuts had kicked in, or they’d started to, but we were coming out of a recession. Had a recession in ’79, recession in ’81, and the Democrats were beating the hell out of Reagan, and the press – you’ve forgotten they hated him. It’s as bad then as it is today about Bush. They hated Reagan, and it worked. I mean Reagan trailed John Glenn by 17 points. By the way, you have seen it close in these generic Democrat polls where Bush and an unnamed Democrat are tied, but never in any poll do you see a Democrat any of these nine dwarves, even Hillary, even somebody that’s named but is not on the roster of potential nominees, none of them beat Bush.
Now, you could look at this and say, “Uh-oh, I’m worried. This is bucking a trend. Maybe a president incumbent who always leads in the polls ends up getting beat, as a way of bucking the trend.” That’s not the way to look at this, folks, because all the presidents we’re talking about won, other than Bush 41, all of them won in huge, huge victories. And yet they were trailing. Bush is not only not behind anybody, according to the latest Fox survey that I have which is from late July, President Bush leads Nikita Dean by 28 points. He leads Kerry and Lieberman and Gephardt by 19 points. And at this point in time, with all previous incumbent presidents, Democrat and Republican, over the last 25 years, it’s just the opposite.
So if the Democrats want to sit out there and you liberals want to sit out there thinking you’re at the birth end of some sort of comeback, some sort of new revolution, whatever it is, go ahead, you’ve been lying to yourselves. It’s too long to calculate, but you’ve really been lying to yourselves since 2000. One of the problems you people are in, you won’t even be honest with yourselves about why you’re losing. And unless you’re going to be honest with yourself about losing you’re never going to come up with the reason to fix it, or the way to fix it, because you won’t even admit why you’re in trouble. You won’t even admit you’re in trouble. You blame the voters, or you blame this, you blame Iraq, you blame terrorists or whatever, you don’t blame yourselves, so you’re never going to get to the bottom of it. Keep this in mind, too. We had the suicide watch of the Democrats yesterday. The economy is getting stronger, and we’re now starting to get the accurate stories about the reconstruction of Iraq. I mean it surely has its challenges in there, not everything is going right.
Yeah, I saw a story the other day, some guy, it is a prominent name, I wish I could remember who it was. Some guy got back, I went over there and I’m stunned what I saw. There are nice restaurants open in Baghdad, air-conditioned and you can go in, nice places, the hotels are open and operating. You watch the news, you think the whole place is like bombed out Beirut from the early eighties. The point is, the reconstruction of Iraq is going better than anybody’s reporting it. The truth of that is now starting to be reported. The economy is rebounding a bit, and let’s also factor this. You have to factor this. You got to factor 9-11. You have to factor the war on terrorism. You have to factor the American people’s respect and appreciation for the courage and the character and the dignity, the honesty of George W. Bush, trust, leadership, all those things. Nobody is close to Bush in those areas.
Now, look, don’t misunderstand. I’ve got nothing in the bank, nothing is done, anything can happen between now and then. All I’m saying is, these people are continuing to make it up. They are continuing to lie to themselves. Now they’ve got themselves believing that they are at the threshold of a revolution, of a big comeback, this is it, the big movement is now underway, all because of these books; where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And they’re all excited about Howard Dean. So that’s where we are with this, and you look at it as objectively as you can, and it’s just laughable. The idea that they cannot be honest with themselves and they’re going to grasp at any straw to tell themselves they’re coming back.
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