RUSH: Hillary Clinton fighting back tears on the campaign trail today. From The Politico: ‘Exhausted and facing the prospect of losing the second test of her primary campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton fought back tears as her voice broke at the close of a sedate event in a Portsmouth coffee shop. She expressed the sheer difficulty of heading out to the trail each day — ‘It’s not easy,’ she said — and suggested she faced ‘pretty difficult odds.’ And with audible frustration and disbelief, she drew the contrast between her experience and Sen. Barack Obama’s that suggests that her campaign’s current message — the question of who is ready — matches her profound sense that she alone is ready for the job. ‘Some of us know what we are going to do on day one, and some of us haven’t thought that through enough,’ she said. The question was innocuous: ‘As a woman, I know it’s hard to get out of the house and get ready,’ asked Marianne Pernold, a local freelance photographer. ‘Who does your hair?” A freelance photographer asked Mrs. Clinton, ‘Who does your hair?’
‘Clinton began by talking about her hair — she has some help — but moved to talk more generally about the campaign. ‘It’s not easy, it’s not easy, and I couldn’t do it if I just didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do,’ she said. ‘I have so many opportunities for this country. I don’t want to see us all fall back,’ she said, her voice breaking in the last phrase. ‘This is very personal for me,’ she said to supportive applause from the small gathering, at which she’d been discussing policy around a table for an hour. ‘It’s not just political, it’s not just public — I see what’s happening. We have to reverse it.” So she teared up out there à la Ed Muskie. Will it hurt? Will it help? A sedate event where a question of how she gets her hair done on a daily basis is what gets reported. A female asked that question. They call me the sexist. You don’t cry in politics just like you don’t cry in baseball. Did you see the Democrat debate on Saturday night? You want to hear Mrs. Clinton lose it? She lost her temper. If she had an ashtray, she might have thrown it. It all happened because John Edwards decided to throw in with Obama. Listen to this.
EDWARDS: Every time he speaks out for change, every time I fight for change, the forces of status quo are going to attack. Every single time. I mean I didn’t hear these kind of attacks from Senator Clinton when she was ahead. Now that she’s not, we hear them.
HILLARY CLINTON: Wait a minute, now, wait a minute. I’m — I’m going to respond to this. I want to make change, but I’ve already made change. I will continue to make change. I’m not just running on a promise of change. I’m running on 35 years of change.
RUSH: I wish we had more of that, because she kept on going to the point that she started rambling, and her voice got shriller and shriller and shriller, and here comes this 35 years of change business, 35 years. It’s a stock line that has lost any impact, if it ever had any.
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RUSH: Mrs. Clinton in tears this morning in New Hampshire.
HILLARY: It’s not easy, it’s not easy. And I couldn’t do it if I just didn’t, you know, passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know, I have so many opportunities for this country, I just don’t want to see us fall backwards, no. So — (applause.)
RUSH: Oh, come on! No. (crying)
HILLARY: This is very personal for me.
RUSH: Whah!
HILLARY: It’s not just political. It’s not just public.
RUSH: Whah! Whaaaaah!
HILLARY: I see what’s happening. We have to reverse it. And some people think elections are a game, it’s like who’s up or who’s down.
RUSH: Whaaaaah!
HILLARY: It’s about our country.
RUSH: Whaaaaaaaaah!
HILLARY: It’s about our kids’ futures.
RUSH: Whaaaaah! Whaaaaaaaaah…
HILLARY: It’s really about all of us together. Some of us put ourselves out there and do this against some pretty difficult odds. And we do it, each one of us, because we care about our country. But some of us are right and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready and some of us are not. Some of us know what we will do on day one, and some of us haven’t really thought that through enough.
RUSH: Some of us are inevitable.
HILLARY: So when we look at the array of problems we have and the potential for it getting really spinning out of control, this is one of the most important elections America’s ever faced.
RUSH: Snerdley is yelling at me, ‘Look what you’ve reduced her to!’ Do I feel proud of myself, he’s asking me. Folks, this is so calculated, this is no different than the makeup. She gets a question from a woman in a town hall meeting that’s a freelance photographer asking her who does her hair every day, and she starts, ‘It’s tough, it’s tough.’ Well, The Politico writes that she teared up. That is a good question, was there a tear there? Let’s see. I’ve got a copy of the story here, lets see exactly what the Politico had to say about this. Here it is. ‘Exhausted and facing the prospect of losing,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, ‘fought back tears.’ Fought back. Fought back. That means there weren’t any tears, right? Let’s listen to this again. I’ll bet you’re right, Dawn. A woman suspicious here of the crocodile tears.
HILLARY: It’s not easy. It’s not easy. And I couldn’t do it if I just didn’t, you know, passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know, I have so many opportunities for this country, I just don’t want to see us fall backwards, no. So — (applause) You know this is very personal for me. It’s not just political. It’s not just public.
RUSH: Of course it’s personal.
HILLARY: I can see what’s happening.
RUSH: It’s called power!
HILLARY: We have to reverse it. And some people think elections are a game —
RUSH: All right, that’s enough. We heard enough. Here’s the thing. This is the sympathy play! This is the gender card again! I’m going to tell you exactly what this is. This is the latest version of invading my space. This is a reenactment with tears of the Rick Lazio moment, ladies and gentlemen. Should a man get away with bringing Mrs. Clinton to tears? Should a man, be it me, be it Obama, should a man get away with bringing Mrs. Clinton to tears? She has said, ‘I have so many opportunities for this country.’ ‘I have’ — How about, we have so many opportunities together, Mrs. Clinton, rather than I have so many opportunities? I this and I that. Emotional blackmail. This is calculated, make no mistake about it, folks. This is not spontaneous because nothing with the Clintons is coincidence. Now, this is also from The Politico, this is from the 4th of January. ‘Bill Clinton voiced his abiding anger at the media’s coverage of him and his wife in Durham, N.H., today, and suggested that media bias will force Clinton to go negative on Barack Obama.’ Awe, the media is gonna make him do it. ‘He also expressed his frustration that his wife is perceived by voters as divisive through, he said, no fault of her own.’
Clinton is traveling New Hampshire, taking questions from voters. The New York Times today has a story that Clinton’s audiences are not well populated, his crowds are not well populated, and that they’re leaving halfway through his speech, that they appear sleepy while he is speaking, it’s as though the magic is off, as though the bloom is off the rose. ‘Clinton also let his audience glimpse the scars of his White House years. ‘Nobody would like it better than us if you could get that personal vilification out of there, because nobody’s been vilified more than we have,’ he said, after noting that he thought Hillary and McCain could run a respectful campaign. ‘One of the problems with laying down and turning the other cheek is McCain had one dose of it. They gave it to us for eight years. And the fact of the matter is, independent voters think you’re polarizing if someone else attacks you, even if that someone is Rush Limbaugh, even if you’ve been totally exonerated of every single charge ever leveled against you, which Hillary was — and some people forgot to tell you about that,’ he said, jabbing again at the press. ‘Nobody would be happier to see all this go away than us. But you can’t ask somebody who is at a breathtaking disadvantage in the information coming to the voters to ignore that disadvantage and basically agree to put bullets in their brains.” He’s talking about Hillary.
(doing Clinton impression) ‘Limbaugh, she’s not going to sit around here and shoot herself just for you. Just because you’re piping up and saying all these lies and things that aren’t true about her, doesn’t mean she’s not going to respond.’ These people live in an alternative universe. Here’s what happened. Let’s go back to the impeachment and the Paula Jones thing and Monica Lewinsky. As you know there was an independent counsel, his name was Ken Starr. What did Clinton, Inc., do? They spent years vilifying and destroying Ken Starr. They went out, they purposely attempted to destroy the reputation and credibility of the independent counsel. After all of that time, when the truth finally came out and Clinton admitted to lying under oath, and had his law license taken away from him for a while, the public had been so inundated with what a scoundrel Ken Starr was that Clinton’s admissions fell on deaf ears. They timed it very well. Of course, Hillary was innocent of all allegations. I think this is what happens when you have this aura of invincibility about you, and it doesn’t play.
You know what’s happening out there, you’ve got a lot of young voters that are going for Obama, showing up and voting for the first time. They are educated, they are new to the process, and they have no bonds with the era of fraud and deceit, which was what we call the Clinton years here. They had no bond with it, and so there’s no magic attached to having the Clintons back. She’s out there trying to make the case for change by focusing back on the nineties, and it just isn’t playing well, so it’s time to once again attack me. And they have a point.
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RUSH: All right, I’ve got a lot of audio sound bites I want to get to in this hour, but I want to go back to something that we uncovered earlier in the program, and that is Mrs. Clinton crying in New Hampshire today. I finally have seen the video on ABC. There were no tears. Here is part of the bite.
HILLARY: It’s not easy. It’s not easy. And I couldn’t do it if I just didn’t, you know, passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know, I have so many opportunities for this country. I just don’t want to see us fall backwards. No. So– (Applause)
RUSH: All right, that’s enough of it. That’s the crocodile tears. There were no tears. This sets feminism back 50 years. You’re not supposed to cry when you start losing. This is Pat Schroederesque. Pat Schroeder ran for president from Colorado back in the eighties — well, she didn’t run. She was thinking about running, and she called a press conference in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains and said that she wasn’t going to run, and she actually did start bawling, started crying. (crying) ‘I’m not running because I’ve decided I can’t win.’ (crying) And her husband was right there, she buried her head in her husband’s shoulder, set feminism back for who knows how many years. And these are crocodile tears. There were no tears. This is purely calculated. This is Bill Clinton coaching her, ‘Look, don’t bite your lower lip like I do, they’ll accuse you of copying me, do some fake tears out there, show ’em you really care.’ December 22nd, PBS all-girl chat show called To the Contrary, hosted by the lovely and gracious Bonnie Erbe, they had Cari Dominguez, Kim Gandy of the NAGs, Dr. Bernadine Healy of US News & World Report and Eleanor Holmes Norton and they were talking about Mrs. Clinton in that picture that I commented on, ‘Do we really want to sit here and watch a female president age every day before our eyes?’
ERBE: This weekend an unflattering picture of Senator Clinton appeared on the Drudge Report website prompting conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh to ask whether America wanted to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis. So what kind of response should he get to that kind of question?
NORTON: Well, you know, Hillary may — may need to soften her image, but she doesn’t need to cry in order to avoid a picture like that. In fact, she better not cry because stereotypes are already setting in. That’s why you have that picture. Yet this is a stereotype, men are crying already. Ask Romney on the stump. She’s gotta be —
ERBE: Is there — so there is a double standard?
NORTON: Huge double standard.
RUSH: Don’t give me that, there’s no double standard, Ed Muskie cried, and that was it, tried to claim it was snowflakes but it was tears and he was outta there. There’s no double standard on this. That was Eleanor Holmes Norton saying, ‘She better not cry.’ She cried today. She cares.
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RUSH: I know, it’s a great question. ‘Why would Mrs. Clinton all of a sudden cry now?’ She didn’t even cry coming out of the womb! Coming out of the womb she was screaming, ‘Get me outta here!’ But she didn’t cry. We have it on great medical authority. It’s just the Clinton soap opera continuing. I wonder if Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason coached her, like they coached Bill on how say that he ‘never had sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky, not a single time, never.’ Now, Bill Clinton thinks that the media is propping up Obama. Let’s see if he has a point. This morning on Morning Joe, Scarborough’s show on PMSNBC, Andrea Mitchell says this about Hillary Clinton’s rally yesterday.
MITCHELL: One thing I did notice also, by the way, at one point she said, ‘Now, who’s here from New York,’ and a whole group of people in the stands, high school gym, said, ‘Yes, we are,’ and then afterwards I started going around. There were a lot of people from New York, East Hampton, from the Hudson Valley, people from Connecticut. These were supporters —
BRZEZINSKI: Well, that’s not going to help here!
SCARBOROUGH: So they’re —
BRZEZINSKI: Hello?
SCARBOROUGH: They’re shipping in New York supporters.
MITCHELL: They’re packing the crowd.
RUSH: They’re packing the crowd. Andrea Mitchell is one of Hillary’s friends or used to be. They’re packing the crowd, because she can’t draw anybody from New Hampshire, and this is what Andrea Mitchell also pointed out about Hillary’s acceptance speech last Thursday night in Iowa. Well, her ‘concession speech’ last Thursday night, that the room was a funereal dirge minutes before her speech began. Tim Russert, same program, talking about Andrea Mitchell’s comments.
RUSSERT: …at the Nashua high school, and I talked to one of the guys, the security guys, maintenance guys — they tell you everything —
MAN: Mmm-hmm.
RUSSERT: He said, ‘They’re all from Massachusetts. Check the plates.’
MAN: Wow.
RUSSERT: So I went out to the school parking lot, and I — I must say, the vast majority of the cars were from Massachusetts.
BRZEZINSKI: Now, that’s unbelievable.
RUSH: That’s Mika Brzezinski, the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor for Jimmy Carter, who just now happens to be a Drive-By Media info babe. Ha-ha-ha! Funny coincidence, that is. So here’s NBC, at least, dumping on Mrs. Clinton — and they are acting fearless in the face of the old testicle lockbox, essentially saying Mrs. Clinton was ‘packing the crowd.’ Andrea Mitchell is appalled at what she’s hearing from Clinton.
MITCHELL: ‘I can’t make her young. I can’t make her male. I can’t make her tall.’
BRZEZINSKI: What’s she talking about?
SCARBOROUGH: You know what, though, brother? You can make her single —
BRZEZINSKI: (cackling)
MITCHELL: (laughing)
SCARBOROUGH: — and after this race if he doesn’t shut up, he is going to be single —
BRZEZINSKI: (high-pitched squeal)
SCARBOROUGH: — because he also yesterday —
BRZEZINSKI: No! No! (laughing)
SCARBOROUGH: — was blaming her staff for the Iowa loss. They didn’t do a good enough job getting the young vote out. ‘I can’t make her young’?
RUSH: Well, that was specious anyway. Here comes the story that Obama cleaned up amongst the young, and so the next day Hillary is out there making an appeal for young people. Her campaign is total reactive. Here’s what they’re talking about, grab sound bites 28 and 29. You could put this in the categorical category here, this is from Sunday, of ‘helpful husband.’
CLINTON: We can’t be a new story, I’m sorry. (laughing) There’s nothing we can do. I can’t make her younger, taller, male. There’s a bunch of things you can’t do, but if you want a president — and you need one — she would be by far the best.
RUSH: Now, how helpful is that? ‘I can’t make her younger. I can’t make her taller. I can’t make her male’ — and they laughed! They laughed at that one. You can ask yourself why. (Clinton impression) ‘There’s a lot of things I can’t do, but if you want a president — and you need one — she would be by far the best.’ Scarborough had the great line: ‘You can make her single.’ (laughter)