RUSH: Here is Edward in southwest Missouri. Edward, nice to have you here.
CALLER: Yes, good afternoon, Mr. Limbaugh. It’s an honor to speak with you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I’m a 30-year member of the Armed Services, and, sir, appreciate all that you do for the Armed Services.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. Appreciate your service.
CALLER: My comment is this, it seems, and it’s only my perception, that many of the elder statesmen of the movement, of the equal-rights movement, are reluctant, even fearful, that Senator Obama could even have a chance to attain the presidency. And my question is, why?
RUSH: That’s an excellent question, and there is a very accurate and simple answer. And here it is. You’re talking about people like John Lewis and Charlie Rangel and several other institutional leaders of the civil rights movement.
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: They’ve thrown in with the Democrat Party for the entirety of their careers. In that process they have gained their power. The Democrat Party is an amalgamation, if you will, of several different coalitions. You’ve got feminists, you have blacks, you have Latinos, you have union members, they’re just a disparate bunch of groups, it’s a very loosely knit coalition. The civil rights coalition gets its seat at the table of power in the Democrat Party by supporting the Democrat machine. So these guys that you’re talking about owe their allegiance, they owe their careers, they owe their power, however they perceive it to be, to the Democrat Party and its machine. So that’s why they’re throwing in. It’s personal. It’s all about themselves. Now they disguise it and say it’s about loftier things, but it’s about loyalty and it’s about being loyal to those who gave them a chance to have power and sit at the table of power and so forth.
Your question helps me to illustrate exactly how irrelevant to these guys race really is. They use it as a means of driving a wedge between the American people, but when faced with doing what they have demanded all the rest of us do throughout our lives, they abandon the black guy. They abandon the black guy, while they tell us all of their careers that we’re the ones that have been doing this and that we’ve been stepping on them and we have been denying them equality and fairness and all this. It’s they now who are doing this, one and all to see. It’s simply because they have no loyalty to Obama. Obama threatens ’em. Obama doesn’t owe ’em. They didn’t make Obama. And so he doesn’t owe them anything.
CALLER: I agree in that regard.
RUSH: If he’s successful, he’s not going to owe them because they will not have helped. So all of these reasons combine into the answer.
CALLER: I certainly agree with that, and I see that also they — well, it’s certainly power, and people want to hold onto whatever power they have. And they will claim allegiance to whatever gives them the power.
RUSH: Right. Well, in this case, you could go so far as to say, even though people like Lewis and Rangel and so forth have won their elections, but they have not really earned their power. It’s been given to them. It’s been awarded them. They’ve been good foot soldiers. They have followed the party platform, they’ve gone out and done the dirty work, they’ve opposed the Clarence Thomases, they make one of the Condoleezza Rices, they do all of that. They make sure that no uppity blacks get anywhere — by that I mean conservative blacks — and in exchange they’re given their seat of power at that table. Look, the Democrats have always used race as a wedge issue. This New York Times story about Obama pursuing Latinos and how race plays a role in this, he’s gotta bridge a racial divide in order to get Latinos, one of the people quoted in this New York Times story, Gloria Romero, a Democrat of east Los Angeles, she said, ‘We need to address what unites us. The key is not to raise the wedge issue.’ So the key is not to raise the wedge issue. The key is to not raise the fact that the Democrats are institutionally screwed up by race. And when it comes out, of course time to call a truce, sweep it away which is what they’d like to do with the Hillary-Obama flap. It’s exposing them for who and what they really are.
North Port, Florida, Janet, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, could you play the Dallas Sopranos singing Puccini in your honor? I’d love to hear that again, if you would.
RUSH: Oh, yeah. We’ll find a way, maybe not today —
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: — hopefully today, but we’ll try to get it in soon.
CALLER: Okay. You’ve been pointing out for more than a decade now, I guess, that the political instincts of the Clintons, they’re often wrong. So isn’t it a miscalculation on their part in moving the caucus and primary season up so early, because I understand they were the architects of this strategy, thinking that Hillary was a sure thing.
RUSH: Well, yeah, they wanted to move it up and have all these primaries early on because it would afford Hillary the chance to expose herself the least. The longer she’s out there, the longer she’s out talking and making speeches, the bigger the chances are that she’s going to screw it up. But the front-loaded primaries are actually not new. They’re just more concentrated this year than they have been for a long while. But I do think that they’re stunned. They did have this sense of inevitability that this was a mere coronation, and they’re off track, and they are in chaos right now. There is no question about it. But they can’t change it, they gotta deal with it, and they deal with it the only way they know how, and that’s destroying Obama.