RUSH: Barack Obama was on the Today Show today with Matt Lauer, who said to Obama, ‘You seem to have started to listen to the critics who started talking about these speeches, the inspiration and the hope. ‘You’ve given me the whip cream. Give me the mashed potatoes.’ Is that a fair assessment?’
OBAMA: There’s no doubt that we want to strike a balance where we explain to people that it’s important for us to get people engaged and motivated and involved, but not just for abstract feel-good stuff. Rather, to deliver on health care for all people or deliver on collage affordability or create good jobs. So, hopefully, the longer I stay in this campaign, the better I get.
RUSH: Yeah. I’ve been working on an Obama speech, ladies and gentlemen. I’m a great impressionist. Well, certain voices, I try to do my best in that regard. I thought I’d try my hand at an Obama speech. Would you like to hear it? The first draft of an Obama speech. ‘Just remember, my friends, the ballot is stronger than the bullet. And the sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world. Remember, you cannot ignore politics no matter how much you’d like to. To put the world right in order, we have to first put the nation in order. To put the nation in order, we have to first put the family in order. To put the family in order, we have to first cultivate our personal life. We must first set our hearts right. We must have hope. Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics don’t know what religion is. Politics perhaps is the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary. The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil people. I’ve always said, and you’ve heard me say it over and over again, in politics, your enemies can’t hurt you, but your friends will kill you. Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow, and politics is the bow of idealism.
‘Remember this: Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river. And anyone who wants the presidency so much that he’ll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with that office. Here we are the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose, the politics of joy, the politics of hope. In our brief national history, we have shot four of our presidents, we’ve worried five of them to death, we’ve impeached one, we’ve hounded another out of office. When all else fails, we hold an election, we assassinate their character. A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in. In politics, an organized minority is a political majority. I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party or men wherever, whatever, in religion, philosophy, politics or anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.
‘If I couldn’t go to heaven with a party, I wouldn’t go there at all. And if they didn’t have cigars there, I wouldn’t bother, either. A popular government without popular information, with the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce of a tragedy, or perhaps both. Politics, my friends, is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies. We don’t have a money problem in America. We got values and priorities problems. Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, the hopeful and the hopeless, means to side with the hopeful the hopeless, the powerful, and not to be neutral. People who don’t vote have no line of credit, my friends, with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests. The people of this country, not special interest big money, should be the source of all political power. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. And none of this can happen without hope and change.’
You feel faint? You feel faint out there? Are you inspired? Were you elevated? You feel befuddled? Why, this was an Obama speech. Hell, I’m only halfway through it. I stopped because I thought I’d made the point. Politics would be a hell of a good business if it weren’t for the damn people in it.