RUSH: Now, on the Republican side, folks, it is not as clear. Senator McCain is not piling up massive majorities over Governor Huckabee, even though the voters know that Huckabee is no longer a serious candidate. In fact, grab audio sound bite number one. I mean, they’re still exit polling me. They exit polled me in Wisconsin last night. This is the Fox News Channel, Megyn Kelly said this.
KELLY: How about conservative talk radio? Folks like Rush Limbaugh, they continue to rail against John McCain. Is it actually having an impact in Wisconsin? Twenty-nine percent of the voters in the GOP primary there say they listen to conservative talk radio frequently, and those folks are voting for John McCain, 56%, to Huckabee’s 32%.
RUSH: All right, so the Drive-Bys are using their exit poll data and their question here to claim that McCain has won over the conservatives. This is the first time in the primary process that this kind of margin for McCain among conservatives has existed, and it coincides with the fact that Huckabee is for all intents and purposes toast, race is over, essentially, the turnout is very small. So it really is not all that meaningful. By the way, she said here that I continue to rail against McCain. Have I been railing against McCain? I haven’t. These people need to keep up here. This program moves fast. We don’t talk about what happened yesterday for four days. We talk about what’s happening now. I am the candidate of right now. And we talk about the future. We’re always moving forward on this program. We look back to do See, I Told You So’s in order establish what we said yesterday that came true today, what we said last week that came true today.
But, regardless, Senator McCain not piling up massive majorities over Huckabee, even though Huckabee is no longer in the race. Well, he’s not a serious candidate, anyway, cannot win the nomination. It appears to me, it seems that what Senator McCain has decided to do is forswear conservatives if he must and go after blue state voters. I mean those are the voters who helped secure him the nomination in the first place, and those are the voters that he feels loyal to. One thing, I was talking, I think it was last week, remember when the FISA bill came up in the Senate and McCain went and voted for the new restrictions and the immunity for the telecommunications companies, then made the point that Obama showed up and voted against it. Hillary didn’t show up. I said this is a golden opportunity for McCain to drive home the point that he’s the national security guy and they’re not. Andy McCarthy, National Review Online, found out why. When the whole thing was originally proposed, McCain sided with the Democrats on it. So he’s vulnerable to being charged with being a hypocrite. His vote is one thing, but if he goes out and makes a big deal about how these people, Obama and Hillary, are not taking security seriously enough on this FISA situation, they could go back to a Fox News story from 2006 to find where McCain was pretty close to them, at least on the same page.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, this is all starting to break as I thought it would. It’s also starting to break out as I told you it would. Last night Letterman stands up in his monologue, rat-tat-tat-tat, six jokes about McCain and his age. He’s the guy that you first see when you walk into Wal-Mart, for example. It’s starting. I knew it was going to start. I told you it was going to start. If you look at some of the national polls, folks, it is not pretty out there. Obama is sweeping. I don’t even want to describe for you how bad these polls are. It’s not even March yet, anything can change, but the general election campaign hadn’t even begun. This cult-like personality or attachment that people have to Obama cannot emotionally sustain itself from now through November. It can die out and be revived again at the convention and get a new life, if it dies out soon enough here, soon enough by, you know, after Texas and Ohio. Last night, his acceptance speech was more like a State of the Union speech, in content and length. It went on and on and on, and when he started, every network dumped Mrs. Clinton — just like that.
So what can McCain do here? Well, the key for Senator McCain will be to try to get to Obama’s substance, such as it is, and his ideological radicalism. That will mean separating Obama from the public personality that he’s manufactured for himself. Now, Hillary couldn’t attack Obama from the left because they’re as far left as each other, and so it will be difficult for her to do that, but McCain can, at least on some issues, attack Obama from the right, attacking his extreme liberal ideology. Now, Obama, when that happens, Obama’s gonna hit him back not only with the usual liberal compassion rhetoric, but Obama will remind McCain of his own dances with the liberals. You gotta understand what’s going to happen here. McCain’s going to have to hit Obama on extreme liberalism. When that happens, Obama is going to say, ‘I remember, Senator McCain, you joining several of us, several times on several votes in the Senate.’ That’s going to happen. But despite that, McCain will have some issues where he can still stand against hard left domestic policies, including — and this will be a big one — including health care.
But it’s going to be much harder for McCain to separate himself from the radical ideological leftism, liberalism of Obama than it would have been for Romney or Thompson because class warfare rhetoric is out of the liberal playbook, his attacks on drug companies, his support for the reimportation of drugs. But somehow on issue after issue, McCain is going to have to resort to conservative policies and arguments to undress Obama’s left-wing radicalism, if McCain has any hope of winning. This is the point. When you have such an extreme ideological liberal running — and that’s what Obama is, and Hillary is, too — you don’t counter that by being less liberal, less ideological and more moderate than they are. You counter that with down-the-middle conservatism. That’s the only way you can compare and contrast, which is what McCain is going to have to do. When he does, I just want to warn you, Obama and his people are going to be able to say, ‘But, Senator, you were with us on several of these things. Have you changed your mind now?’ Just get ready for this, folks. This is one of those things that’s headed down the pike.