RUSH: Joanne in Birmingham, Alabama, we’ll start with you. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Dittos, Maha Rushie.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Well, as a person who’s been observing Barry Obama for the last I’d say probably three years, I’m here to say that this entire messianic aura that he’s got going on right now is not going to last. And I totally agree with you about that. He has become absolutely nauseating to me, just his body language, the way he peers upon the crowd with that condescending sort of aura coming out of him. It’s just sickening to me at this point.
RUSH: Is it Obama that’s sickening to you, or is it the reaction that average American Democrats are having to him that really sickens you or frightens you?
CALLER: It’s him. It’s him. See, I saw him speak back when he was running for the Senate against Alan Keyes, and — wasn’t he running against Alan Keyes at one point, back in —
RUSH: Yeah, right, exactly.
CALLER: It was the first time —
RUSH: Alan Keyes didn’t even live in Illinois.
CALLER: Right. Right. Of course he shot himself in the foot, as usual, but the way he spoke back then, I said, ‘This guy is trouble for the Republicans.’
RUSH: Well, I got some interesting information about this. David Axelrod, who is running Obama’s campaign, ran Deval Patrick’s campaign and Edwards, and this guy may be the source, with the 26-year-old speechwriter they got and Ted Sorenson doing the advising. What all this goes to, folks, what all this goes to is the authenticity. Is this really Obama or is this the product of his advisors writing his speeches and so forth? Somebody’s going to go there. The Clintons will go there, McCain will go there. Just how authentic is this? Is this really some inspirational movement here? Is this Dr. Norman Vincent Peale or is this a presidential campaign? Is this a cult or is it a political movement? People are going to have to start asking these questions about Obama. You know, last night, I just felt like taking a bit of a hiatus from some of this stuff. So when the results came in and it was apparently obvious what’s going to happen, I turned on some entertainment TV. And all the e-mails started coming in, ‘Rush, Rush, Rush, you’ve got to turn on the Obama speech, you’ve got to watch this. I don’t like Obama, but he is great. He’s such a great speaker. Rush, Rush, Rush, you’ve got to –‘ I look at that stuff on the e-mail and my eyes turn into snake slits. Why do I have to watch it?
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what I told one of the people who sent me a note last night. ‘Look, if you want to marvel, if you want to sit there and swoon and go in awe, go right ahead, but those of us who are the best at what we do are not phased by others who also do it.’ I’ll be glad to watch somebody that’s great at what they do if I don’t do it, like somebody playing football or baseball. I’m not going to sit around when I know what the guy is going to say, when I know the whole approach. I got better things to do. I’m taking some time off of it. I’ll read the transcript of the speech later. We’ve put together a montage. We’ve got two different things in this speech that I do wish to highlight for you. We’ve put together a montage here of the nothingness, but then he got specific on economics last night, and this is frightening stuff. So here’s the montage. This is at the Toyota Center in Houston, where Obama gave — what would you call this? An acceptance speech, victory speech, State of the Union speech? It was all kinds of speeches rolled into one.
OBAMA: We need to move in a new direction. We’re here because we still believe that change is possible. And so the question I have for you tonight, Houston, is, are you really ready for change? The size of our challenges has outstripped the capacity of a broken and divided politics to solve. Change in America does not happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up. All across the country people are standing up and saying, it is time to turn the page, it is time to write a new chapter in American history. We want to move forward into a better tomorrow. The American people (crowd chanting ‘yes we can’) — yes, we can. We’ll invest in you, you invest in America, together we will march this country forward. We need something different, and we need new leadership to move into a new century. Nothing worthwhile in this country has ever happened except somebody somewhere was willing to hope. That’s what hope is, imagining, and then fighting for, and then working for, struggling for what did not seem possible before. All these things are possible if you are ready for change.
RUSH: What things? This is amazing! All of those things — change, the future. (laughing) Now, I saw, there were 20,000 people there, and they were mesmerized. I mean it’s a cult. (interruption) That’s what I’m telling you, Snerdley, revival, whatever you want to call it, it’s cult, it is a personality cult. These people that are showing up at these things are investing all this hope in Obama, not in themselves. Hope, like I keep telling you, hope is an excuse for doing nothing. (interruption) I know you gotta whole different opinion of this. I’m telling you, this will not sustain itself, just like the Perot phenomenon didn’t sustain itself. It’s not because it’s not valid, or any of that, it’s because people’s emotional reservoirs just aren’t that deep. Plus, the whole context of the campaign is going to change.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: It’s not over yet, Snerdley. You can’t say she’s finished with this until Texas and Ohio, and even then, with these delegate rules, you know, I’m just reacting today. We’re doing a bunch of hypotheticals within the context that it’s over, but it really isn’t, but in terms of what McCain has to do against an Obama nominee in the general election, that’s the sense in which I’m exploring this stuff today. Snerdley is going nuts here, folks. It just hit him last night that this Obama thing is for real. It’s been real ever since it started. You know, getting a handle on it, putting your arms around what it is, is another thing. But it’s not a political movement. It’s a rock tour. It’s a rock concert tour. And if you don’t show up at the concert when it happens in your town, you’re not hip. It’s a cult. It’s a religious movement, whatever it is, it has gone beyond politics. These speeches say nothing; they say nothing. These people, I’m telling you, that are gravitating to Obama, at least these people showing up in person, these are people desperately seeking meaning in their lives because they don’t have any.
We all want to matter. We all want to have meaning in our lives. We all want to be relevant to something, and a lot of these people don’t feel that about themselves. They feel empty, and they’re trying to fill the emptiness, fill the void. And Obama does. Obama gives them hope that they’re going to be something, but that’s even not it. Obama gives them hope that he is going to make their life substantive and have meaning by virtue of his presence, his messianic — by virtue of his existence alone. They’re not going to have to do anything. Basically you could say that Obama is saying this to these cultists out there in this crowd, ‘I will do my best to take wealth from those who generate it in our country and give it to you, who are hoping for change.’ That’s one of the essences of what Obama is saying. Here’s a couple more bites here. He finally got a little specific on economics.
OBAMA: I believe in the free market. I know Texans believe in entrepreneurship. We are an independent and a self-reliant people. We don’t believe in government doing what we can do for ourselves. But when we’ve got CEOs making more in ten minutes than ordinary workers are making in a year, and it’s the CEOs who are getting a tax break and workers are left with nothing, then something is wrong.
RUSH: Right. So throw all this free market stuff that he just said he supports out the window, because something’s wrong. It ain’t working. The free market isn’t wrong. Hillary says she’s going to rein in all these corporations. He’s doing the same thing. He’s just not using her language. Here’s the second bite.
OBAMA: I want to take away those tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas. We’re going to give them to companies that invest right here in America. And we’re going to rollback the Bush tax cuts that went to all the wealthy people, and we’re going to give tax cuts to ordinary families, people who are making less than $75,000, we will offset your payroll tax, senior citizens who make less than $50,000, we want to say to them, ‘You don’t have to pay an income tax, you’re already having a tough time making ends meet,’ and I will raise the minimum wage not every ten years, but to keep pace with inflation because, if you work in America, you should not be poor, and that’s a goal that we should set for ourselves when I’m president of the United States of America.
RUSH: That’s what I mean. This speech last night, folks, very specific. He is an old-time liberal. He is an old-time socialist. Very little of that stuff, by the way, that he says he’s going to do will ever happen. It doesn’t matter. He’s not going to be able to pull that off. Those kinds of things, that drastically, are not going to happen. But he wants them to, and he will try to make them happen. Obama never worked in the private sector, and it shows. You go out, folks, you try be a young person, you try to get a job under President Obama. He wants to jack up the minimum wage and index it to inflation. You want to blast young people right out of the job market, do the Obama plan. Good-bye high school and college jobs for kids, good-bye entry-level jobs. So will Barack step up and give our tax money to those he puts out of work? Yeah. Because it’s never going to be his fault. It will be the evil Republicans in Congress who have no compassion. I, for one, I do not want a naïve fool with zilch experience managing the United States economy. And Hillary talks this way, too. That’s not their job. Dictators manage economies. Presidents do not. He wants to manage upper-end wages, CEO wages. He wants socialized medicine, to expand unions, empower teachers unions. All of this stuff is Marxism when you boil it all down. These are all old ideas, regressive ideas that have failed, as Obama is a young, naïve man who holds tight to failed old ideas.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I wonder if Obama wants to manage how much money that people get from their trusts, you know, like the Kennedys. Let’s cap that while we’re at it. We’re going to cap CEO pay, let’s cap what you can get out of your own trust.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, here’s my question: Will the American people succumb to one of the most demagogic politicians of our modern times? That would be Barack Obama. We consider ourselves educated, sophisticated, we consider ourselves stewards of one of the oldest democracies in the world. Is this all it takes to undermine it, a bunch of pap, a bunch of meaningless, nothing platitudes? Is this all it takes to turn our military, economy, our courts over to a recent community activist, Barack Obama? Is this all it takes? You have to understand here, ladies and gentlemen, that the Democrats have been vying, focusing, desiring this kind of reaction from the American people for 50 years. As much of nothing as they will accept, the Democrats will offer. As much misery, tumult, and chaos as they can promote, the Democrats will promote to create this sense of panic, discontent, unsettledness, misery in as many Americans as possible. They have done this with their willing accomplices in the Drive-By Media. Every day a barrage of pessimism, fatalism, doom, destruction, hopelessness, all of these things, in the greatest country in the history of man and woman. Is this all it’s going to take, a rookie, to come along and undermine the greatness of this country? It’s a question every one of us needs to ask ourselves.