RUSH: Now, according to the stack of stuff that came together today as I was prepping this show, there are lots and lots of stories in the Democrat stack about Obama’s misstatements, his incompetence, his inexperience — and it’s legendary; it really is — and then there are also some stories about women, Democrat liberal women and how mad they are and how upset they are. Not only has feminism screwed ’em up, so has Hillary. There’s misery on the Democrat side. There really is. It’s not reported this way, but trust me, there is — and again, it’s another reason why we hope that Mrs. Clinton survives Ohio and Texas and continues to move on. Now, one of the items we talked about last week — and we were unable to confirm it last week; now it has been confirmed — during the debate in Ohio, last Tuesday night, Obama, tried to placate and pander to people who are having economic problems in Ohio, promised to get rid of NAFTA, promised to tear it up. Hillary said, ‘Well, I won’t do that, but I’ll renegotiate it.’ It was obvious, the pandering. Then we learned last week that Obama, or one of his advisors actually called somebody in Canada and said, ‘No, no, no, no, no. That’s just campaign rhetoric. We’re not going to do that. You guys are our friends, and we know that.’
The Canadian TV network, CTV, reported this. Everybody involved denied it. Now it turns out that it’s true. Thomas Lifson has it here at the American Thinker, and our old buddy Nedra Pickler at the AP is a contributor. Here’s the thing. We have a long time to go here. We have a long time to chip away at Barack Obama. But as I said last week, it’s going to be really touchy doing this. Obviously the people on our side are not going to vote for Obama anyway, so simply talking to them about what’s wrong with the guy is not going to have that much impact because our side is not going to vote for him anyway. But the problem is going to be separating Obama from his faithful — not his voters; his followers, his faithful — and the wrong criticism is going to lock them to him even tighter. Now, I’d love to tell you about this stuff and I’m going to tell you about it. By the way, this Rezko land. John Fund wrote about it today. Robert Novak wrote about it today, and they’re all saying, ‘It’s going to be big. It’s going to be huge! It’s going to be big.’ It may. But who’s going to bring it up?
Hillary hasn’t been able to make hay out of it. You think the Drive-Bys are going to bring it up? They couldn’t care less. But more than that, do you think Obama’s faithful give a rat’s rear end about the Tony Rezko deal and how Obama bought his house? You know, it strikes me… This is the kind of thing that we tried with the Clintons back in 1992, all of the character defects, the lying. It didn’t matter. It really didn’t matter. People were just so (sigh). People didn’t care about it. When we tried pointing out the character flaws of Clinton, it just didn’t matter. Now, this stuff with Obama is far more serious, and I’m not minimizing how bad the Clinton stuff was, but this is worse. This guy is actually incompetent. He is clueless. He has a Clinton problem in that he will just change a story on a dime, and make it sound like everybody else heard him wrong the first time. Now, here are the details on this Canadian situation. I’m going to read it to you as Thomas Lifson writes it up at the American Thinker.
‘The man who tantalizes the unhappy voter with promises of change may be discovering that this diplomacy stuff may be a little more difficult than it looked. After threatening the NAFTA treaty while pandering to Ohio voters facing declining manufacturing employment, the Obama camp was blindsided by a report from the Canadian television network CTV that his campaign had privately reassured Canadian officials previously that he wouldn’t really change NAFTA, no matter what was said on the campaign trail, that it would just be a Northern version of what the late Senator Patrick Moynihan called ‘Boob bait for the bubbas.’ The Obama campaign denied such a meeting: ‘The Obama campaign told CTV late Thursday night that no message was passed to the Canadian government that suggests that Obama does not mean what he says about opting out of NAFTA if it is not renegotiated.” However, the problem is, ‘It turns out that diplomats often write up memoranda when they meet with people like campaign advisors to a leading presidential candidate in the United States.’ This is apparently something that didn’t occur to Obama or his campaign.
‘So now that such a memo has turned up, widely circulated among the Canadian diplomatic corps, Team Obama is saying that those stupid Canadians weren’t able to understand that their advisor really meant. Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports: ‘Barack Obama’s senior economic policy adviser said Sunday that Canadian government officials wrote an inaccurate portrayal of his private discussion on the campaign’s trade policy in a memo obtained by The Associated Press.’ The memo is the first documentation to emerge publicly out of the meeting between the adviser, Austan Goolsbee, and officials with the Canadian consulate in Chicago, but Goolsbee said it misinterprets what he told them. The memo was written by Joseph DeMora, who works for the consulate and attended the meeting. Goolsbee disputed a section that read: ‘Noting anxiety among many US domestic audiences about the US economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign.
He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.” This is what Obama’s advisor wrote, essentially saying, don’t listen to us. This is campaign posturing. ”This thing about ‘it’s more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans,’ that’s this guy’s language,’ Goolsbee said of DeMora. ‘He’s not quoting me. I certainly did not use that phrase in any way,’ Goolsbee said.’ So, if we believe this version of the Obama campaign’s story, then we have an important Obama advisor creating a seriously false impression in the diplomatic corps of our largest trading partner. Telling them that they didn’t understand is not an excuse. Diplomats are supposed to be in control of their message.’
The bottom line of all of this: ‘[I]f Team Obama is capable of screwing up relations with [Canada] the country most similar to us, the country that knows us best, and that has the biggest stake in the health of our economy and continuing American good will, imagine what kind of havoc would be created when dealing with the likes of the Russians, the [ChiComs], the Syrians, or the Palestinians.’ By the way, Obama knows he’s going to get a pass on this, even though Nedra Pickler has weighed in on it. I’m starting to hear things from people that I heard back in 1992 during that presidential campaign. ‘How come none of this stuff is sticking? Why isn’t it sticking, Rush? This is big stuff.’ It’s not sticking ’cause it doesn’t matter to his supporters. It doesn’t matter to his followers, not yet. It doesn’t matter to his faithful. It’s going to matter to a lot of people, but right now these people you see at the rallies are unaffected by this. We gotta keep chipping away at this stuff, but it’s gotta be done the right way. It can’t be overdone, can’t wear people out with it.