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RUSH: I have to admit to being caught off guard on this. I listened to Joe Klein here on the Charlie Rose Show last night quote Obama as saying, ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,’ and I have not heard Obama say that. But I haven’t spent a whole lot of time watching and listening to Obama press appearances. I’ve seen him on debates and so forth, but when he’s out doing a campaign rally, you know, when the people start fainting that’s when I change channels. So let’s listen to the sound bite again, the question to Joe Klein from Charlie Rose is, ‘What is Obama’s patriotism problem? Not what’s reality, but what’s the perception about patriotism for Obama to deal with?’

KLEIN: One of the greatest problems he has is one of his greatest strengths. He has a very highfalutin way of talking. When he says, you know, if you’re a typical, you know, working-class American, working two jobs, trying to get your kids through college, you come home from your second job banging the cash register at 11 o’clock at night, you turn on the TV, and there’s this guy saying, ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,’ you say, ‘Huh? What’s that about?’ And I think that he has made some adjustments to talk about the meat-and-potaotes things that people care about, but something like this kind of knocks him off stride.

RUSH: Okay, I have to admit to being one of these people banging the cash register at 11 o’clock getting home and hearing Obama say, ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,’ and saying, ‘huh?’ because I said, huh, when I heard Klein say it. So I’ve got three references to it here. This is from a blog called Tell History: ‘Harry Boyte, from the University of Minnesota, shared with us the history of the Obama campaign phrase, ‘we are the ones we have been waiting for.’ In a column for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, he took Maureen Dowd to task for suggesting Maria Shriver was the source of the quote. Instead, Boyte recalls the phrase from a song composed by Dorothy Cotton — inspired, he said, by a line from June Jordan’s ‘Poem to South African Women’ — and familiar from his days with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The campaign phrase reflected the surprising note of optimism in a session addressing how civic engagement had ‘stalled’ in universities.’ Anyway, so that’s one reference to it.

Andrew Ferguson at the Weekly Standard in a piece called The Wit & Wisdom of Barack Obama, says, ‘The origins of the phrase aren’t nearly so glamorous or exotic. Two years ago, before Obama even said he wanted to be president, the left-wing-radical-feminist-lesbian novelist Alice Walker published a book of essays and called it We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For. Believe me: If the line had come from the Tribal Elders of the Hopi nation, Alice Walker would have been more than happy to say so. Instead she said it came from a poem published in 1980 by the left-wing-radical-feminist-bisexual poet June Jordan. Neither Walker nor Jordan has said what the sentence means. But Walker did offer this hint in the introduction to her book of essays: ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for because we are able to see what is happening with a much greater awareness than our parents or grandparents, our ancestors, could see.”

Well, now, that makes total sense to me from the standpoint of the arrogance and hubris of liberals. We are the ones we have been waiting for, because we’re the smart people. We can see what’s happening; we’re much more aware; we are smarter. Now, Oprah Winfrey also introduced Barack Obama as The One, i.e., messianic. And then in another reference here, ”We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,’ the first thing I thought,’ I don’t know where this is from, ‘but the first thing I thought was the old sixties slogan, ‘we are the people our parents warned us against,’ and doesn’t it make sense? You’ve heard of these people out there and imagined them and it dawns on you that they are us. As Pogo once said, we have met the enemy, and he is us. Obama’s phrase, which has been traced to Alice Walker and thence to left-wing-radical-feminist-bisexual poet June Jordan is a nicely positive use of what is not that unusual rhetorical device.’ Anyway, Joe Klein’s point is that average, normal everyday Americans, the people that Obama criticized in San Francisco, get home from their two jobs every day and hear him say this and have no clue what he’s talking about, and that it knocks him off stride. So he’s gotta learn how to talk to regular people. I don’t think he can.

I don’t think he considers himself a regular person, and his comments in San Francisco indicate that he has contempt for regular people. I guess in his stump speech, Obama uses this phrase, ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,’ at the end of his riff on people waiting around for things to change. Somebody else. We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for to create change. The moment is now blah, blah, blah. It’s an attempt to be inclusive. We are the ones we have been waiting for. But, of course, now that we know the origins of this, it becomes even more peculiar.

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RUSH: We are the ones we have been waiting for. We have met the enemy, and they are liberals. Okay, now, the origins, apparently, of we are the ones we have been waiting for can be traced to some bisexual wacko poet from South Africa, some tribalist and so forth. Now, I have a serious question here. Why is it that whenever the left wants to foist a radical new idea on America like ‘we are the ones we have been waiting for,’ they claim it actually came from some back-asswards tribal heathen from hundreds of years ago. What is the magic here? Well, if you stop and think about the real extreme global warming crowd, they want us to go back and live under those kind of circumstances, they’re trying to roll back advancements. So they’ve got some kind of magical, mystical attachment to these tribal — I’m not dissing anything. We had to face these tribal factions over the course of our history, we wiped ’em out, we had to defeat ’em. Aside from not being a good source of ideas on how to govern America, what’s the fascination with backwards tribal societies who use leaves from trees instead of toilet paper? What is the attraction with this?

Nobody ever talks about the wisdom of advanced cultures. Nobody talks about the wisdom of societies who have advanced. The wisdom is always among all these people who have been bypassed, technologically, sociologically, any number of ways. What is the fascination that the left has with ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.’ If you break that down, it is nonsensical. We’ve been waiting on ourselves. We’ve been waiting on ourselves. I was there the whole time, but I’m still waiting for me. I’ve been here all my life, but I’m still waiting. I’m the one I’m waiting for. We are the ones we are waiting for. How can you wait for yourself? But it sounds mystical. It sounds magical. And it sounds like it has real cosmic, deep meaning that only elitist, intelligent people can understand, but in fact it is gobbledygook. It’s psychobabble. ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for.’ I’m waiting for myself. We’re waiting for ourselves here. You’re going to go on waiting for yourselves, because if you’re sitting around waiting, you’re not doing. Who can blame the backbone of America for not understanding this gibberish? Joe Klein did.

Okay, so you got these poor schlubs in liberals’ view. It’s so bad out there in Pennsylvania, so bad out there in middle America, the Rust Belt, the heartland, wherever it is, that you’ve gotta have two jobs, the second job you get home at 11 o’clock from banging a cash register, turn on the TV because you just don’t want to go to bed, turn on the TV, and there is Obama saying, ‘we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,’ you go, ‘huh?’ Which is the absolute brilliant reaction to it. The people in the heartland working two jobs are the smartest people in the country for not understanding gobbledygook and New Age psychobabble. In the meantime, the people who come up with the phrase, ‘Those stupid nuts, they haven’t got the smarts to figure out how brilliant we are.’ Hence, you get the arrogant condescension brought about by American leftists and their view of America. There’s something you people that like the tribes and the tribalists and all these — I don’t care wherever you find them, in the Andes, the Mayans, I don’t care, wherever you want to go, how did they keep warm? They skinned beavers. They skinned animals. They’re running around wearing fur. What do you think the fur crowd in the Democrat constituency would say about going back to that where it was a must to run around and kill animals to survive? That’s if the members of your tribe even dressed.

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