RUSH: So you see this, Sharron Angle has moved ahead of Dingy Harry by three points, 49-46. This is the latest Fox News poll, the margin of error. And there’s a fraud in this race. This guy that’s got 1% of the vote, supposedly a Tea Party candidate, he’s a Dingy Harry plant, and now the Drive-Bys are going absolutely berserk over a tape recording he made of a conversation that Sharron Angle had with him. And I think, if anything, these tapes prove, ladies and gentlemen, Sharron Angle is a true believer. She’s saying on this tape everything she says on the campaign trail. She’s consistent as she can be, unlike Obama. She’s a true believer. Whatever she says behind closed doors on the tape is same thing she’s saying on the campaign trail, and she’s right. The Republican establishment does not want her to win. Not excited about her candidacy. I think she ought to make a campaign ad out of the tapes. Meanwhile, everybody’s going berserk over what she said on the secret tape. Big deal! The stars are starting to align in the correct way here, folks.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal has endorsed Sharron Angle for the United States Senate, and the editorial begins: ‘Harry Reid wears the scars of previous close encounters. The 27-year Washington veteran lost his first U.S. Senate race in 1974 by a mere 600 votes. In 1998, he survived a challenge from John Ensign, prevailing by 428 votes. So here he is again, locked in a tight battle, this time against Sharron Angle, a bit player on the Nevada political scene until she pulled off a surprise in June’s Republican primary.’ Anyway, they go on to endorse her, the Las Vegas Review Journal: ‘Whether it’s shoving the unpopular and hugely expensive Obamacare down the throats of the American people, or rewarding failing companies with taxpayer bailouts, or ginning up expensive and futile ‘stimulus’ packages larded with pork that push the nation closer and closer to fiscal chaos, Sen. Reid has cheered them all.’ They really dump on Dingy Harry here in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
By the way, Fox News has this story: ‘It’s a centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s health care remake, a lifeline available right now to vulnerable people whose medical problems have made them uninsurable. But the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan started this summer isn’t living up to expectations.’ Now, we told you about this late last week and yesterday. ‘Enrollment lags in many parts of the country. People who could benefit may not be able to afford the premiums,’ and they thought the premiums were going to be free. ‘Some state officials who run their own ‘high-risk pools’ have pointed out potential problems.’ Now, here’s the potential problem. Nothing is living up to expectations because they were not expectations; they were lies. There is no way the health care plan can live up to expectations because there weren’t any. The whole health care plan is lies. Every fundamental aspect of it is a lie, same thing with practically every Obama policy that’s come down the pike. I’m sure in some people’s minds it isn’t living up to expectations. They thought it was going to be free. What it means is it was all lies. You can’t have legitimate expectations to live up to if all you have are out-and-out lies, which is the case.
In West Virginia, a seat the Democrats just knew that would be theirs, the Robert Byrd KKK seat. Well, don’t forget it was Bill Clinton who went out there at his funeral, Robert Byrd’s funeral and said (imitating Clinton) ‘That old boy came from the hills and the hollers of West Virginia, and, you know, the people back in those days, I mean he made some mistakes, he spent the rest of his life atoning for those mistakes, apologizing, but he did it for you. He had to get elected. He had to join the Klan. He had to become a Kleagle. He had to do that for you. He had to do that to get elected.’ That’s essentially what Clinton said. So the Democrats thought they owned this seat, but the Republican, John Raese, is ahead 48-43, continues to lead in this race. That’s above the margin of error. There are all kinds of stories. I love these stories. The ABC News/Washington Post poll is out and it’s all about how it’s looking better for the Democrats all the time out there, really looking better. Our poll shows that it’s not going to be the shellacking that everybody thought that it was going to be. And then if you look at the sample, you find out that it’s lies. Try a sample of 35% Democrat, 25% Republican and 39% independent, you mean to tell me that right now 35% of this country admits to being Democrat, only 25% admits to being Republican? It’s garbage in, garbage out.
Gallup, their survey, they’ve switched now because we’re within a month of the election, they’ve switched from registered voters to likely voters, and it’s a debacle. It’s 13 points in the generic, it’s 53-40 Republican over Democrat in likely voters. So they’re playing games with these polls. Gallup had to get straight with theirs because at the end of the day they have their credibility to worry about, but these people at the Washington Post and the New York Times who live for the very day they can be led by a dictator are just holding on. They’re trying to influence, with these polls, public opinion. These polls are not to reflect public opinion. They are trying to shape it. What they’re trying to do with these polls is gin up some support, some energy on the Democrat base, because there isn’t any out there. Zip, zero, nada. I’m sure if you’ve had the television on you’ve heard various anchorettes and infobabes talking about how it’s not going to be as bad for the Democrats as it’s being predicted, and the line from the experts, ‘Aside from history, this won’t be so bad.’
Now, historically — and this is the template — historically the president’s party always loses seats in the midterm election, and so all this election is is what always happens. It’s not a repudiation of Obama, it’s not a repudiation of Obama’s agenda. It’s not a repudiation of the regime’s policies. I mean this is standard operating procedure. The president’s party always loses seats in the midterm elections. Well, let’s turn back the clock. You can look at 1994. They’re comparing this year to 1994 and they’re saying in ’94 we didn’t really know what was coming, but now, in 2010, this is Democrats, we know what’s coming, and we’re ready for it, and it’s not going to be nearly as bad because we know it’s coming. Well, let’s look at this theory that the president’s party always loses seats in a midterm election. Let’s go back to 2002. I will never forget 2002. In 2002 we had not yet gone to Iraq, we had not yet begun the invasion, the president was trying to gin up support for it. He was making the case for it almost on a daily basis. The polling data at the time was strongly in favor of the president. We were very, very close, not a lot of time had passed since 9/11. And the Democrats were demanding another vote, because they were on the wrong side of history. They had first come out after 9/11, ‘We gotta go kick butt, we gotta do whatever we got to do,’ and then they started, as they always do, breaking away from the president, breaking away from the country to try to forge their own political identity, and they demanded another vote on a resolution, use-of-force resolution so that they could get on record as supporting action in Iraq. And the president said, ‘You go right ahead. We’ll gladly give you another vote on this.’
People have forgotten this, but Bush was very content. He dared the Democrats to make the election about him. He campaigned hard for Republicans out there and in 2002 Republicans gained seats. (interruption) What? I don’t care if it was an aberration, it still happened. They gained seats in 2002. Now, I did election night analysis, I’m going to get to that in just a second, but also what happened in 2002 was the Wellstone Memorial. This was all part of the Democrats demanding another vote in the House on a use-of-force resolution so they could position themselves for it because that’s where they saw the country. Then Paul Wellstone died in that plane crash and they had the Wellstone Memorial. It was supposed to be a funeral, Republican senators, colleagues of Wellstone showed up and were booed, were flipped off, and under threat of violence, Trent Lott and the gang had to leave, and then Tom Harkin took over and this Wellstone Memorial became an anti-American rally that the Democrats put on, full-fledged, and that and that use-of-force resolution, the revote, seal their fate. They lost the 2002 midterms.
I did election analysis on election night that night with Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert on NBC. It was the last time I have been invited. It was Russert that secured my invitation there. I’ll tell you, when Russert passed away that was the end of NBC as a credible news organization. Russert kept those people centered as best he could. Republicans gained two seats in the Senate, eight seats in the House, all because the Democrats threw away the camouflage and the mask and acted and behaved as they are. And they’re doing the same thing now, from the White House on down. Now it’s not just the Wellstone Memorial that they’re doing this, they’re doing it from the White House on down. They are making it clear who they are, and they are proud of what’s happening. And we’re talking about lame duck session, we’re going to come back and they’re going to ram 15 to 18 more bills down our throats that we don’t want, and they are fully aware that they’re going to do this, and they’re aware what people’s reaction to it is. So you can talk about the fact that there’s a tradition that the president always loses seats in midterm elections, but it doesn’t have to be the case, as 2002 proved.
Dick Morris is hanging in there. He believes it’s going to be 100 seats in the House. I mean Dick Morris thinks — I read a column of his — Dick Morris thinks that the problem is underconfidence, not overconfidence. He’s got a column out there. He said there are a lot of seats that nobody’s talking about where the Democrats are up four or five points. He said Steny Hoyer is vulnerable in Maryland. It’s what he says. And there are a lot of races where the Democrats, where they normally win by double digits, they’re only up three or four points, just barely out of the margin of error, and if the Republicans went in there and actually ran full-fledged campaigns, that they could win huge and big, no matter the fact the Democrats know that it’s coming. So the Drive-Bys are sitting around out there and they fall into these templates, and they got their phony polls that they then believe. And we have now the whole notion that the Democrats are coming back, yes, the Democrats are coming back. It’s getting exciting out there, new energy, new enthusiasm, we can see it. It shows up in our rigged polls, rigged by virtue of the sample.
Now, Gallup puts the lie to the claim that this is just the unusual pattern. Here from Gallup: ‘These two numbers, if translated into popular votes in the 435 congressional districts, suggest huge gains for Republicans and a Republican House majority the likes of which we have not seen since the election cycles of 1946 or even 1928.’ This is not Dick Morris. This is Gallup. ‘The Gallup high turnout and low turnout numbers suggest it looks like 1894, when Republicans gained more than 100 seats in a House of approximately 350 seats.’ That’s how large it was in 1894. Folks, it’s a tsunami. And, you know, privately they know it. This is all public posturing designed to try to forestall it, head it off, limit its scope.
From the New York Region section of the New York Times by David Chen, buried, in other words: ‘One New York Democrat proclaims that he proudly opposed [Obama’s] health care overhaul plan.’ He calls it the federal government’s health care overhaul plan. ‘One New York Democrat proclaims that he proudly opposed the federal government’s health care overhaul plan. Another one pledges, in the finest Tea Party spirit, to oppose any future financial bailouts. Still another has rolled out three Republicans in three separate commercials, all vouching for his credentials. But there is one word you will not hear mentioned in any of these campaign advertisements: Democrat.’ The Democrats are playing down their own party in their own ads. The Democrats don’t want people to think of them as Democrats in New York. In New York! ‘With the Democratic Party bracing for a dismal showing in the elections next month, many candidates are doing everything possible to convince voters that they are not tied at the hip to President Obama or Nancy Pelosi.’
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to go back to 2002 again. This was a seminal year. It was a great, great, great year. And I’ll never forget the conventional wisdom after 2002. There’s a lot of things that were said after the 2002 midterms. One of the things in the conventional wisdom was that Democrats ‘did not get their message out,’ and I remember, I think it was election night coverage on NBC where that was stated, and I said, ‘Oh, no, they did get their message out. They’ve been getting their message out plenty.’ I remember saying this to Brokaw, and he didn’t look happy. He wasn’t happy out there. That’s also where they asked me, ‘What do you think Republicans are going to do?’ I said, ‘Don’t gloat. Just act like this is normal. You know, like Chuck nothing like said: ‘When you score a touchdown, don’t act like it’s any big deal. We do it all the time as the Pittsburgh Steelers.’ When winning elections, Republicans, there’s no reason to go out high-fiving everybody.’
The message that the Democrats are trying to get out today is that they’re not Democrats. They won’t ID themselves as Democrats in ads; they won’t stand near Obama. That’s not the message voters are getting, and the polls reflect that. They’ve had two years of message from Obama and the disastrous policies to go along with it and Democrats are trying to hide who they are, trying to hide from Obama but it’s not working. Everybody is associating Democrats with Obama. Everybody is associating Democrats with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. But when they say they didn’t get their message out in 2002? Opposition to Bush on the war, tax increases out of the Clinton recession, Wellstone Memorial? They were getting their message out left and right. And that’s why they lost.
Also after 2002, Tom Daschle, ‘the Puffster,’ was the Senate majority leader — or in that case, minority leader — and he came out after the election and said that they had done some polling, some internal polling on me, your host, your guiding light, El Rushbo. And Tom Daschle came out, said, their experts had told the Democrats I was not just preaching to the choir, that a lot of Democrats were listening to this show, and I was changing their minds, and Daschle admitted they were surprised when their, quote, unquote, ‘experts’ told ’em that because Democrats believed that the only people that listened to me were people that were already conservative and Republican. I called him ‘El Diablo.’ We started doing that. Yeah, he didn’t like that either. We called him El Diablo in a couple of parodies. He mentioned that. 2002 was a big-time year. It puts the lie to all this conventional wisdom, and the only thing important about that is the conventional wisdom is stock-standard reporting, and it isn’t always correct.