RUSH: Tracy, California, next, and this is Trent. Nice to have you here.
CALLER: Hey, thanks for taking my call, Rush.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I’m just driving fast in my SUV and trying to burn up some gas on Earth Day here.
RUSH: That a way! Hubba hubba.
CALLER: Hey, I’m seriously considering Obama. I’m a registered — I’m not in Pennsylvania, obviously. But registered Republican, very conservative. And, you know, I think John McCain is more liberal —
RUSH: Wait. Let me just ask you a question. Are you talking about in the general election, or in a primary?
CALLER: General.
RUSH: Yeah, because you’ve had your primary. Okay, so general election, you say you’re conservative Republican, and Obama looks good to you?
CALLER: Well, and here’s — here’s my thinking, and tell me if I’m wrong, but I think that McCain is more liberal than Bush, and I haven’t liked Bush at all. Well, I shouldn’t say ‘at all.’ I haven’t liked a lot of things Bush has done. And so I think McCain is going to screw up the country, and if somebody’s going to screw it up, I’d rather it be a Democrat so that we can get back to someone who’s a little more conservative.
RUSH: I myself uttered those exact words almost within a couple syllables, to the Drive-By Media in I forget what magazine or show. Oh, it was Howard Kurtz. It was the Washington Post. I said, ‘Look, if the country is going to go to hell, I’d rather the Democrats get the credit for it,’ and that’s like right around the first of the year, right? That’s months ago, and it caused a firestorm out there in the McCain campaign and the Republican primary was still going on at this time. But the point is — and I understand your settlement. The point is, you’re not going to vote for Obama because you, as a conservative, like Obama.
CALLER: Absolutely. I mean, I —
RUSH: You’re not calling here to say, ‘Boy, he’s got such a great personality! I think he’s so sincere!’
CALLER: No.
RUSH: You’re not doing that, are you?
CALLER: The longer this primary goes on, the more I think, ‘Ah, I could never do it. I can’t stomach this guy,’ but, you know, I really felt that way early on in the primary, when McCain first won. I thought, ‘This guy is not a conservative. I can’t watch him screw up the country in the Republican Party. I’d rather have someone else do it.’ But, you know, the more time passes — and I think that’s one of the, probably advantage of winning so early is, the more time passes — the more I think, ‘Oh, there’s no way I could bring myself to vote for either of these other two.’
RUSH: I understand that, but let me tell you what’s going to happen. I already know what’s going to happen. Obama is going to be the nominee. Because the party’s not going to have the guts to take it away from him no matter what the Clintons do. He’s going to be the nominee. McCain is going to cream him. McCain is going to cream Obama. Obama is toast right now. In the general election, with people who are paying attention… Everybody knows there’s no bit of difference between him and Hillary. So we don’t need another debate on issues and Iraq and health care, because we know there’s no difference.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: This last debate in Philadelphia exposed Obama as incompetent. Without a teleprompter he’s incapable. It also exposed the messianic personality he’s got. He doesn’t have one! He has it when he’s reading something on a prompter, but he doesn’t have it. He’s also now been exposed as a coward. His associations do matter to people. You choose your friends. If Reverend Wright’s a big mentor and if this wacko terrorist, Bill Ayers, is, these kind of people, this has already been duly noted. But I’ll tell you what else is going to happen. The Democrats are going to pick up a huge number of seats in the Senate or the House, and maybe five to seven seats in the Senate. If they pick up five to seven seats in the Senate, there are enough liberal Republicans — Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins — to give the Democrats 60 votes, which means they can do anything in the Senate. They can stop any judge nomination. They can stop any tax cut. The point is this: McCain’s going to win.
CALLER: But they won’t get anything done?
RUSH: Oh, they’ll get something done! This is the problem. Presidents define getting things done as passing legislation.
CALLER: Right. Which is bad for us. (laughs)
RUSH: It’s bad for us.
CALLER: For the most part.
RUSH: It’s bad for the country. You know, I care about people. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is for me and has been all of my stellar broadcast career, to be considered mean-spirited and harsh and all this simply because I’m a conservative — especially by people who don’t listen. I care about people. I care about people more than Obama cares about people, I’ll tell you that, and there’s not even a contest. Obama says he cares about people. I actually do. I want the best for people! I look at everybody and see their potential, and I see that most people aren’t using it, because they don’t even know it, because they haven’t been treated with high expectations. They haven’t been treated as mature adults. They haven’t been told either by their parents or teachers or whatever, that they did have what it takes. They’re being told just the opposite.
And while they’re being told that, they’re being told their country is horrible, that their country is guilty, that their country is committing sin: killing people, destroying the climate, and all of this. It breaks my heart when I see this. This is the greatest country on earth, and the great country is only as great as its people, not its politicians, not its messianic leaders. Anybody that sits around and loves the country because they like the way a candidate speaks, or because they think he has a nice personality, is selling the country short. People have to know what that personality and that character are going to do, issue-wise, policy-wise. Obama’s policies, Hillary’s policies, the policies of any liberal, will continue to emasculate millions of Americans by denying them the full potential of their humanity. They do this on purpose so as to make them dependent on people like Obama and Hillary and a Democrat-run government.
So it does concern me what these people stand for and what they’re going to do and it does concern me the Democrats are going to have this big margin in both the House and the Senate. Because whoever is in the White House, the objective is to get things done. This is going to bear watching. The whole focus, for me, anyway — and I know a lot of people like me — are being so concerned about, ‘I don’t hear anybody talking about American exceptionalism.’ Not one of our presidential candidates is talking about the greatness of this country, just the exact opposite. That’s not good. If somebody could break out of the pack talking about how great this country is because of how great the people who work and live here make it, that guy could run a landslide victory. It’s simple. It’s right there. It’s in the playbook. It’s in the blueprints. We end up, on our side, so often accepting the doom-and-gloom pessimistic premises of the left, and that’s why this all gets frustrating sometimes.