RUSH: Here is Charles as we start on the phones. Charles in Las Vegas, nice to have you with us, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I’ve been listening to you since 1990, and I’m your self-loathing gay person from Las Vegas, who is a conservative and hates himself because he’s gay and conservative.
RUSH: (laughing) Yeah, well, welcome back.
CALLER: Well, thank you. I was listening to the show, and in the midst of it, I don’t know if it was a local feed or the national feed, but there was an Obama commercial. And being an expert in this field of communications, I want to ask you, why do you think they would spend money to advertise during your show knowing the target audience that you have?
RUSH: Precisely because they know the kind of audience that we have. I take you back to 2002. I can’t share our own audience research with you, because we keep that close to the vest here and use it for our internal purposes only. It would amaze you. But we don’t have to release our own because Puff Daschle, 2002, was so much like this. It was not a presidential year, but the Democrats were just convinced, they were just convinced that everybody hated Bush and we were going to go to war and they were going to be for it, they were going to take back Congress, take back the House of Representatives. They did the Wellstone memorial and it blew up in their faces, and a couple days after the election Puff Daschle did a press conference in which he expressed shock and amazement that his experts had told him that Democrats, lots of Democrats actually listen to Rush Limbaugh. He actually said this in his press conference. He made reference to the fact that some of these Democrats eventually changed their minds on things. They also thought, just as you thought out there, Charles, that this program is preaching to the choir. But it isn’t. I don’t think Obama’s buying anything national. You might be hearing a local buy. But if he is, if he’s buying the show in local markets, that’s even a better indication that he knows who the audience is and his people do.