RUSH: Jennifer in Bloomington, Indiana. We start on the phones with you, and great to have you here. Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call, Rush. It’s an honor to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I’m fairly new to the daily monitoring of politics. I probably only been paying attention for the last year. And I find myself feeling fairly defeated on a daily basis.
RUSH: What spurred your interest a year ago to get involved in this daily?
CALLER: Well, the nomination of Barack Obama for the Democratic Party.
RUSH: I see. Up to that point you felt comfortable not paying much attention to it, ignorance is bliss.
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: Yeah, okay.
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: Now you found out who he is and this is starting to bother you every day?
CALLER: Well, the ten of billions of dollars for the auto industry here, the tens of billions of dollars for the health care industry there, I don’t see a good future in America. I don’t have any kids. I want to have kids, but I’m actually having second thoughts about that because I don’t know that I’m going to recognize the America that my kids would grow up in.
RUSH: Well, you know, I mentioned this yesterday. Two of the last three weekends I’ve had 24 different friends of mine and their wives in town, golf buddies and so forth, and every night after we get back from playing golf and the women get back from Worth Avenue shopping and so forth, we sit 
around and have a lot of fun at dinner and so forth, and these are all achieved people. These are people who are accomplished. Some of them are retired, semiretired. They all have kids and they’re all, like you, I’ve never heard this kind of abject fear of our government expressed by these kinds of people. Now, we’ve always had the sixties radicals and leftists — which is kind of ironic — they’ve always been afraid of what they call autocratic power, but now they voted for a guy who is an autocrat, who is an authoritarian, so it just matters who’s wielding the power to them, but I’ve never seen this kind of fear. I’ve never heard people say the kind of things they’re saying about the future and the concerns they have for it. So you’re not alone.
CALLER: Well, I guess my question, with your vast amount of experience, witnessing this, commentating on it over the years, what’s the silver lining, what are we looking for as a sign that the pendulum is going to swing? Because it does seem to swing. I’m only 30. I haven’t been voting for all that long. I’ve participated in all the elections, but I haven’t experienced a lot of change. I’ve been fortunate enough to vote for the winners up until now.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: So what am I watching for, is it states’ rights legislation that they’re talking about, or what are we watching for to feel better?
RUSH: Well, that’s what’s different about this circumstance is that those normal swings of the pendulum, even people who think they’re going to happen think they may be too late and that the mess that’s going to be made is gonna take a longer time than just one swing of the pendulum to undo. Look, you keep your radio on and I’m going to answer this when I have a little bit more time when we come back. Thanks, Jennifer, for the call, and hang with us. Don’t give up.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, the question’s on the table: What do you look for to see the pendulum swing back the other way? And the accompanying question always is, ‘How do you stay optimistic?’ You know, the pendulum swinging the other way. What I’ve always relied on — and I’ve mentioned this over the course of the 20-plus years that I have hosted this program — is my infinite faith in the American people. We’re a great country made up of great individuals, and somehow the country has always righted itself from heading down the wrong path or what have you. Whenever I’ve said this over the years people have called me and said, ‘Rush, we appreciate what you’re trying to say, but you’re missing a very crucial point, and that is more and more and more Americans are not great and more and more and more are uneducated, more and more and more have been propagandized, more and more and more have been indoctrinated, and it’s been happening in the schools for 30 or 40 years. So these new generations that you talk about that are going to graduate and grow up and refuse to accept the nonsense that their parents and grandparents have bequeathed them, Rush, it’s not going to happen.’
We’re raising kids these days where nothing is their fault. They’re little angels. We have self-esteem courses, and everything that goes wrong is somebody else’s fault, and they have been propagandized. Nobody is being taught critical thinking. Even when they get out of high school, they go into college, those that do get indoctrinated by Marxist professors at many places. And they would cite to me, ‘Look at how easy it was for the people of this country to buy into a hoax like global warming. Look how easy it was for otherwise reasonable and intelligent people to agree with the concept that the car they were driving could destroy the climate to the point that life, human life could not be sustained. Look at how easy that was.’ And I said, ‘Well, I know why it’s easy, ’cause everybody wants to matter, everybody wants their life to have meaning.’ One thing I know is that a lot of people go through life thinking their life doesn’t matter; they go through life thinking their vote doesn’t matter; that their life really has no meaning. They’re lost souls wandering in the wilderness trying to find out who they are; they’re trying to be relevant. As media, pop culture media has become more and more pervasive, definitions of success have changed.
Now getting on television, having your entry on MySpace or Facebook and vomiting every bit of personal information about yourself, this is considered now success. It’s considered fame. And as such, people have a far different definition — plus, Rush, you’re forgetting, too, they’ve had it so easy. Economically, they grow up, when they get out of college at 22 years old, they think they should have a $400,000 house or a $300,000-a-year job and if they don’t they get all upset and think America is screwing them. I’ve always refused to believe that this is a majority of the American people. I’ve always thought that there’s this great bunch of unknown people who are not seeking fame and notoriety, who are just the people that make this country work, and the people that are playing by the rules and follow the traditions and institutions that made the country great. Because through all of these trials and tribulations the country has survived, but I’ll tell you, one thing I have to accept, it’s a new challenge now. Because I don’t think even during the thirties, during the New Deal, this kind of massive authoritarian power was sought. Sure, Roosevelt did everything he could to empower the Democrat Party, and I know that he did make some attempts here, pack the Supreme Court, tried to get 12 years for himself, an additional term, tried to get fingers in some businesses and so forth. It was hideous. But even then, we came out of it.
It took a while, it took World War II to come out of it and an economic boom to come out of it, and so the country has approved resilient. People are asking themselves now, have we reached the point where a majority of voting Americans can actually be persuaded and fooled by a demagogue, by an empty suit who simply talks in platitudes, offers nothing of really substance, and it appears so. It appears so. If you look at the last election results, it appears so. However, on the other side of that, and I hate to keep saying this, I think, with the proper candidate, Barack Obama could have been defeated. Somebody who was fearless; somebody who had all of the correct issues and principles to run on about American greatness, American exceptionalism, how to inspire the American people to make that happen, I think he coulda been beaten. The problem is that that person doesn’t exist, and in large measure, the party doesn’t exist. Two or three or four people in the party, great people, and they’re fine and dandy, but right now there’s nobody willing to present this contrast.
There’s nobody willing to contrast the awfulness that is this administration to what it’s trying to do to this country, with the things that have made this country great in the past. This country doesn’t need to be resurrected; it doesn’t need to be saved; it doesn’t need to be brought back from the depths of destruction. It’s being taken there, if the truth be told. So the pendulum, somebody’s going to come along at some point, it will happen. Until that time, the question must become something other than, ‘What do I look for to give myself hope?’ The question has to become, ‘What are you going to do to give yourself hope?’ Our last caller said she didn’t want to have kids. She was afraid to bring kids into the world. Jennifer, let me tell you something. When I was 12, I remember hearing adults say that. When I was 20, I remember adults say that. Every generation thinks that times are worse than they’ve ever been. Every generation has a group that thinks they’re in the last days, and every generation thinks, ‘This is not the kind of culture or the country I want to bring kids into.’ That’s exactly wrong.
People who have the opportunity, the influence to raise children in the image of American greatness and exceptionalism should be doing that, if you want kids. The question is not, ‘What do I sit around and watch? What do I sit around and look for, or who could I call to encourage –‘ This is something that every American is going to have to make happen by standing up and opposing the things that you disagree with, and then hopefully having people to elect who will represent you in these disagreements. At some point, that is going to happen. But for all I know, it’s worth fighting for. And to what extent, you know, I’m optimistic because of what has happened to me in my personal life. I’m living a life I never dreamed, so is my family, even with all this rotgut. It can be done. I do, like everybody else, I do at times — I was talking about it with my friends over the weekend. In fact, I told one of my friends, I said, ‘I’m afraid that before I finish, they’re going to take it all away from me.’ They’re going to find a way to take it away, not because I’m Rush Limbaugh, just because they’re going to need the money and it’s going to be bad, and they’re going to take it away from me and everybody else, they’re going to take everything away. It’s going to be a crime to be an achiever. It’s going to be a crime, it already is.
The achievers in life are already being targeted by Barack Obama, wherever they are. And he said to me, ‘If you really think that, then get out. If you really think that, get out while you can.’ That’s not my nature to get out while I can. That would be caving and giving up. Plus, I don’t want to anyway. So you hang in and you stand up for what you believe, you try to persuade others. It’s an ongoing process, and it’s very frustrating because you do run into people who are just not going to understand you, because they’re not even thinking, they’re emoting, they have arrived where they’ve arrived on the basis of propaganda, demagoguery, feelings, beliefs. It’s really an important thing to understand that a lot of people here, that we wish would change their mind, have beliefs, not thoughts. They vote because they have beliefs. They believe Obama’s this, or they believe global warming. They believe that their vote can change — they believe. It’s almost like a faith. You ask them to explain intellectually why they believe what they believe, and they can’t. Just like people can’t explain to you, in a definitive way, what their faith is. They can tell you what the belief is. But what sustains the belief is faith, and that’s tough for a lot of people to explain. They just have it. It’s just something that is.
A lot of people don’t have the faith, they’re fatalists, and a lot of people of that persuasion reside on the left. A lot of people I’ve talked to felt this way during the first couple years of Bill Clinton, and that wasn’t half as bad as this is. So it can be overcome, and it can be defeated, and what you have to ultimately realize is that what Obama’s doing is not going to work. And before everybody realizes it doesn’t work and is not going to work, it’s going to be said to have worked. The moment we get an economic uptick, the first moment the GDP goes up even one-tenth of 1%, the parades in the Drive-By Media are going to start, Obama’s stimulus is working, you’re going to be depressed even more than you are now. That’s when you have to take solid comfort in the fact it doesn’t work and at some point it’s going to have to be fixed. If there’s nobody around to fix it, it won’t be. So you have to hang around. This is still a country where working in your own self-interest will achieve everybody else’s self-interest as well, self-interest is different than selfish. There’s nothing wrong with self-interest. And you’re not operating in your self-interest if you just, ‘Ah, to hell with it, ah, screw it,’ you’re not operating in your self-interest if you do that.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Another thing to keep in mind look, folks: only 53% of Americans voted for Obama, and that was after an economic collapse. Fifty-eight million people voted against Obama. All those people need is a political leader, and they don’t need somebody that’s going to be Democrat Lite. Obama could have been defeated. This was what was so frustrating about the whole Republican primary campaign and the general campaign. He could have been defeated, and can be defeated in 2012.