An Alan Cranston Flashback

RUSH: Yuba City, California, John. Welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Thank you for holding on.

CALLER: Yeah, hey, Rush.

RUSH: Hey.

CALLER: It’s a pleasure. I’ve been listening to you since ’85.

RUSH: You know what? I remember Yuba City because shortly after I moved to Sacramento in ’84, in early 1985, somebody, I forget what publication, Yuba City, California, was in the top-five worst places in the country to live.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: And there were refugees streaming out of there. I went up and did a remote show from the Yuba City City Council.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: I drove up there in the program director’s Mercedes. We got tomatoed. We got egged. (laughing)

CALLER: Oh, come on.

RUSH: No, we didn’t get tomatoed. We thought we might, though.

CALLER: Yeeeah.

RUSH: What’s the question?

CALLER: Okay. Well, actually, what it is, we’ve been talking about McCain since the Black Tuesday, and I had some —

RUSH: Black Tuesday. (laughing)

CALLER: Anyway, my initial response was I guess liberal because I was emotional and I was wondering, ‘How can I vote for this man?’ You had a call from a lady last week who kind of said the same thing and she wouldn’t vote for him and all that. And then I got over the liberalism started thinking, as conservatives are supposed to, and I remembered some things — you remember this — Alan Cranston and Ed Zschau. And now we have Feinstein and Boxer. And it can get worse, unlike people said years ago, can’t get any worse. It can.

RUSH: You know, John, you are a smart cookie. You are also very, very diplomatic, because you could be nailing me to the wall on this if you wanted to, with my own words. Let me explain, John, thank you. I’m going to answer your question, I’m going to explain what he’s talking about. Back in 1986 there was a moderate Republican from San Francisco, a businessman named Ed Zschau, and he was running against Alan Cranston of Jurassic Park for the United States Senate. Yeah, it was ’86. The year is crucial because it involves the Bork fiasco. The Republicans in California, many of the evangelical fundamentalist Christians would not vote for Zschau because he was pro-choice, wouldn’t go anywhere near Zschau. So Cranston won reelection, and it was close. It was a close race, and a lot of people thought if just a smidgen of the conservative Republicans who were opposed to Zschau on abortion would have voted for him and held their nose, that we could have had a Republican. This is what John from Yuba City said, because he remembers me talking about this. I was excoriating some of these conservatives for being single issue and shortsighted. I said, ‘Look what happened, you kept Zschau out of there, but you kept Cranston in there,’ and shortly after that Reagan nominated Bork, and you see what happened.

Now, the one Senator might not have made a difference, but we do know that Zschau, a freshman senator, would have probably supported Reagan in his nomination of Bork. We don’t know that, but that was my guess. So what John’s saying here, ‘Look, you said if you end up doing what the Republicans did out there, you elect Alan Cranston, the same thing is going to happen here, if you don’t get on board McCain, you’re going to elect a Democrat.’ And he wants to know, ‘What’s the difference here, Mr. Limbaugh?’ And here’s the difference. The Zschau situation was a single-issue situation. And at the time, nobody knew that it might be a relevant factor that Reagan was going to nominate Bork and that Reagan could have used all the Republicans in the Senate he could get. In this case we’re not talking about a single issue. We’re talking ten to 12 issues. We’re talking about the presidency, John, where our candidate seeks victory not by coalescing the Republican Party and all of its parts behind him; he wants to go out and get Democrats and independents, which are the same thing, if you ask me, and liberals, to join the Republican Party and give him his margin of victory, not as Republicans voting for him, but as Democrats. I don’t think the situation here is analogous, if you will, but you raise a good point, and your memory is profound. He’s been listening for 22 years, and I appreciate that. I really do, John. Thanks much.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Look, my Ed Zschau theory is all wet anyway because we don’t know how he would have voted. Six Republicans voted against Bork, including John Warner. I have since grown and learned from that, so disregard my stupid theory back then.