Clinton Inc. Takes on Obama

RUSH: Now, here’s this Dick Morris piece. It’s at Fox News and was published way back on the 22nd, and I just now have been made aware of it. So it is clear this piece was published prior to Mrs. Bill Clinton’s big fundraising sweep out in Beverly Hills over the weekend in California. ‘They were supposed to be the A Team in American politics. The Clinton Machine that inspired fear and admiration throughout the political world. They had guided Hillary through two successful Senate races in a state where she had never lived and helped her recover from scandals that nearly crippled her — the pardons, the White House gifts, the Peter Paul fundraiser. They seemed invincible. But ever since the presidential campaign started, the Clinton operation has looked amateurish, flat-footed, defensive, and tactically clumsy. They don’t seem to be at all ready for the big time. Obama has repeatedly outmaneuvered Hillary’s campaign,’ well, the stories today are just the opposite.

The stories today are that Obama is making ‘rookie mistakes.’ He did make a rookie mistake. They’re not really holding him to this, but in some campaign appearance somewhere he went out and started ripping to shreds a Senate bill he’d voted for. He either forgot he voted for it or he didn’t think anybody would look up that he had voted for it or whatever. I don’t even remember what the bill was. But it’s these kinds of mistakes. Now they’re starting to ask questions: ‘Is Obama All Style and Little Substance?’ This is our old pal Nedra Pickler in the AP. ‘The voices are growing louder asking the question: Is Barack Obama all style and little substance?’

You know, the question could be asked of Mr. Bill Clinton.

By the way, I have a revision, ladies and gentlemen. Not a substitution, but a revision and an addition to my own announced theory as to why Hillary is the presumptive Democrat nominee. To give you the short version, I have suggested that she’s just entitled. She’s owed this because of the life she sacrificed, her own life, which could have been far greater than it is now. If she had just stuck to her feminist ideals and gone out there pursued her own interests rather than get hooked up with this hayseed from Arkansas, and tried to take over wherever he ended up. But I think there’s a new way to look at Hillary’s candidacy as well, and Bob Tyrrell makes this point. He’s got his book out called ‘The Clinton Crackup.’ Tyrrell is the editor, the owner, the publisher, the grand pooh-bah of the American Spectator. His theory is that Hillary Clinton represents the last gasp of the sixties radicals to have their vision of the future, back in the sixties, in the White House.

That’s why this election is crucial. I’m one of these people who grew up in the sixties, but not all people in the sixties — not all baby boomers sixties people — were anti-war leftists and communists and people that hated America. There are plenty of them that are Reaganites, like me. Tyrrell’s theory is that this election in 2008, the presidential race, is the last election of this generation of people where the left’s candidate — well, his point is, if you take Hillary out of the race, who else in that crowd represents the sixties idealism that fostered all the anti-war rallies and all of the anti-America stuff?

If she loses, that’s it for that crowd in terms of the presidential race. Not that they’re going to be out of power in Washington, because these people are entrenched in the bureaucracies. For that reason, Tyrrell says — in addition to my own well-developed and unassailable theory; in addition to mine, Tyrrell’s theory is — that Hillary represents the sixties radicals, and she’s it. So this is a seminal election where this generation has finally grown up and reached its last-gasp effort to shape the country in its own image from the sixties. Anyway, it’s an interesting theory.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The story here about Obama, is a Mike Allen story at The Politico.com: ‘Rookie Mistakes Plague Obama — Speaking early this month at a church in Selma, Ala., Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said: ‘I’m in Washington. I see what’s going on. I see those powers and principalities have snuck back in there, that they’re writing the energy bills and the drug laws.’ It was a fine populist riff calculated to appeal to Democratic audiences as Obama seeks his party’s presidential nomination. But not only did Obama vote for the Senate’s big energy bill in 2005, he also put out a press release bragging about its provisions, and his Senate Web site carries a news article about the vote headlined, ‘Senate energy bill contains goodies for Illinois.’ The press release said he voted for the bill ‘reluctantly’ because he wanted something ‘bolder,’ and his staff says there was nothing inconsistent about the comment in Selma.’ So that’s where he generated the headline, ‘Rookie Mistakes Plague Obama.’ This Nedra Pickler story is much the same thing, ‘Is Obama All Style and Little Substance?’ I tell you, Dick Morris writing that Clinton, Inc. is down, is wandering off the reservation. I think both of these stories are Clinton, Inc. inspired. Nedra Pickler today, ‘Is Obama All Style and Little Substance? — Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, the only other candidate to serve less time in elective office than Obama, described in detail his health care plan to provide insurance for all Americans. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a written plan yet, but no one questions her expertise, since she was the chief proponent of the issue during her husband’s presidency.’ Well, see, no one questions her expertise. Why the hell not? Why does Obama have his expertise questioned? I’m talking about the Democrat side now, with the Drive-By Media. Why is it that Obama gets his expertise questioned and Hillary doesn’t, even though Hillary has no plan? She has no plan, but nobody questions her ‘expertise.’ Her expertise ought to be questioned because the plan she proposed was totally exposed, and it went down to a screaming defeat and was a seminal factor in the Democrats losing the House of Representatives in 1994. She had no experience in working with bureaucracies and committees and so forth in order to get something like this done. She went up there as Lady Godiva and was just going to get it all done on the power of her personality and the fact that she was co-president. By the way, she has said essentially that what she’s going to do is revive her own plan, maybe update it for a few things, but if she’s elected she’s going to implement the plan which already failed miserably. But these two stories are classic illustrations of how Hillary gets a pass on the same things that other candidates are being criticized for. Nedra Pickler writes, ‘If Obama were running in a different time, he might get more of a break for lacking specifics.’ What’s that got to do with it? He doesn’t offer specifics. (A lot of people think that he is, by the way.) He doesn’t offer specifics. If there’s somebody not offering specifics about anything on anything, it’s Mrs. Bill Clinton. But she has the presumed expertise, don’t you see? Going back to Bob Tyrrell’s theory, I think it’s one of the reasons his theory holds. The Drive-Bys are largely compromised of the same generational types, these sixties types that the Clintons come from, and they are one and the same. Clinton is these people. Mrs. Clinton is these people. People often ask, ‘Why does Hollywood like the Clintons so much, particularly Bill?’ He’s one of them, folks. He’s one of those guys. Bill Clinton and Monica and Kathleen Willey, why, that’s a license for all the guys in Hollywood to keep doing what they’re doing. If the guy at the top is doing it, that couldn’t be better for them. He’s exactly like one of those guys. It’s not so much ideology, although that’s a factor. You can’t ignore it, but it’s more a cultural and behavioral thing. That’s why he’s such a hero. People ask me all the time, ‘Well, how come Hollywood people like a guy that sounds like a hayseed hick, some southern guy that has this accent like that,’ because Hollywood hates those people, they think they’re all Christians. They think they’re those right-wing Christians that want everybody to burn in hell. ‘But how come Bill Clinton…?’ The way you could identify Clinton with one of these fundamentalist Christians in terms of how his character, behavior, and so forth, is Clinton gives these guys a license to steal. Just the fact that he’s dating while he’s married will be enough to seal the deal for him. In fact, they’re jealous of him. They’re actually jealous. He’s one of those guys. It’s really no more complicated than that.