Mrs. Clinton’s Victory Speech

RUSH: Birmingham, Alabama, this is Kathy. Nice to have you on Open Line Friday. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I’m a first-time caller and listening for the past 17 years.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: And hi to my dad who is in upper peninsula of Michigan in freezing, snowy temperatures. But I had an opinion of her, Hillary’s — I don’t know what you call her speech, her moving on to New Hampshire speech, maybe? That from a female point of view, I feel like she’s on the verge of either a screeching rant or tears.

RUSH: You mean her acceptance speech, her victory speech last night?

CALLER: Is that what it was?

RUSH: Well, that’s what she tried to make it look like, yeah, absolutely, it was her victory speech.

CALLER: I feel like she was holding back.

RUSH: Well, look, the Clintons are very slick. The objective of the Hillary speech last night was to try to convince anybody watching that she had won. No, I kid you not. If you didn’t see it and you think that, okay, she loses by nine points, you think, Rush, you couldn’t possibly be right. Nineteen-and-a-half years, how can any of you ever disagree with me about anything anymore? That’s another thing that stumps me, but for another time, that is. She tried to claim victory. Everything was ‘we.’ We Democrats did it tonight. We Democrats realize we want a Democrat in the White House. We Democrats realize how great it was to have a Democrat in the White House. We Democrats are going to move on to New Hampshire. She congratulated Obama. She congratulated the Breck Girl. It was only toward the end that she started using the personal pronoun ‘I’ and talked about moving on to New Hampshire and this sort of stuff. It was interesting to look at the people standing behind Mrs. Clinton. They were all relics of the nineties. You had Bill Clinton on her left, and he was not acknowledged. She did not thank him; she did not reference him. Standing next to him was Chelsea. But the camera never put her in the close-up.

Only when they showed a wide shot of the stage did you see Chelsea standing there. But in a close-up, it was Madeleine Albright, moving from left to right here on the screen, Madeleine Albright, and I’m sorry, folks, but you look at all these relics of the nineties, and Clinton’s talking about change — it isn’t going to fly. Then you had a bunch of union people back there, and then you had Mrs. Clinton and Bill. Bill is standing with that little grin that he gets on his face, and he’s applauding and so forth and nodding his head up and down, and I listened to some of the Drive-Bys last night, ‘Oh, we can see the wheels turning inside that fertile brain of Bill Clinton. You can just see the strategy coming together even now as his wife is up there making her speech,’ and so forth. They’ve got this notion that there’s magic inside Clinton, Inc., and that it was in the process of being formed in the mind of Bill Clinton last night while Hillary is up there — grab audio sound bite 16. This is Andrea Mitchell, and this is about an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half before Mrs. Clinton went out and tried to claim victory.

MITCHELL: This room was, until about five or six minutes ago, completely empty. This is like a manufactured post-celebration. It really felt more like a funeral as people started strolling in from upstairs where they had obviously been gathered. This is unlike anything that I’ve ever seen, completely empty, dirge-like event and clearly now they’ve gotta go on to New Hampshire.

RUSH: It was a funeral; it was dirge-like; it was empty; it was a manufactured separation. There was some noise when Mrs. Clinton tried to give an acceptance speech, but when you got to Obama and when you got to Huckabee, you could see genuine enthusiasm, genuine emotion, genuine energy. In the Clinton room, it was contrived. This was devastating. I don’t care what people say, this was the worst night of her life last night, perhaps second only to some nights in the second term. This is the first time the Clintons have been shellacked in an election, folks, since 1988. This is the first time they have not won an election.