RUSH: I want to go back to the archives of this program. I want to illustrate for you my prescience. When I tell you that you are on the cutting edge of the societal evolution if you are a regular listener here, this will establish it. October 18th, 2006. This is prior to the November elections, the midterms, and I was getting phone call after phone call from conservatives saying they were not going to vote. They were mad as hell. They were sick and tired of the Foley thing and Macaca. They were sick and tired of Republicans not governing as Republicans, and to hell with it, and this is what I said to them.
RUSH ARCHIVES: This notion that it doesn’t matter who wins because the Democrats aren’t going to have a big enough majority? That’s going to lead to another thing that I will share with you. It’s going to lead to the nomination of John McCain for the Republican presidential candidacy. In two years, you same people who will have helped bring about an ascension to power by the Democrats, are going to be so angry — you’re going to be so fed up — over what they have tried to do, over the things they will maybe have accomplished, that you are going to demand power back, and you will accept anybody that you think has a chance of winning it. And right now, that looks like McCain, above anybody else — who, I must tell you, is not a conservative. And so what are you probably going to end up doing? You’re going to be so frustrated by 2008, and the thought of Hillary Clinton becoming president so obnoxious, so abhorrent; that in 2008 you will flush your precious principles down the drain and elect a Republican, precisely the kind of Republican you think you’re running against now — or you will at least nominate one. Who knows how that election will go? So the very principle that you are fighting here, if you succeed, you will be given a candidate who fits the very thing you’re angry about: somebody who’s not conservative enough but probably has the best chance of winning.
RUSH: That was me on October 18th, 2006 — from this very studio, from behind this very microphone — telling you what was going to happen if you sat out the ’06 November midterms to show those Republicans a lesson, that you were going to empower Democrats and they’re going to make you so mad over the things they try to do, and you’re going to be so upset and so frightened of Hillary coming along that you will nominate anybody you think can win — and I specifically predicted, October 18th, 2006, that not voting in 2006 and not holding the House and not holding the Senate, would lead to the nomination of John McCain. It has happened. Don’t doubt me. I want to take this a step further. Now that I have your attention, I want to take this a step further, because McCain is the Republican nominee. It is over. Huckabee is going to stay in. There are five caucuses and primaries this weekend, and Tuesday’s a biggie, and he’ll stay in to see how he does there, but he’s going to have to get out, too. But he’s going to do what he can to keep angling for the veep slot. He has no chance of getting the veep slot.
He will soon be thrown under the Straight Talk Express like everyone else that Senator McCain vanquishes. But I want to share with you a story from Congressional Quarterly. This is from yesterday by John Bicknell. He’s a Congressional Quarterly columnist. ‘Picture a President John McCain, next January, making his first appeal to Congress. What might that message entail? Certainly, it will include something about Iraq, and the war on terror, and other elements of national security and defense that will put him at odds with the majority Democrats. But then, the new president will turn his attention to his domestic agenda. And he likely will be facing a Congress with larger majorities of Democrats than it now has. The electoral math all but guarantees Democratic gains in the Senate. The House looks pretty good for them, too. If President McCain wants legislative victories, he will have to turn to those majorities to get them enacted. And he will be happy to do so. That’s how McCain has always operated, and there is no reason to believe that if he becomes president, he will operate in any other manner.
‘Conservatives who have opposed McCain during the campaign have cited his positions on a range of issues — immigration, campaign finance, climate change, tax cuts, legal rights for detainees — where he has sided with Democrats. But the positions McCain has taken are only part of the problem for conservatives. As president, with a Democratic Congress, it is the other part — the stylistic part — that will prove to be a much greater problem for conservatives. When McCain has been on the conservative side, as he has been on the vast majority of issues, he gives it full-throated support. He is not afraid of giving offense to appropriators when he sticks up for cutting spending,’ except voting for the spending, for the stimulus package, ‘and he has not been shy about deriding Democrats who oppose the war in Iraq, to cite two potent examples. But when he is with the Democrats, he is really with them. McCain is not someone who simply reaches across the aisle to form coalitions with the other side. He walks across the aisle, puts on the other team’s uniform and sings the other team’s fight song. If he wants to accomplish things — and every president wants to accomplish things — he will have to do so on the Democrats’ terms. That means his agenda will include those things on which he agrees with the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate: A cap and trade regime for climate change,’ which is going to be a huge energy cost increase. ‘Expansion…’ You know, the Democrats want to expand McCain-Feingold regulations for campaign finance. McCain will go along. He will not go against his signature issue. ‘Expanded legal rights for enemy combatants, and probably the closing of Guantanamo.’ The Democrats want that. McCain agrees with them. That will happen. ‘Comprehensive immigration overhaul, with a guest worker program and a path to citizenship for the millions of illegal immigrants already in the country.’
The Democrats want that; so does McCain. With a Democrat Congress, he’s going to get it. ‘This will not be a ‘reaching across the aisle.’ This will be a full partnership of the president and the Congress, who just happen to be of different parties. The shrunken GOP minority in the Senate might serve as a brake, especially on immigration. But it will be only a brake, not a standing astride history yelling ‘stop!’ Certainly, on other issues, McCain will fight with the Democrats. On the Iraq war, on taxes, on spending, the relationship will be more typical of that between a Republican president and a Democratic Congress. In his victory speech on Super Tuesday, McCain laid out his GOP credentials,’ and they quote him here. The thing goes on to say, ‘between now and November, John McCain can make all the speeches and do all the reaching out he deems necessary to assuage the concerns of his conservative base. He can even turn his considerable skills at political combat against the Democrats. It might help get him elected or it might not. If it does, come next January, he still will have to begin governing in the face of wider Democrat majorities in Congress, and he still will have to choose between success and failure. In that instance, he will choose success.’
Success for presidents is defined, at least in the case of modern presidents, by passing legislation. Get this bill passed. Get that bill passed. Show that you can work with Congress. Show that you can get things done. Show that you can reach across the aisle. That’s the definition of success. Not standing for principles, not moving the other side to your side, but going along with the other side so you can advance their agenda in order to say, you got things done. ‘When that happens,’ writes John Bicknell at the Congressional Quarterly, ‘the conservatives in the Republican Party will really have something to be mad about.’ As I said in my little sound bite here from October 18th of 2006: Sitting out those elections and letting the Democrats have a majority in the House and Senate, is one of the many things that has led us to exactly where we are. And if you have been upset over the last two years of the Democrats in Congress, House and Senate, even though they haven’t gotten much done, you’ve been upset with what they want to try, what they want to accomplish, the rhetoric they’ve been using. Imagine ten months from now, somebody in the White House who’s going to agree with them on a lot of those things.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: No. No, no, no, no. Don’t misunderstand. The point of the story, the point of all of that in the last segment, I’m sorry I didn’t make this clear, is you cannot sit out the House and Senate elections. We cannot simply sit here and let whatever disappointment we have over the presidential primary result take us out of the House and Senate races. This is a time, folks, for you to start paying attention to who in your state legislatures are tax cutters, culturally correct, the things that you think define conservatism, because these are the people that are going to be running for the House someday. These are the people who are going to need support. This is going to be rebuilding something bottom up. Going back to my sound bite with the prediction, eerily, eerily, eerily prescient saying sitting out the ’06 elections is going to give us McCain, and it has. If you sit out this election on the House and Senate side, you’re just going to get a bigger Democrat majority than otherwise is scheduled to happen, and you’re going to be frustrated all over again, because while you think you’ve beaten Hillary, and you have with McCain, if that happens, you’re going to get a president that sees his success as not only getting along with Democrats, but walking across the aisle and enacting their bills, because that’s how presidents these days define getting things done. That’s how they define success. So that was the point of telling you the previous story and sharing with you the Congressional Quarterly column. Now, let’s go back once again to me. This is just yesterday on this program. But this is what I said to you about the way McCain intends to expand the party.
RUSH ARCHIVE: This confusion, this mess, contrary to the take of the Drive-By Media, this mess that conservatism, slash, Republican Partyism finds itself in today, is a reaction to the establishment Republicans who have ignored conservative principles and watered down their party for the last decade or more, and their failures. This mess has resulted from them, their failures, and their false promises. And these very same people now, who are the big-tent guys, which resulted in — and, by the way, I’m all for big tent, but you bring people in as us, not as them. Don’t misunderstand. Nothing exclusionary about me. You want to expand the party, I’m all for it. It’s what we’ve been trying to do here in fact, with conservatism! These very same people now who sought to expand the party by essentially marginalizing conservatives and bringing in their buddies, the moderates, the independents, even some liberals are now demanding that the people they took for granted — us, and the evangelicals and so forth — continue to follow them, continue to be swayed by their demeaning and condescending lectures.
RUSH: All right, so this is the lament. You’ve heard it all week, this is how we’re growing the Republican Party, we’re growing it, we’re putting in the big tent. We’re bringing in all these independents, liberals, and moderates as liberals, independents, and moderates. Last night, CNN, Anderson Cooper 360, fill-in host John King speaking with his fiancée, a reporterette, Dana Bash, about Senator McCain’s problems with conservatives. John King says to his fiancée, ‘If some conservatives stay home and are still mad where we’ve seen the Democrat turnout significantly higher, don’t they have a problem?’
BASH: I was on his bus and he was talking about this, what he says is we’re not going to run George Bush’s campaign in that what he tried to do, remember, John, in 2000-2004 was really try to galvanize the base in some of these swing states. He says I’m going to bank on the fact that I have proven that I can win with independent voters and bring more people into the party. It’s going to defy recent history, but that is more and more what we’re going to see and hear from John McCain in the days ahead.
RUSH: You didn’t need to hear it from Dana Bash, fiancée of John King at CNN. I’ve been blaring this from the EIB mountaintop for weeks. What I have been trying to do with all of this, and don’t misinterpret this, I don’t know any way to say it right now because I want to get to the phone calls here. I have been trying to protect and save the way this party is defined, and when I say this party is not going to look like it does in either the election or nomination of Huckabee or McCain would change the structure of the party, this is the exact kind of thing I’m talking about. Here’s Dana Bash on McCain’s Straight Talk Express, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to go the Bush route. I’m not going to try to galvanize the base. I’m going to bring in independents and moderates, that’s my strength.’ So just get ready, folks. You’re looking at it through the tunnel vision of defeating Hillary. If that happens, I’m just warning you, you’re going to call here and get mad at me starting next February, might not take the call. What, Snerdley? What? Snerdley, it just gets worse and worse. It is what it is, and this is exactly what I’ve been trying to say it is, and I’m just giving you a heads-up. If it’s Hillary, and McCain beats her — Cookie, I want you to flag this entire segment. What is this, February 8th, 2008, save it for one year from now. Flag it, save it. Send me an extra dupe copy so I can have it here on my studio computer.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: That’s exactly what I meant. When I said to Howard Kurtz for publication last Tuesday, if I think there’s going to be very little difference between a McCain, Obama, or Hillary presidency and it’s going to give us a bunch of stuff, it’s going to take the country down the tubes, I’d just as soon the Democrats take the hit. And this Congressional Quarterly piece which spells out exactly what it’s going to be like if there’s a majority in the House or Senate of Democrats, larger than it is now, with a President McCain who’s very comfortable walking across the aisle and dealing with them, I’m just warning you, get ready, you’re going to watch all this Democrat stuff get enacted like expansion of McCain-Feingold, the amnesty bill will come back, it will get done somehow, because the Democrats are going to want it. You’re going to have the global warming fiasco of McCain-Lieberman. The Democrats are going to want that. You’re not going to be able to do anything about it because you’re going to have a Republican president there that you’re not going to be able to really roundly criticize and nor will the Republicans in the House or Senate be able to do much about it because you can’t criticize the head of your own party when he’s the president. ‘Well, Rush it’s too late now.’ It is what it is. I’m just telling you, I’m warning you to get ready attitudinally, emotionally when all this stuff starts coming down the pike if Senator McCain wins.
By the way, we had a little audio technical malfunction here the last couple of days. The speakers here in the studio did not mute when the mic went on, so your yelling and screaming at me was heard by the audience. A little off mic, put they still heard it. It was G-rated, but I got a number of e-mails, ‘Somebody is actually talking to you. I thought you were just doing that for artistic, creative reasons.’ (interruption) What do you want now? What’s the question? Hm-hm. Hm-hm. The question Mr. Snerdley is asking, cannot Republicans in the House and Senate during a McCain presidency, can’t they go be mavericks and disagree with the president and oppose what he wants to do? How many have done it via President Bush? McCain’s been the only maverick. In the House they gotta run every two years, and if you start criticizing and attacking your president, then the RNC is going to call you up and say, ‘You want some help with your reelection campaign? You want some campaign contributions from outside your district?’ You know, the party loyalty thing is very, very difficult. This is why I contend to you, this is why the Republicans in the House took the heat for not being conservative enough, it was McCain who was the one that was not conservative. He got away with it. He didn’t pay a price for his maverickism.
The Republicans in the House had to go along with the White House, just the way things are, they take the heat for not being conservative enough. ‘They didn’t do what they said they were going to do when we elected them. They didn’t govern as conservatives.’ Well, they had a Republican president not as conservative as they were and they had to fall in line with party loyalty. Besides, what do you think President McCain would do with a series or a number of maverick Republicans in the Congress? Try to crush ’em like bugs. He’d make even more deals with the Democrats just to embarrass them and make ’em look like even more marginalized losers and so forth. Folks, it’s done. I’m not saying vote against McCain, none of that. I’m not saying vote Hillary. Don’t misconstrue what I’m saying. I’m just telling you, if, if, if McCain happens to beat Hillary, becomes president, I just want you to know what I said today, because you have to keep in mind you’re going to feel frosted and mad about a year from now, maybe 14 months from now.