Mrs. Clinton Didn’t Endorse Obama

RUSH: I hope that you had a great weekend. I certainly did. No, Snerdley, she didn’t endorse Obama. Everybody is missing what happened Saturday with Mrs. Clinton. She said the words, but she didn’t endorse Obama.

I tuned in Saturday morning and I wanted to see this because I had seen throughout the weekend, on Friday anyway, Friday afternoon, that the Drive-Bys , particularly CNN and DNCTV, MSNBC, were covering this withdraw from the race unbelievably like it was a funeral, like it was a major major event in the world and it was so overblown and so overdone. So I got up and true to form, an hour and a half before she’s scheduled to show up, we are getting these analysis of what she might say, what she’s going to say and so forth. It was just so over the top; it was irrational, and then she’s 40 minutes late. She hangs around in her home somewhere in Washington and then they started speculating, ‘Whoa, this is really disrespectful to her audience, perhaps a little disrespectful to Obama.’ She’s supposed to withdraw at noon. She finally showed up and started speaking at 12:45.

Peggy Noonan wrote about this for the New York Post and I have to agree with a couple of things she said, number one, if you watch this — and I’m a student of the Clintons, and Peggy Noonan is right about this — when Mrs. Clinton was talking about herself, she was radiant, buoyant. She was gesticulating. She was smiling. When it came time to mention, not endorse, mention Obama, she read. There was no gesticulation. There was no animation. There weren’t any smiles. A couple of smiles here and there, sort of like a McCain teleprompter smile it didn’t fit when she did it. The other key thing — and this I noticed — you show up at a place to get out of the race, and by the way, you know the place they did this, the National Building Museum, was the same location the National Review’s 50th anniversary bash was held, and I sat there at Mr. Buckley’s table with Kay Bailey Hutchison and Joe Lieberman. It was a black-tie event and it’s a beautiful place, a beautiful building, but if you’re going to announce that you’re getting out of the race, I don’t care where you hold it, whoever shows up is a bunch of stick-with-you-to-the-end diehards. These are people that don’t want to give up. These are people that don’t want to quit. Why go to someone’s appearance where they say, ‘No mas, I’m out of here. It’s over with.’ Why go to that unless you’re a true believer?

So in that audience we had true believers. She mentioned Obama’s name 15 times. She knew that every time she mentioned Obama’s name because of the nature of that crowd that there were going to be people in there that would boo, and there were. And the boos were even audible to me and I am deaf. I turned up the sound. Normally I watch television with closed captioning because the noise emanating is just noise to me when you’ve got crowds cheering and all of that. But I turned it up, and I went into a room that I have ‘acousticized,’ if that’s a word. It has fabric on the wall so everything gets absorbed, the sound doesn’t reverb. I watched it in there and I could hear the boos and she made it a point. Now, if you are Mrs. Clinton and you are serious about unifying the party and bringing the party together and you know that your crowd’s not happy about what you’re going to do, that you’re going to quit and they don’t like Obama, you only mention his name once or twice, not 15 times. She gave that crowd 15 opportunities to boo Barak Obama. And they did.

The Drive-Bys tried to ignore it, but as unusual the bloggers caught it, forcing the Drive-Bys to admit it and then ignore it. I’m sitting there watching this and there’s simply no way that this was a genuine — she said the words, but she’s looking down as she reads them, and then looks up at the audience in sort of a joker kind of smile kind of permanently on the face, an inanimate smile. I was watching this, and I’m listening to the Drive-Bys, particularly on NBC, and they’re just having orgasms. ‘Oh, this is great, this is wonderful. The party is coming together,’ and all of this and all of that. And I’m saying, ‘You guys are so blind and so susceptible to the conventional wisdom. We’re talking about a Clinton here. The Clintons don’t go away.’ You’d have to show them a cross at sunup two inches from their eyes and even then they wouldn’t go away. They would snatch the cross out from your hand, and they would stomp on it — a little Dracula reference for those of you in Rio Linda.

She didn’t release her delegates. Hold onto them, hells bells. And she can go out and she can raise money. She has to retire her debt and so forth. She can do that up till the convention. She held on to her delegates, meaning if Obama slips and falls, and he is. Obama is slipping and falling all over the place.