RUSH: New York Post, Page Six, gossip column: ”McCain Squad Out-Talks O’s’ — If only John McCain could use surrogates instead of having to debate Barack Obama in person. The other day in Toronto, McCain’s team, his foreign-policy adviser Niall Ferguson and conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, crushed the Obama squad — Samantha Power, who had to step down from his campaign after calling Hillary Clinton ‘a monster,’ and Richard Holbrooke, who was Bill Clinton’s UN ambassador. Before the debate, only 21 percent of the audience agreed with the motion that ‘the world is a safer place with a Republican in the White House.’ Two hours later, the mostly liberal, anti-George Bush crowd had a profound change of heart: 43 percent ended up voting for the motion. ‘Was it simply that Power was the weakest of the speakers on the stage?’ columnist Shinan Govani wondered. ‘Or did it point to a weakness in the Obama brand?’ Power, a Pulitzer-winning Harvard professor, left ‘shocked and visibly downbeat,’ Govani reports. ‘What happened?’ she was heard asking.’
Wrong question from this typically left-wing journalist. The question is not, was it simply that Power was the weakest of the speakers, or did it point to the weakness of the Obama brand? No, what this points to is a weakness in liberalism! Let me tell you, I didn’t even know this was going to happen, but Krauthammer and Niall Ferguson apparently wiped out the Obama team in a debate on the whole concept of who keeps the country safer. What this does underscores the point that it is not our ideas that are in trouble, it is our advocates. We don’t have anybody in the elected Republican leadership saying obviously what Krauthammer said and Niall Ferguson said. They go in there to a den of liberals and they convince 50% of them to change their minds in two hours, against the supposed brilliance of someone from Harvard. And who can deny, ladies and gentlemen, the brilliance of Richard Holbrooke? Ahem. What this means is that if you are inarticulate about our principles, or if you are surrendering our principles, you are going to lose the debate. If you are confident and articulate about our principles, you will win the debate.
McCain is less articulate, less coherent about this stuff than his own surrogates. That’s the real frustrating thing. Isn’t it for all of you frustrating as well just as it is for me? We know our ideas have not gone south. We know our ideas haven’t been rejected. We just don’t have anybody that can articulate them. We don’t have anybody that wants to articulate ’em, apparently. And even if we had somebody that wants to, I don’t know who out there can, uh, in politics. So that’s the lesson here. I mean, this is a confidence builder as far as I’m concerned in the sense that in the arena of ideas, you get somebody who knows what we believe and can articulate it with passion and with confidence and optimism, slam-dunk. Liberals want no part of these kinds of debates, either in Congress or anywhere else. In fact, I mentioned moments ago the idea that the Democrats want to shut down the military from doing any press conferences on the basis that it is propaganda. The reason they want to shut the military down, the reason they don’t want to allow a press conference by the military is simply because they don’t want the truth out. They have the lies of the Iraq war and the war on terror under control, from both themselves and their buddies in the Drive-By Media.
Now, Lance Fairchok, the American Thinker, wrote about this. He said: ‘In the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people, the Democrats work hard to silence information that undermines their agenda, and they’re winning. While the military fights for victory, Democrats plot their defeat, not on the battlefield, but in the minds of the very citizens they serve. In this, they diminish us as a nation and inch us ever closer to defeat. The political fight for America’s access to the truth, whatever the source, is one battle the military cannot fight for us. They have to remain apolitical. This is a fight we, the people must win for them.’ It’s absolutely true. We’re the ones that have to sing their praises. We’re the ones that have to tell the truth about them. The Democrats do not want to allow them to have press conferences– (interruption) that’s a good point, since we are winning in Iraq. That’s no coincidence, by the way, that Pelosi has come up with the idea to ban Pentagon press conferences, ’cause here we are in the middle of winning, and they can’t afford, as I told you, their whole future is invested in the concept of defeat, that we’ve already lost, that we cannot win. The worst thing that could happen to these people is if word gets out that we are.
Now, they can trust their buddies in the Drive-By Media, and they can trust the people that they control in the House and the Senate, but they can’t trust the military, so shut ’em up. Same thing with talk radio, and here we have this example in Toronto of this debate with the proposition being Republicans keep the country safer, an audience of libs, and they go from 21% to 43% accepting the proposal. If we can get people that can say what we believe, can articulate it, we’ll win most of the time. That’s really what is so frustrating.