OBAMA: We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. (laughter) They’re gonna…. They’re going to say, ‘You know what, he’s — he’s — he’s young, inexperienced, and, uh, uh, he’s got a funny name. Did I mention he’s black? (cheers and applause) (Obama laughs) He’s got a feisty wife.
RUSH: Were you able to understand that? You weren’t? Come on, Snerdley, we added some sound effects to make it sound like the messiah was speaking, but we thought you could still hear what he was saying. You didn’t understand what he said? Well, okay, then I’ll translate it. He said, ‘We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. They’re going to try and say, ‘You know what? He’s young and inexperienced. He’s gotta funny name. Did I mention he’s black? He’s got a feisty wife.” This guy, ladies and gentlemen, is diabolical. Barack Obama will do and say anything. This is a disgrace, and people should be furious with this kind of thing. It is the Democrat Party that brought up race.
All of the racism, all of the sexism, all of these things that supposedly the Republicans are guilty of and that the country is guilty of, were on full display during the Democrat primaries. Barack Obama is out there virtually ignoring the fact that it was the Clintons and any number of other Democrats who were pointing out he’s not black enough. It was Democrats and liberals who started the whole refrain, ‘Is he authentic?’ meaning has he been down for the civil rights struggle. They are the ones! The Reverend Jackson reference by the Clintons, North Carolina. (doing Clinton impression) ‘Hey, of course they know he’s gonna win here. Jesse Jackson won here. He’s black!’ You know Clinton was right. They played the race card on him — and, of course, the sexism and so forth.
Meanwhile, while all this has been going on, John McCain has been doing everything he can to distance himself from anything that mentioned Obama’s middle name; Obama’s race or what have you. He’s made it plain he doesn’t want to go there, and yet here is the disgraceful Barack Obama coming out, doing and saying anything, making it up. In fact, what you might even be able to conclude from this is that it is Obama who is playing the race card himself, and he’s trying to evoke sympathy. I don’t know anybody who’s talking about race when it comes to Obama on our side. Do you? Everybody on our side is scared to death to say anything about Obama! I don’t know who’s bringing this up. I don’t know anybody who’s talking about him being a Muslim. Who’s doing that? But he’s out there saying, ‘They’re going to call me…’ Who on our side is doing that? Do you know anybody? I don’t know anybody saying that, anybody that matters.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So Obama is out there accusing the Republicans of playing the race card. He did this in Florida on Friday. ‘They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. They’re going to try and say, ‘You know what? He’s young and inexperienced. He’s gotta funny name. Did I mention he’s black? He’s got a feisty wife.” By the way, the Atlanta Urinal-Constipation Saturday — speaking of ‘feisty wife’ — it’s a blog. ‘Michelle Obama has been the recipient of rougher treatment than her husband for a reason, the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference said Saturday. One [of the Obamas] has ancestors who were slaves and the other doesn’t,’ and that’s the reason, ‘said Charles Steele Jr., president and CEO of the decades-old, Atlanta-based civil rights group.’
I told you.! See? This is the bottom line. Everybody says, ‘Rush, you gotta understand here. If Obama wins, we have crossed the threshold. We have reached the Promised Land. We have reached the mountaintop! There will no longer be any valid charges of racism.’ No way, folks. It’s going to get worse. Obama is playing the race card now saying any criticism of him is racist. Any mention of his name, any mention of his race, any mention of Michelle, it’s all racist. Now we got the Southern Christian Leadership Conference honcho saying, ‘Hey, nothing is changing. If Obama wins, nothing is changing here. We still need an outside voice,’ because he’s not black enough. He’s not authentic.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Charles Steele, Jr., has just said — if you know how to translate this stuff like I do, because I know liberals — he’s not black enough. He is ‘from the system.’ He is the ‘Magic Negro.’ He is the guy. He is the one that they’ve all been waiting for, guilty white liberals, can say, ‘Finally I can vote for a black guy, get over the guilt I feel for slavery that I had nothing to do with!’ But not so with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. These people don’t miss a trick, do they? (laughing) They don’t miss a beat! ‘Hey, you white people? You think Obama being elected is going to change things? You got another thing coming. (laughter) We’re still gonna need an outside voice. You’re still gonna hear from us.’ (laughter) Barack doesn’t have any slave history, but Michelle does, and that’s why people are supposedly ripping Michelle.
Mr. Steele, I don’t think you understand, to the extent that people are ripping Michelle Obama, it is only after she inserted herself into all this and started claiming that she was never proud of her country until the last year or so, and then when she’s out making speeches to poor people, she’s essentially telling them to stay that way and don’t have any higher aspirations. You have to understand something, Mr. Steele. When anybody… I don’t care who it is. I don’t care what their ethnicity, what their race, what their sexual or gender orientation happens to be. When somebody enters the presidential race and starts getting involved in it from the standpoint of ideas, people are going to react to it, and if you think that you guys can get away with shutting that down simply because — well, you might be with some of the Republican Party, but other people are not going to be intimidated by this. What? Not able to criticize anybody because of their name, not able to criticize anybody because of their skin color, and yet we are playing the race card?
But all that aside, this last sentence in this story is the piece de resistance: ‘The SCLC said his larger point was that — even should Obama win the presidency in November — the problems faced by African-Americans will still require an outside voice,’ cause Obama is not authentic. Obama is not really black. Obama does not have a slave past. He has no slavery in his bloodline. Well, you might say he’s got some Al Sharpton in him. Sharpton in the protest line, while Obama was in prep school. And naturally some of these guys feel sort of shoved out of the way by Obama. And so they’re making it plain. ‘Hey, hey, we kind of dig Michelle. She got slave past. She got slavery in her blood, but not this guy. They’re still going to need us to explain how things are not right racially in this country.’ Oh, we’re going to play you an audio sound bite of the Drive-Bys reacting to Obama throwing the race card. We have a montage here. This is from Friday through Sunday morning. Who do we have? We have Jack Cafferty, the old… He’s out of his mind. He’s the curmudgeon at CNN. We’ve got Gloria Borger. We got Ed Henry — all these people at CNN. We got Ann Curry of NBC. We got Howard Fineman from Newsweek. We got Scarborough. We got Mika Brzezinski. We’ve got Jon Meacham — and Obama They’re all responding to Obama, so Obama’s responding to himself here.
BORGER: Why not bring it up with a little bit of a sense of humor at this point?
HENRY: President Bush does that with humor.
CURRY: Obama addressed race at a fund-raiser in Florida using a little humor.
FINEMAN: Anything you can laugh at or with, you’re not afraid of. He’s really played it quite brilliantly.
SCARBOROUGH: That’s great stuff.
BRZEZINSKI: Wow.
MEACHAM: That’s one helluva of a good politician.
RUSH: Throwing the race card down and supposedly doing it with humor. In other words, telling lies about people is just fine with the Drive-Bys. They think it is a fabulous strategy and hilariously funny that Obama has called Republicans racists. Here’s Ben in Atlanta. Ben, I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. I think what this is all about is that the Republicans have not gotten involved in race, not talked about it. The only people talking about it are Obama’s camp and the Clintons. So they played a preemptive race card ’cause they got to drag the Republicans into this to get ’em where they want, which is away from the questionable radical associations of Pfleger and Wright and Ayers and get ’em on to the stuff that sells. Because I think they’re finding that reasonable, middle-class American blacks are turned off by all this radical stuff with Wright and Pfleger and they’ve gotta change the topic and get it on to something that they know is a winner, and the winner is race.
RUSH: Yeah, I don’t disagree with any of that. This is all part of the repackaging of Obama and so forth.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: But once again it does distort the whole thing. All of the racism was… If anybody played the race card on this guy, it was other Democrats.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: It was the Clintons. It was all over the place. I think it’s just deplorable what he’s doing. I don’t find it funny.
CALLER: When you do it this way and play the preemptive race card, you get to maintain your victim status and still get the first blow in —
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: — and say —
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: — those rascally Republicans!
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: You know what they’re going to do to me.
RUSH: Right. Right. Ben, thanks for the call. I just want to do something here, ladies and gentlemen. I just want you let you know it isn’t gonna work on this program. Just like I can hang around with liberal women and not be changed for good, I’m not intimidated by Barack Obama.
(playing of ‘Barack the ‘Magic Negro”)
RUSH: That’s the Reverend Al Sharpton singing ‘Barack the ‘Magic Negro,” which is all about the fact that Barack’s not authentic enough. He’s not black enough. And, lo and behold, the same point has been made by this guy Steele at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in which he says, ‘[S]hould Obama win the presidency in November the problems facing African-Americans will still require an outside voice,’ because Obama doesn’t have slave blood in him, but his wife, Michelle, does. Ain’t got no blood; ain’t got no slave blood. So the guy who first wrote this ‘Magic Negro’ column in the LA Times, David Ehrenstein, has been proven correct. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference has now said Obama’s not authentic, no slave blood. He ain’t got no blood, ain’t got no slave blood. Michelle does. So he requires an outside spokesman. Point made.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I just want to reiterate here, my friends, Obama is out there throwing down the race card, and he’s also throwing down this bit about his middle name and whether or not he’s Muslim and this sort of stuff. I want to remind you, nobody of any importance in the Republican Party is using his race or the fact — nobody’s even saying it. I don’t know who he’s talking about. In fact, he’s not talking about anybody. This is a preemptive strike. What this does is give the Drive-Bys cover to accuse people of it, because the Drive-Bys are in total coordination with Obama, and so he’s now put it out there, ‘They’re going to say I’m black. They’re going to make fun of my name and they’re going to call me a Muslim and say my wife is feisty,’ whatever, and so the Drive-Bys: ‘Wow, this is great. This was funny, why, get rid of the issue.’ This is just carte blanche for the Drive-Bys to level the accusations now, and they’ll report on Republicans in that context. I don’t know anybody of any importance who’s even talking about these things when it comes to Obama.
The only people I know of that brought up the fact he’s black and tried to make a big deal out of it are Democrats in their primary campaign, and there are even some Democrats who brought up this Muslim business. You know, he went to madrasahs, whatever they are, all these things. The Clinton campaign, a number of others, did their best to subtly and sometimes not to subtly bring this up. But hell, folks, Republicans don’t have the guts to go anywhere near any of this stuff. They don’t even have the guts to be all that critical because they’re afraid this is what’s going to happen to them, which has always been one of the Republicans’ biggest problems anyway. They’re going to get ripped to shreds, so why not do the right thing anyway? No matter what they do, the Drive-Bys, the Democrats are gonna impugn them, attack them. So why not say the right stuff? Just do the right thing. It doesn’t seem to permeate.