RUSH: Interesting story in the New York Times yesterday. We talked about this just a little and it’s interesting, too, about who wrote this. Adam Nagourney. Adam Nagourney is the reporter that the Obama campaign — what did they do, throw him off the airplane or kicked him out? They criticized him. Oh, that’s what it was. He wrote a story in the New York Times about how Obama is not solving the racial divide in this country, and they responded to Adam Nagourney the next day by putting out a Talking Points Memo that treated Adam Nagourney of the New York Times like he was a candidate. They went out and destroyed him and destroyed his piece, and Adam Nagourney at the New York Times is miffed about this. He was very upset about it; said they could have at least called me. I can take it. They could have called me and talked to me about my story.
So Adam Nagourney yesterday asked, ‘Why is Obama not improving in the polls?’ This has a lot of people stunned. Now, the daily Gallup tracking poll out of registered voters today has Obama up by eight. But if you look at likely voters, McCain is up by four, and McCain among likely voters has had a swing of ten points since last Friday, when, you know, Obama’s intern tour all over the world ended. Everybody is scratching their heads because if you look at television, it is clear which campaign is dynamic and exciting and is getting all the coverage, and which campaign isn’t (to be polite). Yet McCain, in the USA Today/Gallup poll, is up by four. This was yesterday. ‘McCain moved from being behind by six among likely voters a month ago to a four-point lead over Obama among that group in the latest USA Today/Gallup poll.
‘McCain still trails among the broader universe of registered voters. By both measures the race is tight. The Friday-through-Sunday poll, which was mostly conducted as Obama was returning from his [intern trip] and released just yesterday, shows McCain now ahead 49-45 among likely voters. In late June he was behind among likely voters 50-44.’ Then we come to Nagourney’s story: ‘It is a question that has hovered over Senator Barack Obama even as he has passed milestone after milestone in his race for the White House: Why is he not doing better? It shadowed him as he struggled against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in many states through the primaries … And it is back again as he returns from an overseas trip that even Republicans have described as politically triumphant. In this case, the question is why, given how sour Americans feel about President George W. Bush and the Republican Party, about the Iraq war and the ailing economy that Bush will leave to his successor and about the perception that Obama is running such a better campaign than Senator John McCain, the senator from Illinois is not doing even better in national opinion polls.’
Why is that? ‘Most polls show Obama with a lead of 6 or 7 points over McCain nationally, and he rarely breaks the 50 percent mark,’ and Robert Novak made this point in his piece yesterday that no matter what, he hasn’t crossed the 50% threshold. And neither, by the way, did Bill Clinton in either of his two presidential races. Let’s go back to the paragraphs that Adam Nagourney writes. I think this explains much of the mind-set and the narrative — the template, if you will, of the Drive-By Media — Why? [G]iven how sour Americans feel about President George W. Bush and the Republican Party, about the Iraq war and the ailing economy that Bush will leave to his successor…’ Why? With all this hatred for Bush, with all this anger at Bush, with all this anger at Republicans — Republicans are hated — with all this desire to get Bush out, why isn’t Obama doing any better? Plus with all our wonderful coverage. We are treating this guy like a rock star. We’re treating Obama as if he is The Messiah! We have gone overboard. Could it be, ladies and gentlemen, exactly what I said to you in the early days of Obama’s summer camp trip last week? Backlash. There’s a backlash out there against Obama, backlash against the media. The media is not popular. The media is less popular than George W. Bush, if truth be known.
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RUSH: Brett from Redwood City, California. Great to have you here, sir. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, how are you doing?
RUSH: Good, thank you.
CALLER: Hey, I just wanted to say that back in January or February when Obama was giving a speech I remember my wife wanted to shut everything down and listen to Obama, and everything that he said about hope and change.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: She’s basically going, ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Absolutely fantastic.’ Anyways, at the same time my son — who is about 16, 17 — and I are going like, ‘Don’t you see he’s saying the same thing, ‘Hope and change. Hope and change’?’ Anyways, you know, so she’s pretty set on Obama and voting for him but then I talked with her the other day, I said, ‘Are you still in with Obama?’ And she goes, ‘Well, the more I see him, the more I’m not really liking him anymore,’ and so will that change her vote? I couldn’t tell you, but right now, I don’t think that she’s lying what she’s seeing now.
RUSH? What is causing her to change her opinion of The Messiah?
CALLER: You know, the more I think she sees him, I think the more she’s starting to realize that the guy is pretty much a — sort of a fraud. But she won’t say so; she doesn’t want get into details because she’s not really political. She just likes what he was standing for in the beginning.
RUSH: Yeah, yeah. I know. I know.
CALLER: So the role or the shroud is sort of coming off.
RUSH: Sad but true.
CALLER: And you know one other thing — and I know that I’m supposed to keep on this topic, but — I was with my aunt who is about 91 years old the other day. She’s down in LA, and she’s a big Hillary supporter, and I said, ‘Well, since Hillary is out, are you going to vote for Obama?’ She goes, ‘Heck no. I’m not going to vote,’ and so I thought that was pretty interesting.
RUSH: Well, I’m glad you called because you have provided here a nice transition into a couple of audio sound bites that I have told the broadcast engineer to stand by on. First, yesterday, just to refresh your memory, here is what I said.
RUSH ARCHIVE: This is going to be a referendum on Obama. It really is. And some people are going to have to vote against him. Well, I know that’s not the perfect world. You want to have somebody out there you could vote for. But this campaign, this election, is going to be a referendum up or down on Obama.
RUSH: It is. And this last call, this guy’s unpolitical, apolitical wife, starting to be exposed. Something about it doesn’t seem genuine anymore. She can’t put her finger on it because she’s not political, just seems to be a little disingenuous. The word ‘fraud’ was used. David Rodham Gergen was on Larry King Alive last night. Larry King said, why is this presidential race so close, David [Rodham] Gergen?’
RODHAM GERGEN: That’s one of the great mysteries, Larry. Today there’s a Gallup/USA Today poll wha — uh, uh, among likely voters which has McCain up by four. We’re in this highly puzzling, uh, mysterious time. This is increasingly a referendum about, uh, Barack Obama, and so it is very much like what we saw back in 1980 when — when Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter. The campaign became, are you…? Is the country ready for Reagan, and over time — in the fall, especially — Reagan convinced people he was someone they would like and then they voted for him.
KING: (grumbling) Right.
RODHAM GERGEN: Uh, and I think that’s the Obama challenge now.
RUSH: Well, up until the Reagan comparison, I followed this. David Rodham Gergen is essentially echoing my sentiments that this is a referendum on Obama. It’s his to win or lose. But Reagan in 1980? For crying out loud, this country was in genuine misery! Jimmy Carter was not liked at all. In fact, the preelection polls did not show the scope of Reagan’s victory. That was a 45-state landslide. The Drive-Bys were just fooling themselves back then. This country was not a referendum on ‘Is Reagan liked or not liked?’ This was a campaign on salient issues that dealt with the specifics of this country’s economics and foreign policy at the time, and Jimmy Carter had demonstrated himself to be a total failure. He had insulted the American people, blaming them for the malaise — I should say us, blaming us for the malaise — in which the country was floundering.
To compare Reagan to Obama in the sense? See, the Democrats loved to talk about Reagan as somebody that was simply the result of slick marketing and packaging, and Reagan was about substantive issues. And it was about the presentation and articulation of those issues in an inspirational way, and they have done their best to rewrite the history of that. If there’s anybody that’s getting along here with slick marketing and packaging, it is none other than The Messiah: the Most Merciful Lord Barack Obama, who is a total media creation. (interruption) Well, Snerdley asked a good question here. Sometimes Snerdley actually inquires a good question. ‘Why is the presumption that he should be up?’ Why is the presumption that Obama should be up?
Well, look who’s asking the question? The Drive-Bys! We aren’t. The Drive-Bys are asking the question. And the reason why they presume that he would be up is because they have been giving this guy the kind of publicity he couldn’t afford to buy. Not only are they covering what he’s doing, they are portraying him as acting president, and they are saying he’s qualified, and he’s a statesman, and he’s going to save America, and he’s going to make America liked. What they don’t get is a majority of Americans don’t care to have this country defined by whether or not people in other countries approve of us or not, particularly the Europeans. They live in their own cocoon and they think that whatever they’re doing is going to transfer to the same kind of adoration for Obama that they have amongst the great unwashed.
So their presumption Obama should be way up is based not only on the fact that they are so in the tank. Even some Drive-Bys are getting concerned about it. The second reason is, they’re ignoring McCain. And when they do pay attention to McCain, they try to make it as unflattering as they can. So they figure that he ought to be well over 50, maybe up to 60% simply because of the assistance they are giving him. They’re out of touch. The Drive-Bys are out of touch. This, as I told you, his campaign, the Obama campaign, as stated by that brilliant PR executive in DC, is about history. It’s historical. And it’s even more unimportant, the historical aspect is even more important to the Drive-Bys because they want to be able to say they made it happen. Not only are they witnessing history, the first black president, they want to be able to say they made it happen, and they aren’t making it happen. He didn’t get a bump when he got the nomination. He didn’t get a bump on his little intern tour. McCain up by four? That’s got ’em floored. So they’re not reporting the likely voter side of the poll. They’re reporting the registered voter side of the poll. The presumption that he ought to be up is based on the fact that he is… Well, they’re even.
I’ve got some stories in the stack today. He’s the story. I mean, he’s everywhere. Everything he does, everything he says gets reported and amplified. They just can’t figure out why this isn’t translating into love and support among the people for Obama that echoes their own love and support.
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RUSH: You might recall a couple weeks ago when the whole notion of the unfairness that McCain was experiencing in terms of media coverage versus Obama, I remember getting a call from the Associated Press, David Bauder, and he wanted a quote from me on this, and he used 80% of what I said. I said this is not surprising here. This is very typical the Democrat candidate would get far more coverage and much more favorable coverage than the Republican candidate. There’s nothing untypical about this. This is par for the course. What they’re trying to do is establish this guy as a statesman. The whole point of going over there is to make him look like he is something he’s not. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, foreign policy-wise. This is to make him look like he’s a statesman in that area. Then I said there’s another thing going on here, Mr. Bauder, and he didn’t use this quote, but this also answers the question, why the presumption that Obama should be up at 60%. There is no question that the Drive-By Media, because of guilt, genuine liberalism, and so forth, have this desire for a black candidate to do well.
The senator, who doesn’t know diddly-squat about anything, served 143 days, working days in the Senate, who has no substantive achievements that can be pointed to, they still have to make sure this guy does well. This is the historical aspect of this, the historical aspect of this campaign, the first black president. And so they want to be the ones to make it happen whether he’s qualified or not, because they, as liberals rooted in the civil rights struggles of this country’s past have this burning desire for black candidates here to do well. They’re going to be so bent out of shape if Obama loses this. You should be prepared for that. I’m forewarning you about it now. There’s another aspect of this, too, and that is the arrogance of liberalism. The arrogance of liberalism is that, ‘Okay, so you have Bush that won two elections, 2000 and 2004, flukes. Something went wrong. The Diebold machines or the Supreme Court, the American people don’t elect Republicans, they elect Democrats.’ This assumption here that the birthright of Democrats is power and it’s theirs by fiat simply because they’re born and they exist.
So you couple their arrogance with the historical aspect and their desire for a black candidate, for this guy to do well, and they’ve gotta make it appear he can do well ’cause he cannot do it on his own by pointing to his record, and you have this presumption that he ought to be way, way up in the polls, plus they look at McCain, and they see somebody old and worn out who’s not making any waves, who’s not exciting anybody, and they don’t understand it. Well, look at some recent histoire, ladies and gentlemen. Go back to 2000, the last two presidential races have been pretty close. Two-thousand, of course, very close, came down to one state, and 2004 was not as close as 2000 and not as close as the Democrats thought, but it still came down to one state, Ohio. This country has been pretty well polarized for quite a while. The presumption that this is going to be a runaway, the presumption that this is going to be a slam dunk for the liberal Democrats is not born out by this nation’s recent voting history.
Here is Janet from The Porch, Maine. Great to have you on the EIB Network, Janet. Hello.
CALLER: Hi. I’m on the porch in Maine.
RUSH: On the porch, okay. Well, you never know. People call here with names from my home state of Missouri I never heard of, so I just assumed there was a place there called The Porch. I know there’s a place in Texas called The Woodlands.
CALLER: Well, this is actually a porch overlooking the ocean. Hi, happy 20 years, and thank you.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: Arts-and-croissant crowd dittos. I just wanted to posit a new idea about Obama, as to why he’s not sweeping us all off our feet, even though he was causing women to faint earlier this year —
RUSH: Tell me.
CALLER: — at the rallies.
RUSH: Tell me, tell me, say it, say it.
CALLER: He’s not likable. It’s really simple. The man is odious. He talks like a girl. You ran a clip yesterday of Gloria Steinem, excuse me, Jane Fonda.
RUSH: Jane Fonda, yes.
CALLER: Those two women are fairly interchangeable, and making the case for women’s radio, the need for women’s radio. Well, that could have been Obama opining on his version of foreign policy. It’s pure psychobabble.
RUSH: Well, now wait a minute. Normally I would discount any assertion that Obama is unlikable. But when it comes to women assessing political characters, personalities, you gotta give it some weight. You gotta give this some credibility. It would have never occurred to me that Obama is unlikable. But you don’t doubt women on stuff like this.
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RUSH: I got a lot of guys telling me, ‘It’s wrong, Obama is totally likable.’ Maybe to you guys. I’m telling you, don’t doubt these women. Don’t doubt ’em on this. This is interesting.