McCain and Obama Discuss the Idea of American Exceptionalism

RUSH: I thought about apologizing at the beginning of this hour for the first hour in this program, because we’re trucking along really good, we’re just having a grand old time and then I sucked all the oxygen out of the show by playing Obama and McCain sound bites. Both these guys at this forum last night sounded like they were asleep. I’m not being critical of them. I mean, they were at a very staid, respected institution. But it sort of sucked. You wouldn’t believe the people on the other side of the glass here at my EIB studio are still stunned over this Eva Longoria thing. What do you mean, you can’t believe these people? This is who they are! We all think that they can’t go any lower than they went yesterday. They do it, they do every day. What was this treachery, four years of sex and treachery in Desperate Housewives, I thought I was the perfect pick for vice president.

Anyway, I’m going to run the risk of going back to the Columbia forum for two more sound bites here. The question here from Judy Woodruff is fascinating. She says, ‘What is it that’s different about being in America? Are Americans better than people in some of these other countries? We hear the term exceptionalism about the United States.’ Now, I don’t want to analyze this question too much, but I think the whole concept of American exceptionalism probably offends a lot of leftists and a lot of people in the media. I don’t know if Judy Woodruff is just asking a question here or if it represents how she really thinks. But no, we in America do not think that we are better people. We are no different than people around the world. In fact, DNA is the same, humanity is humanity wherever you find it. What separates us from the rest of the world is a miracle that took place in Philadelphia. We have founding documents that enshrine the source of our freedom. We’re all endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the purest of happiness. We happen to be the freest people in the history of the world and we see what free people can do with unlimited potential, ambition, desire, drive, whatever attribute I want to assign. We have run rings around the rest of the world in less than 250 years. We are a superpower like has never existed. We have outrun cultures, countries, societies that have been around thousands of years longer than we have, and we’re no different than anybody else, in terms of our makeup. I want you to hear these two answers. Here is McCain’s answer to the whole notion of American exceptionalism.

MCCAIN: I do believe in American exceptionalism. We are the only nation I know in the world that really is deeply concerned about adhering to the principle that all of us are created equal and endowed by our creators with certain rights, and those we have tried to bring to the world. And we have not so much militarily, but through example, through leadership, through economic assistance.

RUSH: Well, you can’t throw the military out. We’ve liberated how many millions of people? How many hundreds of millions of people have we liberated? We do not conquer. As the caller from Italy said yesterday, ‘We’re not Rome. We’re not Greece. We don’t enslave people. We don’t conquer them. We liberate them.’ Here’s Obama’s answer. The question, this Stengel guy, he’s either at TIME Magazine or was. It’s tough to keep track of these guys. They go back and forth from magazines to TV networks to think tanks. He says to Obama, ‘Is volunteerism, is national service part of American exceptionalism? Is it part of what makes America special?’

OBAMA: We have always balanced the tradition of individual responsibility and self-reliance with notions of community and love for country, in part because of voluntary associations. What it’s done is allowed people to — to exercise the freedom to determine the direction of their communities, but still recognizing that we are part of a common project of creating a better life for the next generation. And that’s something that’s been lost. But what we’re seeing in this campaign is that something that people want to restore.

RUSH: Oh, okay, so we’re not exceptional anymore, we’ve lost the ability to organize our communities. We have lost the ability to exercise the freedom to determine direction of our communities. We have lost American exceptionalism, but, but, we can regain it via the Obama Messiah campaign. Quick time-out here, folks. We will be back. There’s a great illusion of the difference between the way a conservative and a liberal looks — that whole answer of his, by the way, just, again, is there anything presidential in this answer? It’s liberal gobbledygook. It is the kind of garbage that you hear in classrooms at the Ivy League and when they go to clubs and so forth, this is liberal network speak, and it’s not inspiring. Given a chance to talk about American exceptionalism, do you realize what he could have done with that answer if he had the slightest notion that there is something special about America? And he just punts, he just blows it. He thinks America wants to hear how rotten we are, what we’ve lost, how we have been better. He can’t specify when it’s been better. He can only tell us that we want to get better through him and his idiotic campaign.