Rush to McCain: Turn Sarah Loose

RUSH: I was on Fox News yesterday afternoon, Martha MacCallum’s show at five in the afternoon, and she asked me a question, and I didn’t quite hear everything she said, but the gist of the question was, ‘How come the McCain campaign is not letting Palin interact with the media?’ And it had to do with the fact she’s at the United Nations and she’s meeting all these world leaders and so forth. So today I see the Politico has a story: ”Palin Press Relationship Gets Testy’ — Sarah Palin’s relationship with her traveling press corps went from barely existing to downright chilly Tuesday, when the two sides briefly engaged in a standoff over journalists’ access to Palin’s photo ops on the sidelines of the United Nations meetings here.’ Biden’s not doing a whole lot of press conferences. Let me tell you what’s going on here. The first thing you have to remember is Palin’s job is not to be buddies with the Drive-By Media. Go back to her acceptance speech in St. Paul. She’s not here to be friends with the Drive-Bys. She knows they don’t want to be her friend. She’s doing Katie Couric tonight. She went out and she’s done some of these things, she did Hannity and a couple of others, but she’s not doing press conferences. She’s not out there trying to woo them.

When Palin shows up with McCain, they take hundreds of questions from voters at these joint town hall meetings that they’re doing. I’ve watched ’em do it. They’re very good. And the questions that they take from the audience, these town hall things are better questions than the Drive-Bys would ask, they’re very random. The Drive-Bys just want to set up some ‘gotcha’ moment. That’s what they want. The bitter clingers get this, too. You and I, we bitter clingers, we get it. The people out there hate the Drive-By Media right now. We realize we’re running against the Drive-Bys, we’re running against the Democrats, we’re running against Ahmadinejad. Cookie did a great thing here. We’ve got Ahmadinejad from his speech yesterday at the UN and gone back and found Obama saying much the same thing at various spots along the campaign trail. I do wish, however — and this is what I told Martha MacCallum on the Fox News Channel — I wish they’d let Palin go, not press conferences, let her go out and do these rallies.

Get her out there. She’s the one that’s electrified the whole base. She’s the one that’s electrified the election. She’s the one that turned this thing around. Get her out there. I’m not talking about press conferences and little chats, sitting around with the Drive-Bys. My fear is that every time I’ve heard her speak now in the last couple of times, she’s been mirroring McCain’s message of reform, that Obama’s never worked with Republicans but that McCain has worked with Democrats. That’s not how to use her. McCain can handle being McCain. They need to send her out there and let her be who she is, as she was introduced. I wish they’d do that. Now, it could be they’re saving her, they don’t want to overexpose her, save up here for the last two- or three-week crunch.