RUSH: Here’s Sandy in Chicago. Sandy, glad you waited. You’re next on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
RUSH: Hey, don’t give me that. You’re venting, Sandy. How does it feel?
CALLER: Well, it feels good. But I’m still so frustrated, Rush. All the polls are like trending towards Obama now. He’s in danger of losing Virginia. You have a big jump in the Gallup poll from yesterday to today. That means basically the people did not look well on McCain’s, you know, quote, stunts. You know, they’re viewing it how the Democrats have put it out there as a talking point.
RUSH: Sandy, let me ask you a question.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Seriously, now. The election is 39 days from —
CALLER: I know.
RUSH: I wasn’t finished.
CALLER: Okay, sorry.
RUSH: I was setting up the question. Election is in 39 days, a little over five weeks. Honestly, now. Five weeks from now, how much of what transpired this week will they remember, do you think, the voters?
CALLER: Well, I’m not sure. I’m not sure how it’s going to go. If the economy is still one of the top issues, which it will, but of course the Democrats are going to continue to hammer stuff like this, it could go poorly for McCain. I’m just not sure how it’s going to go.
RUSH: And that’s the intelligent answer.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Nobody knows. We don’t want to get defeatist. I think it’s a dangerous cycle to get caught up in daily tracking polls.
CALLER: I understand that the media is trying to —
RUSH: I know.
CALLER: — trying to cause us to be desperate and despair and all this with their playing with the party affiliation and all that. I know that they do that. But I remember a long time ago you said that Obama is unelectable. Do you still believe that?
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Cheer me up, Rush. Cheer me up.
RUSH: You’re talking polls, can I remind you of something that happened earlier this week and late last week? We’ve got a three or four-day barrage of national and local media —
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: — in blue states lamenting the sad fact that one-third of white and blue-collar Democrats just won’t vote for the black guy.
CALLER: I know. I know. And some of the blue states are trending towards —
RUSH: Purple.
CALLER: — towards McCain, like Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, even Michigan is fairly close.
RUSH: Look, now, there’s still a huge spread of 14 points in Rhode Island. Rhode Island, you know, Vermont, Jr.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: But it’s down from 20 or something like that. The point is with polls you can find, if you go deeply enough into the internals you can find whatever you want. All I know is this: The bloom is off the Obama rose. The aura, whatever he was to people, however he was exciting people, that’s gone.
CALLER: I know.
RUSH: Now it’s just pure standard old Democrat Party hack politics, and I guarantee you, you probably thought that Kerry was going to win this time back in 2004, ’cause the media was carrying his water and the media was carrying his lunch. Media always tries to elect Democrats, but they don’t always succeed.
CALLER: But you know they’re going to try to continue on the economy, pounding it into the ground for the benefit of Obama. You know they’re going to do that all the way up until the election. Now, if something doesn’t happen with this bailout and the economy really tanks, the Republicans are going to be blamed for that and McCain. The Democrats will make sure of that, so will the media because, quote, they had a deal.
RUSH: Look. I am not going to sit here and just let them get away with that. I’m going to be pounding here, and I’ve got TV requests coming out both ears, and I hate doing them, I despise it, but everybody says, ‘You need to get out there on television because it reaches a different audience.’
CALLER: You do!
RUSH: No!
CALLER: You do, Rush.
RUSH: Why should I go on a TV show with a million viewers when I’m sitting here with 22 of them?
CALLER: I would love to see you debate one of these kooks on the left.
RUSH: They won’t do it.
CALLER: I know they won’t. I know they won’t.
RUSH: I have to go on solo. But anyway, if this economy is in such peril, if there is an imminent disaster — we’ve been told the last two or three days, if we don’t get something done by Friday, it’s depression city, you’re going to see people jumping out of the windows on the buildings that remain on Wall Street. All this horrible stuff and nobody is going to be able to get credit card debt, credit cards are going to be canceled because the credit card companies can’t extend debt, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
CALLER: Rush —
RUSH: Wait a minute, now. If it’s that urgent, the Democrats have the votes to pass this, Sandy.
CALLER: I know. I have one more question for you. If the economy is on the brink, do you think that the electorate is going to put in the White House an absolute neophyte? I mean I don’t necessarily think that —
RUSH: It won’t be that. That’s not how it’s looked at. And I don’t know. The economy is on the brink. You have to understand that as far as press, Democrat spin being reality, the economy is on the brink and it’s going to be on the brink through the election, even if the bailout happens.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I want to warn you, if this bailout happens, something next week is going to happen, we’re going to hear, ‘Oh, it wasn’t enough, we need $150 billion over here, $200 billion over there,’ we’ll have people saying, ‘Well, this is a good start, but this is nowhere near getting us out of the fire.’ You’re going to have the effort continue to make people as miserable, fearful, and crisis-oriented as they can. Crisis is the greatest power elected officials have to control the population. They’re going to continue that, the Democrats with their media buddies will try it all the way through the election. Now, the traditional conventional wisdom is that it is change in a bad economy that forces people to vote the opposite party. What’s Obama’s plan? Obama’s plan will make it all worse, tax increases, all these various things, but right now with the negative numbers that Bush has, the assumption is that the voters will blame whatever economic malaise on the people who are running the show now. And the people running the show right now are not the Democrats in Congress, it’s Bush. The president gets all the blame, all the credit. There’s a mitigating factor here that nobody’s talking about. Congressional approval is so low they are hated. It’s 9%. It’s 9%.
CALLER: I know. I know, Rush.
RUSH: There are also polls. Normally when you go talk to people about their congressman and Congress they tell you they hate Congress but they love their guy, and they always reelect ’em. There’s some polling data that suggests that’s not as firm this year as last. There’s a lot up in the air.
CALLER: I know. And the polls are all over the place. Even the tracking polls are all over the place.
RUSH: That’s right, that’s right.
CALLER: But they are. But this thing about McCain, I thought it would help him because I thought he had cornered Obama, you know, Obama following in his trail all the way up to Washington when he just dismissed him —
RUSH: No, you saw it that way, I saw it that way, but that’s not the way it was portrayed–
CALLER: I know.
RUSH: — in the Drive-Bys. Let’s see what happens in the debate tonight.
CALLER: So, Rush, can you just tell me one more time that you still think truly, that you still think that Obama is unelectable?
RUSH: ‘Unelectable’ may be too strong a word, in the sense you mean it, but I don’t think anywhere near the slam dunk. There’s nothing that argues he’s a slam dunk for this.
CALLER: He cannot get over 50% in the polls. He is stuck around 46 to 49, sometimes he gets to 50.
RUSH: Let me tell you something, if he’s not up 56 — I know these are statewide electoral polls that really matter, but his national number, if he’s still tied or even leading in the margin of error going into Election Day, Obama and Axelrod have problems.
CALLER: And, Rush, can you tell these Republicans in Congress and his surrogates and even McCain himself, they need to get a lot more aggressive with beating back these Democrat lies —
RUSH: Yeah —
CALLER: — and smears.
RUSH: — been hearing this for 20 years, Sandy.
CALLER: Oh, cripes, but I mean, you know, I called his campaign —
RUSH: I’ve been —
CALLER: — and all they have to say is, ‘We’ve suspended our campaign.’ I’m like, what?
RUSH: Look.
CALLER: What?
RUSH: How old is your father?
CALLER: My father is passed away.
RUSH: How old was he before he passed away?
CALLER: Sixty-one.
RUSH: Are you going to get him to change his mind about things at age 61?
CALLER: Probably not.
RUSH: No. No. I mean that’s why beer advertisers advertise to 16- and 17-year-olds, trying to get them to make their choice for the rest of their life. You don’t see beer advertisements with some 61- or 73-year-old sitting around watching Hee Haw. They’re set in their ways. McCain’s got his own honorable idea of how to run a campaign here. Now, the House Republicans did come out at one o’clock with a press conference to explain things. I was not able to hear what they said, but they can get coverage. They can force all kinds of coverage on this now because they’re the focus. Thanks, Sandy.