RUSH: Now, you gotta hear this sound bite. Mark Halperin from TIME Magazine (he’s their editor-at-large) was on with Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, on her MSNBC show. And she said, ‘Mark, you recently traveled outside of Milwaukee under the radar. Sarah Palin went to Milwaukee. Nobody knew it. No cameras that most people know about. What kind of crowd? What was the excitement there for Sarah Palin in Milwaukee?’
HALPERIN: A big event at the state fair grounds, about 4,000 people who paid —
MITCHELL: Four THOUSAND people! A week ago this was?
HALPERIN: This was like a Friday night, I think, one week ago. They showed up really early. I got there three hours early, and I was not the first person in line, by any means. The line stretched over half a mile, and they love her. I’ve never seen anything like this in my career. The gap between… We say casually, ‘She has support amongst the grassroots.’ She truly does, and we’ll see it on the book tour next week. People at the grassroots love her personally. They want her to run for president. The gap between that and what people in this city say, people we know say about her prospects couldn’t be wider.
RUSH: Now, in this sound bite, Mark Halperin swerves, stumbles upon the truth. Sarah Palin represents the disconnect between Washington and the rest of the country. Now, I don’t want to take anything away from Sarah Palin, but 4,000 people who paid 30 bucks. He’s never seen anything like that? He’s never seen anything like that? Has a never been to a Sean Hannity freedom concert? Does he not know what happens out there when conservatives get together and rally? Has he never been to a Rush to Excellence Tour stop? Has he never heard about one of those? Two thousand in Washington! It was capacity. Right where he lives. Ditto Detroit, all over the country. I don’t do them very often, but, you know, Hannity, Levin, the guys are out there. Beck goes out and draws crowds all over.
And Sarah Palin, I’m not taking anything away from her, because he’s right: This book tour starts next week and Washington is going to be stunned. The one thing he’s really right about is they don’t get it. They haven’t the slightest clue how disconnected they are from the base of this country. They have no idea in Washington how disconnected they, in the media are from not just grassroots people, but the people who make this country work. Why do conservative books sell so well? Do they ignore that? No, they don’t ignore it, because over at the Huffing and Puffington Post, they want the New York Times to set up a conservative-only list because the lib books are getting shellacked.
There are two reasons that a Democrat is in the White House today. Well, maybe three, but I’ll focus on two of them. We had the wrong candidate in 2008, and we had a Democrat candidate who just pulled the biggest scam on the people — the innocent people; the people that are not actively, daily involved in politics. He pulled the biggest scam on them ever, making them think that he was something never before seen: A messiah that was going to come and get rid of all the angst, get rid of all the arguments, get rid of all the partisanship. We’re going to lower the sea levels. We’re going to be loved and we’re going to have jobs!
Everybody is going to be rich and there’s not going to be any poverty and so forth. And of course who wouldn’t want all that? And you have some guy with some supposed skill at oratory, that’s actually reading a prompter who was able to make that pitch. The third reason is, the Bush administration just refused to defend itself. I mentioned that to Governor Palin in my interview with her yesterday after this show for the newsletter, because we were talking about this. In her book she has the same question that I’ve always had: How do you respond and when do you respond to baseless, totally fabricated, made-up criticism? You know, we had a discussion about it, and she said something. I don’t remember specifically what it was.
My reaction to it was, ‘We weren’t helped by the fact that we had all kinds of people in this country willing to go to the mattresses over this, but the administration and leader of the party just did not want to get political, because Bush felt that it was lowering the prestige of the office to respond to all these attacks and critiques,’ and so therefore all the lies were allowed to stand. The media and the Democrat party did a pretty good job of ginning up even more people who hate this country, who think this country is guilty. Because people at the highest levels of the Republican Party were not refuting it. Their strategy was, ‘The story will last a day and move on to other things.’ But if it takes 4,000 people at a Sarah Palin rally for these guys to understand their disconnect, so be it — and she is going to set records with her book sales. I think she probably already has.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Mark Halperin was blown away by Sarah Palin in Milwaukee a week ago: 4,000 people paid 30 bucks each to see her. They weren’t any cameras there so the Drive-Bys didn’t know about it. So I thought to myself, ‘Okay, what is it that impresses about this? Is it the 4,000 people or is it that they paid 30 bucks?’ And I started to ask myself, ‘Wait a minute, now. Did he not see the tea parties that happened in Washington where he lives? Did he not see those?’ And I ran the question by Snerdley. ‘Oh, they didn’t see those. They didn’t see these town halls, didn’t see the tea parties. They don’t watch Fox. They watch MSNBC, CNN, but they don’t watch Fox. The only thing they saw at the tea parties was a picture of a guy outside carrying a gun,’ and I guess that’s true. It is a huge disconnect.