RUSH: Here’s Juan Williams, by the way: American people could not be made to eat the dog food.
WILLIAMS: No, typically what happens is the word goes out that it may be time for the chief of staff to move on.
CHRIS WALLACE: Exactly.
WILLIAMS: The difference here is that Rahm Emanuel is a hardball political player, and his attitude towards the health care reform deal, towards cap and trade and these other things that have not come to pass is, ‘Don’t worry about public opinion. We’ve got a Democratic majority on the Hill. We’ll focus on the Democratic majority, we’ll focus on the process, and we will get it done,’ and the big failure on health care, as we’ve just discussed in the previous panel is, the American people aren’t eating the dog food.
RUSH: Well!
WILLIAMS: So if that’s the case, you gotta go out there and sell and gotta do it effectively.
RUSH: All right, now, how in the hell are you going to make people eat dog food, Juan? Who the hell wants to eat dog food? The only people eating dog food are the senior citizens who have to choose between that and medicine, we are told. But who the hell wants to eat dog food? What a really strange analogy.
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RUSH: Jerry in Prescott, Arizona. Nice to have you with us, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Wonderful, snow-covered dittos from beautiful Prescott, Arizona, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: The dog food metaphor. The dog food metaphor is an old, old marketing term. It goes back to Madison Avenue and it’s an extremely cynical and derogatory way of referring to your clients and customers. In the dog food market there’s two kinds of people: Those that buy the very best, most expensive brand and those that buy whatever’s on sale. And the marketing phrase is, ‘We have to get it out there but get the people to buy it but there’s nothing we can do if the dogs won’t eat the dog food.’ So the essence of the phrase is: We can trick people into getting stuff that’s not for their intended purpose, but if the dogs won’t eat the dog food, there’s nothing we can do about it.
RUSH: That’s all —
CALLER: It’s just a cynical marketing phrase.
RUSH: Well, I appreciate that. Being an excellent marketer myself, I appreciate cynical marketing phrases.
CALLER: (chuckles)
RUSH: But I’ll tell you this: He wasn’t talking about dogs. He said, ‘Rahm Emanuel can’t get the American people to eat the dog food.’ Now, it’s cynical or what have you. Maybe he misspoke. But he said it, and in saying it he uttered, perhaps, one of the most profound truths about this whole scheme: The American people do not want to eat dog food! This is not North Korea!
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RUSH: Okay, people are inundating me here with this dog food business and trying to say that I’m making a bigger deal out of this than it ought to be. So let me explain to you what this really is. The guy who called was right. It’s a marketing term, and basically it’s when a company uses the products that it makes to show that the products are great. Or it is a way to describe a product being rejected by the very market and people it was intended for. ‘Can’t get ’em to eat the dog food’ was thought to have originated — now, this is open for debate here. It was thought to have originated from testimonial-type TV ads for Alpo dog food in which the actor Lorne Greene claimed that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. This is all well and good, but ‘Did he eat it?’ is the point. Did Lorne Greene go out and do television commercials, then open a can of Alpo and start eating it and then feed it to his dogs? No! Juan Williams said they ‘can’t get the American people to eat the dog food.’ Marketing term or not, he has stumbled across a big truth. And, by the way, we had a drive-by caller who made an excellent point here. We’re not going to be able to eat the dog food ’til we get our dead sister’s dentures, which was a big sob story told by Louise Slaughter last week at the health care summit.
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RUSH: Greg in Arkansas. It’s nice to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. 1989 dittos.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Hey, on the tsunami thing. I totally understand your point on the media fascination with it, and you were right a while ago when you said that in the open ocean you can’t see a tsunami. You know, it may just be a two- or three-foot wave but it’s traveling very fast. And in Indonesia, the first thing that happened was the water did leave the beach before it came rushing back in.
RUSH: Yeah, and you could see that.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: That’s when you do see the tsunami.
CALLER: Right. If you’re on the beach and the water starts leaving, you better get going. And it just depends on what generates it. What happened this weekend was the earthquake that was supposed to generate occurred 20-something miles below the surface of the earth.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: And so it wasn’t likely to generate, whereas the one in Indonesia was a displacement in the ocean floor, kind of like part of the ocean floor sunk below where it was, causing a huge displacement of water.
RUSH: It’s interesting that a guy in Arkansas knows all this.
CALLER: Yeah. (laughing) I’ve been around. I lived in Hawaii for seven years.
RUSH: (laughing)
CALLER: You know, and in Hawaii, there’s evidence of a tidal wave hitting the island at about 300 feet above sea level.
RUSH: I know. But, see, here’s the point. After —
CALLER: Part of the island falls off into the ocean causing a huge displacement of water —
RUSH: Exactly.
CALLER: — and that’s what really generates the huge tidal wave.
RUSH: Exactly. Look, I shoulda added this. After this thing in Indonesia, we built (at, I’m sure, great expense) a massive tsunami warning system, and that was it on Saturday? That’s what we got for it?