RUSH: Riverdale in New York. Adam, I’m glad you waited. It’s great to have you on the program, sir.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I need your help today. I was thinking about 1980. I remember Jimmy Carter very well, and I remember that the whole country could hardly wait ’til he was voted out, and I knew he was gonna lose by a landslide, and he did. Now, I was hoping that the same thing applied to Obama. I’m hoping that the whole country wants him out, that it is a Jimmy Carter-like situation. Lately I’ve been feeling a little more hesitant about that because even conservatives that I know in New York, they’re saying, “Well, Obama has all the money for the commercials, and Gingrich is not very exciting; and Romney, he’s like a nervous car salesman.” I think they’re good statesmen and I think they can make their points very well, but somehow I just have the feeling that there’s a slight chance that Obama could slide by and win.

RUSH: Now, of course there is. Anything can happen. Anybody can win the election coming up.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: It would be foolish to sit here and tell you that Obama is finished.

CALLER: Mmm-hmm.

RUSH: However, you make an interesting point and you’re actual expanding on something that I was talking about in the first hour. Let’s go back to 1980.

CALLER: Mmm-hmm.

RUSH: You say that you remember back then that you had a sense that Carter was gonna lose by a landslide.

CALLER: Yes. I was 14 years old.

RUSH: You were among a precious few who thought so. Back in 1980, the biggest shock I can ever remember the media experiencing up until 1994 was the size of Jimmy Carter’s defeat. The polling data did not reflect a Reagan landslide. It was so massive that Carter conceded before California had closed its polls.

CALLER: Really?

RUSH: That’s how bad it was. No poll indicated it, and even going into the 1980 election — I’m glad you brought this up — Ronald Reagan, when we look back now and we see as close to perfection as we can ever imagine, and we remember all of this enthusiasm, but it wasn’t there. Reagan was not a sure bet. The Republican establishment was not enamored of Reagan. They didn’t like Reagan winning. They wanted George Bush back in 1980.

CALLER: Humph.

RUSH: In ’76, you know, Reagan owned that convention at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City. I was there. I was working in Kansas City at the time. Reagan owned it, but the Republican establishment won that nomination process, and Gerald Ford got it. But Reagan owned it. Reagan was the sentimental favorite. He came back in 1980, but even going into 1980… I hear people talk about, “Well, I’m not excited about any of these candidates.” There wasn’t a commensurate amount of excitement about Reagan, not that matches how we look back at him. If you go back to that election. When we get into the 1980 election, that Election Day was fraught with as much anticipation and fear as any election is, and yet it ended up being this massive landslide. Now, my point to you is —

CALLER: Yes?

RUSH: — the same thing’s happening here. We’re told, “With the wrong candidate, Obama can sweep to victory. There are 47% of people who don’t pay taxes and all these people on school lunch program. Obama can’t be beat. He’s got a billion dollars,” and this is my point about how every day you get up and I don’t care where you go, you see the imperfections of our candidates highlighted.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: We got Newt’s problem here. You got a Romney problem over there. You got a Bachmann problem. Could we focus on Obama? Could the people ostensibly on our side of things start focusing on Obama rather than trying to find the perfect Republican conservative, ’cause that person doesn’t exist. I’m telling you: With his numbers eight points below Carter’s, with half the country afraid to spend money on Christmas presents, with people out of their homes, no jobs and no outlook, would somebody please explain to me where it is automatic that the incumbent wins? This is why you have to constantly fight the images and the news presented in the mainstream media each and every day because they are designed to dispirit you.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is a great caller. It’s very instructive. Back in 1980, running up to the election, just a couple of weeks prior to the election — throughout that campaign, by the way, Ronald Reagan in 1980, Jimmy Carter — and the country, in comparative terms, was exactly where it is now. It’s worse today than it was then, but back then people didn’t know that today was gonna — it was horrible. The misery index had been created to quantify how horrible it was. And Jimmy Carter was giving speeches like Obama does, the malaise of the country. Obama’s out telling the rest of the world that American workers are lazy and so forth, and Jimmy Carter was basically saying we were in a long national nightmare of malaise and so forth. It was utter despair. It was disaster.

Reagan’s negatives? He was a bumbling buffoon; he was dangerous; he was a cowboy; he was a bad actor; he was unproven; he was unstable. He was everything that they’re saying about every one of our candidates except Romney. Whatever they said about Reagan, they’re saying about Rick Perry, they’re saying about Bachmann, they’re saying about Newt. Reagan was outspent by Jimmy Carter. Carter had the media on his side just like Obama does. And up until the last couple of days in the 1980 campaign, pollsters had it close, a toss-up with Carter perhaps leading in a couple of ’em. And then, miraculously, the pollsters stopped reporting. A couple, three days before the election they started dwindling the reports of the polling numbers because the pollsters realized that they were gonna have to adjust here to avoid being mocked and made fun of.

Now, back then, you didn’t have 47% of households not paying income tax, and back then you didn’t have 44.2 million people on food stamps, and back then you didn’t have the foreclosures that you have today. It was bad for the times. It’s worse now than it was then in any comparative way that you want to look at. Much worse. And yet the cycle is repeating. Even though we get numbers here, like Obama’s approval numbers are below Carter’s. You tell me if I’m wrong. The assumption wherever you go — ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, USA Today, wherever you go, the assumption is Obama’s gonna be reelected and the assumption is that the Republican nominee, whoever it is, is an idiot, is a flawed character, something terribly wrong about every one of them. They’re intellectually deficient or they’re flip-floppers, or they are liars, or sexual harassers, or you name it.

In a Gallop poll on October 26th in 1980, two weeks before the election, Gallup had it Jimmy Carter 47, Ronald Reagan 39. That election two weeks later ended up in a landslide that was so big that Carter conceded before California closed. The same thing’s happening now. However, if you look and if you are open, you will see the truth. Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell, I’m gonna remind you again, have written a column begging Obama to get out for the sake of the country and for the sake of the Democrat Party. Now, part of it is that they both want Hillary. But these two guys are pollsters, and Caddell was a pollster for Carter. Schoen was a pollster for President Clinton.

They did the same thing going into the 2010 midterm elections. They wrote column after column. You Democrats don’t know what’s going to happen to you in these elections. You are lying to yourselves if you do not understand the problems that you’ve got, and they got shellacked all the way down the ballot to dogcatcher in 2010. And today they’re trying to tell us that that doesn’t mean anything because the Tea Party no longer exists, and Occupy Wall Street is real America now, that it’s the 99% versus the 1%. Now, these two guys — and they’re not through, they go on television, and they say this over and over again, and they’re not Republicans. They’re not Republicans in disguise. Now, my point, folks, is not to tell you that it’s over. I tried to hammer this last night. My point is that it is harder for all of us every day to remain positive because we are inundated with negative story after negative attitude after negative this, negative that. It is flooding us.

And even if you try to avoid it by avoiding ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, if you avoid all that, you’re still gonna find it if you go to certain so-called conservative websites and publications. Because they, too, are getting in on the act of, “Well, this candidate can’t win, this candidate’s flawed, this candidate is a flip flopper, this guy’s got big, big problems. Why, the only reason Herman Cain’s staying in the race is matching funds. He’s cooked. He’s done. He’s over with. He’s gonna get out in January if he gets his matching funds. And Newt, he lobbied for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” These are our so-called team members saying this stuff. Why are they saying this stuff? Because they have a different audience. They’re trying to gain respect and approval of their peers on the left who are in media.

You, on the other hand, are going to these sites ’cause you think they’re conservative. You think they’re on the conservative team speaking. Now, my only point in all of this, I’ll say it again, is that it takes a considerable effort to not succumb to defeatism. Now, that’s precisely what it is hoped happens to all of us. They hope as many of you as possible get so fed up with this whole Republican field, you just throw your hands up in frustration, “To hell with it. I don’t want any part of it. None of these guys can win. I’m not excited about any of them, to hell with it.” That’s what they want you to do. They’ve got no choice. They are trying to get the biggest loser in the history of presidents reelected. And this loser has a record so bad they can’t even mention it. So all they can do is scorched earth destroy the country.

This is Schoen’s point and Caddell’s point, that even if Obama wins, this country is gonna pay a price like it’s never paid because the campaign is gonna be so negative, so destructive, it’s gonna be so divisive that even after he wins, he’s not gonna have any support. But that doesn’t matter ’cause he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care. He’s the guy who sent his own campaign guy out to tell everybody on Monday in the New York Times, “Nope, we don’t care about the votes of working white families.” The great unifier, the great Barack Obama is gonna bring everybody together in a unified sense like we’ve never seen before, love everywhere. Yeah, right.

So all they can do on the Obama side is scorch the earth. All they can do, you talk about politics of personal destruction, you haven’t seen anything until these people get going once we do have a nominee, because the last thing they can afford to happen is for this nation to be told point blank that Barack Obama is why they don’t have a job; that Barack Obama is why their kids might not have a job; that Barack Obama is why their kids are not moving out of the house; that Barack Obama is why they’re afraid to have a good Christmas. They can’t afford for that to be told so they’re not going to tell it. They’re gonna leave it to people like me and others. And, of course, what are we gonna be called? Extremists, fanatics, what have you.

Who are we? All we are, you and I, are people who love this country. We understand what makes it special, and we want it special for everybody. We want everybody to do well, and we want everybody to be happy. We want everybody to be content, as many as possible. We don’t care about anything else. We don’t look at people and subdivide them into groups. We don’t feel sorry for groups of people. We don’t get caught up in all of that. All we want is people trying to be the best they can be, knowing full well that nobody’s perfect, knowing full well that not everybody is going to be as good as they can be.

But what we don’t want is a leader telling people that they live in a country that has betrayed them, that offers them no opportunity whatsoever because 1% of their fellow citizens have stolen everything from ’em and refused to give any of it back. We’ve always had divisive leftists. We’ve never had a president do it. We have never had a president who actively, purposely sought division and class warfare resentment. We have never had a president who wanted groups of Americans hating each other, blaming each other. We’ve got a guy in the White House and his whole team now who are promoting that, fostering that, nurturing that.

And whether some of us are able to actually put it in that terminology or understand it that way, we know something’s not right, and it’s infuriating, and it’s frightening ’cause we know that the way this country is being managed right now is not the way this is supposed to be done. It’s not the way things happen. We have never been led by somebody opposed to progress. We’ve always had crony capitalists. We’ve always had corruption in government. We’ve always had people taking care of their big donors and so forth, but we’ve never had a series of appointees and czars unaccountable whose sole objective is to transform this country into a socialist state that has as its number one enemy the people who work and produce and achieve.

We have that now. Whether you realize it in that direct graphic a way or whether you just sense it, you know it. It’s sometimes hard to admit we actually elected somebody like this. We don’t want to think this kind of stuff about presidents. Chris Christie the other day… It was yesterday. I’m flying up to New York, I’m watching the television, and Chris Christie is going on a rant here about Obama not showing up at the deficit super committee hearings. “What are we paying him for?” Well, that’s a good question, but you talk about naïve?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Chris Christie. “What are we paying him for? What is he doing? Where is his leadership?” I know that Christie has endorsed Romney and for Governor Christie, that’s a campaign thing. He’s actually furthering the Romney campaign. Which is fine, that’s not my point here. I’m not ripping Governor Christie for who he’s supporting. My only point is here is that the real answer to the question, “What are we paying him for?” is (sigh), “What do you expect? There was no way that that super committee was ever gonna come up with anything!” This campaign’s invested a billion dollars in a do-nothing Congress. The last thing in the world… I told the crowd last night, “If the super committee had agreed to shelve the Bush tax cuts and raise tax rates on the rich, the Democrats would not-a gone for it.” They wouldn’t have! “Mr. Limbaugh, that’s exactly what…” Nope, nope, nope. They’re gonna do that after the election. Right now they need a do-nothing Congress. Hell, Republicans gave ’em $300 billion in tax increases. They turned it down. “What are we paying him for?”