RUSH: I mentioned it toward the end of the previous hour that yesterday a lot of the media was shaken up. The media has been comfortable — and you may find this hard to believe — the media, the Democrats, the left, have been comfortable with the way Romney’s going about campaigning on the economy, because they have been of the opinion that it’s ineffective. And it largely is ineffective, given the discussion that we had yesterday. We live in a new era. Traditional campaign theory, tactics, everything in the playbook you pretty much have to throw out. We’ve never had this degree of dependence before. You’ve got more people signing up for disability than getting jobs in the month of June. That’s unprecedented. It’s never happened.

People are signing up for disability when their unemployment compensation expires, after their 99 weeks are over. They need the money. There aren’t any jobs. But it doesn’t matter as much now that you don’t have a job. In the first place, there’s no stigma attached. In the second place you can still eat and you can still have your cell phone. You can still have your cell phone coverage paid for, and you can still have your car and your plasma. And so the degree of pain that’s attached to not having a job for a lot of people — not everybody, some people have a moral aspect to it they just despise — but for a lot of people there’s not that much pain. And there’s an aspect of 8.2%, 8.1% unemployment as a new norm. It’s been three-and-a-half years. It hasn’t gotten any better. The media’s not holding anybody to account on it.

Romney runs around campaigning on this in a traditional way that probably isn’t going to get a lot of traction, and it was the only thing he was campaigning on. The economy was it. So I was pointing all this out yesterday and some in the media got a little nervous, ’cause there was a comfort level attached to the way the Romney campaign was dealing with the economy, a comfort level on the part of the Democrats. Here is an example. We go to CNN. By the way, I think I figured out what CNN’s gonna do to try to recapture their lost glory. I think they’re gonna move further to the left, try to even out-left MSNBC. That’s based on a couple things I’ve seen. It’s too early to know for certain, too soon to tell right now, but it looks to me like CNN is gonna move even further left in their valiant effort to recapture the 98% of their audience that they’ve lost since the 1980s.

Now, this morning on a program called Newsroom, the anchor, Carol Costello, who is also the CNN assigned stalker of this program, she spoke to a columnist at The Daily Beast by the name of John Avlon about the Romney campaign and me. She played audio of me saying that the economy is not enough for Romney to win on. And then she said, “So, is Rush Limbaugh right? Are we dealing with something new in 2012?”

AVLON: What Rush Limbaugh is alluding to is that this race is going to get uglier, it’s going to get nastier, it’s going to get more negative. When he talks explicitly about how Romney, he believes, needs to do to Obama what he did previously to Gingrich and Santorum, that’s a very specific prescription. That’s what Rush Limbaugh is encouraging Mitt Romney to do, to go negative and to use a financial advantage to try to, you know, look, politics ain’t bean bag, but that’s the prescription Rush Limbaugh’s saying that Mitt Romney needs to follow.

RUSH: Well, that’s pretty much right, and that worries them. It worries them. They don’t want that to happen. Romney does have a financial advantage. They want Obama to own Mr. Negative. They want Obama to be Mr. Cutthroat. They don’t want to see the Romney that destroyed Santorum and that destroyed Newt with his Super PAC. They don’t want to see that. So now they’re a little worried.