RUSH: I gotta be very, very careful in discussing this. I have to be very careful because Reince Priebus went out and announced the new Republican Party rebranding and marketing plan. Now, I have been in marketing. Marketing is a multifaceted discipline that has one objective and that is to separate people from their money. And sales is part of marketing.
Now, one thing that I’ve always believed in, as somebody in marketing, is you don’t tell anybody how you’re gonna separate them from their money. You just do it. You don’t give them any ammo to resist you. You just do it. You just show up and execute the plan. I remember when I worked for the Kansas City Royals I was in sales and marketing, and the off season was the busiest time ’cause the off season is when you planned everything you’re gonna do, marketing-wise, to sell baseball tickets the next season. The one thing that sells tickets better than anything else is a winning team and that’s the one thing you have no control over. You have no control over whether the team’s gonna win so you have to come up with creative, innovative ways to get people to the ballpark regardless. But we never told anybody how we were gonna do it.
In fact, we were famous for our marketing plans. I mean, they were copycatted by a number of teams, not just in baseball, but in the NBA and it got to the point the media would come to us and say, “So what’s the theme for this season?” We’d never tell ’em. We’d just execute it. But the Republicans… and we’re gonna get into this in some detail. The Republicans are just totally bamboozled right now, and they are entirely lacking in confidence, which is what happens to every political party after an election in which they think they got shellacked. They think they got landslided, and they didn’t, but they’re acting like they did, and they think they did.
I think what really is going on here, folks, at this moment policy is not the primary thing they’re concerned about, even though they’re not gonna admit that. They are concerned, and you will understand this the moment I say it, about their donor base. And so what Priebus is doing, they got this big plan. I got a copy of it last night. I got an embargoed copy. It was embargoed ’til like seven o’clock this morning, but it didn’t matter to me because I’m not gonna be talking about it in public by then so I could go ahead and look at it, and I didn’t. I waited for others to go through it and report on it ’cause I know what it’s gonna say, and I was right. They think they’ve gotta rebrand and it’s all predictable. They gotta reach out to minorities. They gotta moderate their tone here and moderate their tone there. And that’s not at all what they’ve gotta do.
The Republican Party lost because it’s not conservative. It didn’t get its base out in the 2012 election.
Now, that’s simple to say, and it’s probably simple for you to agree with, but I’m telling you, that is a major mountain to climb within the party itself, as you well know, because the establishment in Washington, the ruling class, both parties, is not conservative, and in fact they fear it. They’re very much worried about it because it’s considered an outsider movement. So they kicked the Tea Party out, they try to deemphasize the Tea Party, don’t use it, let’s put it that way. They did not use the asset that the Tea Party provided them. The principles here are timeless, but go back now and redefine your principles and the message, and it’s not it. It isn’t that hard.
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RUSH: There’s a story from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. They ought to change the name of this to the Limbaugh Research Center for Excellence in Journalism, because everything that I have said in criticizing and analyzing the media, these people now say.
Customers are not being serviced. Customers are unhappy. Consumers of news don’t trust it. They don’t think they’re being dealt with fairly and honestly and so forth. It won’t matter. So there are degrees of similarity here that are as scary as they can be. While all this is going on, folks — while a golden opportunity exists for the Republican Party to simply contrast themselves with all of this radical liberalism — what are they doing? I’m not comfortable criticizing here. I’m not in their line of work.
You know, politics is not my business, and I don’t pretend to know better than they do how to run their business. I don’t want anybody misunderstand, and I really don’t doubt that they’ve got people trying to do what they think is best, but have I been telling you? The past five years have not been, and there never will be again, a greater opportunity to contrast conservatism with what’s actually happened. We don’t have to warn people about radical liberalism. We don’t have to warn people about what will happen if radical liberals ever get in office.
It’s already happening! We’re in the middle of what we were warning about ten and 15 years ago. The contrast is clear. But instead we’re getting this hand-wringing analysis from the Republican Party and marketing announcements and what we gotta do to reach out to minorities and so forth.
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RUSH: Here is Reince Priebus. The chairman the Republican National Committee today at the National Press Club announcing the new marketing plan. He started out with an analysis — oh, remind me, you know, these Google glasses, have you seen these? Remind me I have a salient point about this I’ve gotta make. Already there are establishments saying, “We don’t want ’em in here.” There are already bars and restaurants saying, “We do not want anybody wearing these glasses in here.” You don’t understand why? Oh-ho. Good. If Snerdley doesn’t get it, then a lot of you probably haven’t figured this out or had it occur to you. Let’s put it that way. So remind me.
In the meantime, here’s Reince Priebus. What went on first is an analysis of what went wrong or what is wrong.
PRIEBUS: Focus groups described our party as narrow-minded, out of touch, and, quote, “stuffy old men.” The report minces no words in telling us that we have to be more inclusive. I agree, and as President Reagan said, our 80% friend is not our 20% enemy.
RUSH: What does that mean?
PRIEBUS: We can be true to our principles without being disrespectful to those who don’t agree with a hundred percent of them.
RUSH: I’m sorry, but we’re not disrespectful to anybody. Look at what these focus groups have got these poor guys believing. Look at this. Our party’s narrow-minded. I know it’s the impression, but it’s the why that people think that, that is the secret to rebutting this. It’s not accepting that as true because it isn’t. “But, Rush, perceptions are reality. You’ve said it yourself.” Well, that’s true, but out of touch, not out of touch. We are in touch with the founding of this country. We are in touch with the greatness of this country and its people. Narrow-minded. See, we oppress people. We’re not open. We’re not tolerant, see. We’re not inclusive.
So we gotta be more tolerant. That means cash in our chips on our core principles. We gotta be more inclusive, and he says he agrees with this. We can be true to our principles without being disrespectful to those who don’t agree. When are we disrespectful? Was it us who ran ads accusing Obama of not caring if some guy’s wife died of cancer? Was it us who ran ads about Obama not caring about his dog? Was it us who ran ads accusing Obama of hiding money in the Caymans? Was it us that did all this? The Democrats get away with it.
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RUSH: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, this is Dave. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Rush, thanks for taking my call. I’ve gotta tell you, Reince Priebus couldn’t be more wrong about having to rebrand the party. He’s right about they need to reach out to minorities, but the way to do that is get people like Robert, that called you last Thursday and Representative West to be the ones to help do that. I was so inspired by that guy’s call last week. First of all, he had the guts to apologize to you. That, in itself, is unbelievable. Once you can admit you’re wrong about something, which is what I think half the problem is with people that vote Democrat, things can change quick. But the biggest thing that can scare them right now in the Democrat Party is if blacks start turning out for Republicans.
RUSH: You know, that’s a good point. What he’s talking about, folks, is a caller last week from South Carolina or somewhere. His name was Robert and he was black guy, and he voted for Obama. He’s done a 180, and he called to apologize. He was apologizing for believing what everybody had always said about me, and that he always believed before he started listening. And then — like we hear over and over — he started listening, and he heard something entirely different.
What he heard was very appealing, and what he heard (obviously) when he tuned in this program was conservatism, and he totally abandoned Obama, and he totally abandoned the Democrat Party, and he came to understand exactly what the danger that Obama poses, and what got him… He didn’t say it in these words, but what woke him up was the Limbaugh Theorem, the observation that Obama never does anything other than campaign/oppose. He’s always running for something, apparently, according to appearances.
He doesn’t govern.
He’s always trying to fix something. Anyway, the light went off for him, and his point was that what got him was not a marketing package, and it wasn’t Republican Party outreach. It wasn’t that somebody from the GOP got hold of him and sat him down in a focus group and asked him what he wants the party to be. He just heard conservatism. He heard conservatism explained.
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