RUSH: Chris in Manhattan. Hey, Chris. It’s great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How you doin’?
RUSH: I’m fine, thank you.
CALLER: It’s a real honor to speak with you, and thank you for all you do.
RUSH: I appreciate that, sir.
CALLER: Over the years I’ve heard you say that you would always tell us when it was time to worry, and you still seem kind of optimistic that things will turn out all right. Everything I see seems to indicate the opposite. I mean, you have the IRS about to run our healthcare; the government’s spying on us instead of us spying on the government. Just, so… Everything is going wrong. It seems like everything Obama wants to do is against the United States that we’ve kind of grown up knowing.
RUSH: Let me tell you what troubles me more than anything. All of what you say is true, and we’ve known it was going to happen. We knew, you and I. I mean, we knew who Obama was and is, and what someone with leftist-socialist tendencies wants to do. Obamacare, building government, controlling people. It’s what they do; we’re not surprised. There are two things here.
The thing that worries me the most is there’s no political pushback. I don’t know what’s happened to the Republican Party. Chris, one of the reasons I’m optimistic… I’m not falsely optimistic. This is major what’s happened to this country. Some of this stuff appears to be irreversible (within our lifetimes anyway) such as Obamacare if it actually is fully implemented, the empowerment of the IRS and all that.
I understand that, but the majority of the American people don’t want this. I know. I know Obama got elected. The election is what it is. It wouldn’t have happened if there would have been a viable Republican Party alternative pushback. Four million Republican voters stayed home in 2012! I don’t know why the Republican Party doesn’t fight. We don’t have any representation out here, you and me, Chris.
CALLER: I agree with you. I mean, and there’s just such an acceptance. I mean, I try to talk to people about what’s going on and they look at me like I’m from Mars.
RUSH: Well, but wait a minute.
CALLER: They have no idea what I’m talking about.
RUSH: You’re in Manhattan.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: You’re in the Devil’s armpit as it were.
CALLER: But we still lost! That’s what I felt. I felt that, “You know, okay, I’m in Manhattan, we’re going to…” I have another question about the election, if you give me the chance.
RUSH: Sure. Go ahead.
CALLER: Okay. You remember before the election, there were all these people voting ahead of time. On the news, you actually heard about people saying they would walk into the voting booth and they would vote for Romney and Obama’s name would come up and there were all kinds of irregularities. Nobody ever addressed it. There was also some kind of talk that Soros owned or bought the companies that counted the votes. Was there any truth to any of that?
RUSH: I’m sure that there were instances of that happening, but I don’t think that explains Obama’s win. I’m sure that happened, and I know that the Democrats want to continue to be able to corrupt the voting process. Their opposition to photo ID to vote is all the proof anybody needs for that contention. Let me try… Look. Anytime the question of optimism comes up, and I get it a lot — “How do you stay so optimistic” — it’s a fine line here because nobody wants to hear false, phony optimism that’s not grounded, not rooted in reality.
I mean, Norman Vincent Peale is fine, but there has to be a foundation for the optimism to take root in, and I don’t want to create the impression that what’s happened here is no different than what’s happened in the past in America. “We can overcome it and we can turn it back.” We’ve had things happen that haven’t happened in this country before. The Constitution may as well not exist to the Democrat Party today. But the big problem, if I may say again…
Please look at me when I say this. By every measure available to us — polling data, everything but election returns (and, of course, they may matter more than the polls in this case. But issue by issue by issue by issue, the vast majority of the American people oppose what is happening. Now, that doesn’t explain the election returns. But if there had been some pushback… I said it earlier: You and I right now, Chris, do not have any representation in Washington.
The party that’s supposed to represent us is afraid to.
They are more inclined to either be quiet or to give the appearance of not opposing Obama because they’re scared to do it for some reason. I think one of the primary reasons or explanations for that is race. I just think it’s paralyzing. I think the accusation of racism and the serious criticism will be rejected because it’s said to be racist in its origins. I really do think it has them befuddled, and there’s also a part of the Republican Party in Washington that is “of” Washington and not the country.
They are part of the ruling class.
It’s Washington versus the rest of the people.
But the reason I’m optimistic is that we haven’t lost the people yet.
All we need is some representation, and I’m going to get in trouble for saying this. (sigh) How do I say this? If the next Democrat presidential candidate is not African-American, it’s going to change everything about the way the Republican Party operates. I think the Republican Party is frozen. They are afraid to oppose anything that involves Obama and the Democrats right now because of race. The way it is used as a hammer against Obama’s opponents has been very effective on them.
I think this presidency is a one off, but there’s so much damage that’s been done by this president that is different than the damage that Clinton did, for example, or LBJ. But we did come back from FDR. We came back from Woodrow Wilson. We did. Capitalism returned and became dominant, but the roots that FDR planted continue to grow. This has taken 50 years to happen. It didn’t happen overnight, and it’s a monumental thing to turn this back. And the idea that we may still have a majority of the people, but it’s not big. And there’s a sizable contingent of our population that is apparently totally happy to accept the status quo. Because they’re doing okay with it.
So it just makes more sense to me to be optimistic and hopeful than defeatist and negative. That’s not going to get us anywhere. It’s not going to accomplish anything. It really isn’t. And no matter what, Chris, we remain individuals and we all only get one life. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the Democrat Party ruin my life. I mean, I’m going to do what I can to stop them, but I’m going to enjoy my life as best I can, no matter what happens. I am not going to cave or give up or become apocalyptic because of what they do.
You know, I’ll oppose them and fight them here on the radio and whatever other venues I happen to get into, but I’m not going to go home and be depressed. I’m not going to go home and mope. I’m not going to go home and worry about things I can’t control, which is the low information voter and the other people in this country that don’t seem to be troubled by this. I’m just going to continue to try to reach them here and teach them and so forth. And that to me requires optimism. I hear the phone ringing. Are you still there?
CALLER: I’m sorry. I’m still on. But one last thing, what you said about race and you were going to get in trouble for something. So I’m just going to say something. My soon to be ex wife is a doctor.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: During the election, before the election, she was talking to another doctor, a friend of hers who’s black. She says, “I know Obama’s done a horrible job, but he’s a black man, it’s his first time, and I have to vote for him again.” Now, if we would have said this about a white person, like I’m voting for him because he’s white; I’m not voting for a black person
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I mean, that would have been all over the place. But there was so much of this. So many people just voted for him based on his race and because he was cool.
RUSH: Let me tell you something. I’m glad you brought that up because there’s a phrase for that, Chris. The people you are talking about, and they are all over the media and they are the worst racists of all because, let me define what you just explained there. It’s called the soft bigotry of low expectations. What you just said was that this white person you were talking about really thinks we need to feel sorry for Obama and we need to feel sorry for him because he’s black and we need to feel sorry for him because, well, you know slavery and racism. That is the way every white liberal looks at it.
Whoever coined this phrase came up with a brilliant way of explaining liberal white racism. The soft bigotry of low expectations, this never ending sympathy for all of the horrible things that happened in the past and it’s not fair to expect greatness. It’s not fair to expect. We’ve got to allow them not to be very good because that means we understand how hard they’ve had it. It’s the worst racism there is because it lowers expectations, it excuses poor performance. They’re the ones that perpetrate it. It’s rooted in their own guilt that they are attempting to assuage or feel better about themselves by voting for Obama, even though the friend admitted he didn’t do a good job, but “Give him a second chance, guys. The first black president, come on, who are we talking about here?”
That means they feel guilty, not for anything they did but just from things that happened and they are trying to get rid of the guilt. They don’t want to feel guilty and so, “Look at me, I’m not a racist. I support the black president.” Soft bigotry of low expectations. And they perpetuate this. The thing that that does delegitimizes every genuine success an African American has. White liberals do this. This is the exclusive province of white liberals. They run around and they talk about colorblind society. You look what they do when they encounter somebody truly colorblind like me. They call that racism.
I’m not afraid to criticize Obama. He’s the president of the United States. I don’t care what his skin color is. His policies stink as far as I’m concerned. They are doing great damage. The fact that he’s black does not matter to me. I’m colorblind. He’s president. All that matters to me about Obama are his policies and what his ideas are. I don’t care about all that other extraneous surface stuff because it doesn’t matter. But it’s used as an excuse for either incompetence or radicalism or what have you. Does great damage. Anyway, don’t let these people ruin your life.