RUSH: You want to know how bad it is for the Democrats right now? Even Willie Brown, da mayor, former mayor of San Francisco, in a column over the weekend, said Hillary Clinton is going to lose. Da Speaker has a column in the San Francisco Chronicle, and he wrote that Hillary Clinton’s gonna lose. He said, “Everybody keeps asking me, ‘Why did this happen?’ Beats me. When it came to the elections, I was a dreamer who thought the Democrats were going to retain the Senate. Instead, we got walloped.”
And he said the big mistake that the Democrats made was “running away from President Barack Obama, ‘which simply played into the RepublicansÂ’ strategy of portraying him as a failure.’ The party also failed to turn out young voters,” he said.
No, we weren’t making anything up. Obama is a failure. No, see, even have to qualify that. In his own mind, in terms of what Obama really wants to do, he’s not a failure at all, folks. Obama is in the midst of overwhelming success. In terms of what he wants to do, what his agenda has always been, he’s in the midst of overwhelming success.
So Obama, when he says he’s gotta do a better job of selling, no, that’s just smoke and mirrors. He’s saying what he thinks other Democrats and the media want him to say. He doesn’t have to sell it. Obama’s not in sales. Do you think authoritarian figures wait for public approval to do what they want to do? He’s not worried about making a sale on anything here. That’s so crucial to understand. He’s not a salesman. He doesn’t need a better pitch or a more believable pitch or whatever.
He confirmed, by the way — this is major to me. He confirmed the Limbaugh Theorem. He literally confirmed it. This from the Washington Free Beacon: “After six years of endless campaigning and fundraising, President Obama admitted to CBSÂ’s Bob Scheiffer that ‘campaigning and governance are two different things.’
‘HereÂ’s one thing that I will say, is that — campaigning and governance are two different things,’ Obama said. ‘IÂ’ve ran two successful campaigns, and anybody whoÂ’s seen me on the campaign trail can tell how much I love just being with the American people, and hearing what they care about, how passionate I am about trying to help them.'”
That’s exactly what the Limbaugh Theorem is, a constant campaign and the appearance of not governing in the sense of not being responsible for anything. The Limbaugh Theorem, as the explanation for how Obama gets away with this. He’s governing against the will of the people. How did he get away with it for so long? Because they relied on the stupidity of the American people, in their own words.
Obama figured that if he was outside Washington constantly appearing at events that looked like campaign events, and if at those events he was always presenting his agenda as something everybody was trying to stop in Washington, that he wasn’t part of Washington. I mean, he was elected, but it didn’t matter. He was still on the campaign trail and still trying to deal with these powerful forces that were arrayed against him, rather than appear to be governing and wielding the power that he did and has. So he’s admitted it here to Bob Schieffer. Schieffer just didn’t pick it up.
Bill Clinton is the one who popularized it. Clinton popularized the permanent campaign. In the permanent campaign, you can always be at war. If you’re in a permanent campaign, you can constantly be waging war against your enemies. But that doesn’t look cool if you’re waging war against your enemies when you’re in the most powerful office in the world. It just wouldn’t look right. So Obama did not ever want to convey the appearance of governing so as to avoid any accountability for what was happening. He would go out and campaign against the very things he was implementing. And he admits it!
He admitted it on Face the Nation yesterday. (imitating Obama) “Yep, there’s a big difference in campaigning and governing, and, you know, I’ve kind of figured out the campaign part. That’s all I do. I gotta get better at governing.” And that’s a signal to look out for these next two years. Keep a sharp eye.
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