X

Why the Clinton Camp Still Feels Vulnerable

by Rush Limbaugh - Aug 9,2016

RUSH: Trump has raised — I think they reported — $70 million or $80 million in July, and it supposedly has unnerved the Clinton campaign.  Why would that be?  I mean, money is part of politics. Both parties raise money. Both parties run ads.  Why would this said to be on…? I mean, Hillary raised $90 million in July in addition to, on top of, the gazillions that she’d already raised. So what’s the big deal? 

I’ll tell you why.  For all this talk of the polling data — and there is a new poll, the Monmouth poll.  Let me go over this.  I promise you I will not lose my place.  This is… Even by an objective analysis, this is the worst poll so far for Trump.  It is a poll of likely voters, which is considered to be the primo sample.  That means it’s more accurate than just a survey of adults, or even registered voters.  Monmouth has a great reputation.  They are not considered to be an outlier. 

They are considered to be fairly down the middle, in terms of objectivity.  And in the Monmouth poll, Hillary Clinton has never been above 46%, but in this poll she hits 50%.  And it is the first Monmouth poll that shows her hitting 50%.  Actually, she may even be a little bit above it.  Trump is at 37% in this poll.  So poll watchers are looking at this and they are just seeing doom.  They’re saying, “Oh, my gosh, this is so bad! I don’t care if this is August. This is so bad, how do you recover from it?” 

He can recover from it.  Look, I’m not gonna get into a discussion of whether a poll is right or wrong or any of that.  Take this back to fundraising.  Why would the Clinton campaign be unnerved that Trump had raised $80 million?  Are they unnerved because they didn’t think that he had that much support anywhere?  Are they unnerved because they didn’t think there would be enough people willing to put that kind of money behind Trump because they think they’ve effectively defeated him already? 

Or are they worried what Trump will do with it?  I mean, Hillary has been running ads against Trump, and the Hillary ads have had one theme, that he’s unfit.  “He’s just not fit.  He doesn’t have the right temperament. He doesn’t have the experience. He’s risky. He’s off the wall! Can’t let this guy near the nuclear codes!”  But they’re worried about something.  They know that ads are negative.  They know that ads… By “negative,” I mean they’re highly critical.  I think they feel vulnerable. 

I think they feel vulnerable because they’ve got a problem, and it’s hard to talk about people with (chuckling) a 17-point lead as having a problem.  But she has a major problem, and it’s acknowledged by everybody.  The more she is seen in public, the worse she does in any kind of poll you take — a preference poll, a poll on likability, a poll on the future of the country — because she’s not likable, she’s not inspiring, she doesn’t appear to be real, and now there’s even… I run a risk saying this.

I don’t know how to describe it, but when I watch Hillary at her rallies… I saw her going after Trump after his economic speech, and I saw her glancing down at her notes practically after every sentence.  She just… I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to be… I can’t think of another way to describe it other than “all there.”  See, I would think if you’re Hillary Clinton, you know Democrat socialist policy inside out.  You don’t need crib sheets. 

You don’t need notes to tell you what you think, and refuting a speech like Trump gave? I mean, Trump gave a classic Republican speech, and many people think that’s good.  There are a lot of people think that if Trump would just keep doing what he did yesterday, that he could overcome these poll deficits. If he would just stay disciplined and just focus on the economics and the disastrous economics of this country as brought to us by Hillary Clinton and Obama, that he could gain serious ground. 

I happen to believe that that’s true, and I think they know it, too.  They know Reaganomics worked.  They know tax cuts work.  They know all these things work, and they work by making people less dependent on Democrats — and that’s why Hillary and the Democrats oppose this stuff.  They don’t want you keeping more of your money! They don’t want you becoming more self-sufficient.  They don’t like you being self-reliant.  They really don’t. 

If you’re listening to me for one of the first/few times you ever have, don’t doubt me on this.  That is a threat to them.  They want people dependent.  They want people in a state of need.  They want people looking longingly at government.  They want people looking at government as a hope and as salvation and as a backstop.  They want people looking at government as a protector and as people who are gonna take care of them and so forth. 

They do not want people thinking they can get by without it. 

They don’t want people thinking they can succeed and achieve great heights without government.  That’s their sole hold on power.  So Trump coming along and articulating tax policy that has worked every time it’s been implemented has got to bother them. So they’ve got to immediately embark on discrediting it, which they’ve been doing since the eighties.  They have become experts at history revisionism, lying to people about the eighties, lying to people about trickle-down economics. 

Economics is trickle-down! It’s exactly how it works.  It’s not a Reaganism thing.  Trickle-down is exactly how economic growth happens.  It’s not the result of Republican policy.  Economic growth equals trickle-down.  All “trickle-down” means is that the economy is growing and that people are participating in it.  Trickle-down is nothing more than a rich guy buying a car or a middle class guy buying a car.  Somebody benefits selling the car.  The people that make the car benefit. 

The people that market and advertise the car benefit when it’s sold.  The guy buying the car benefits because he’s pleased, if it isn’t a lemon.  He likes it!  That’s trickle-down.  They want you to believe that “trickle-down” is the rich not paying any taxes, getting to keep everything they earn and then not giving it to anybody.  They want you to think trickle-down is the rich giving money away, is the rich taking a break. I don’t know what… It’s convoluted what they think, but that’s exactly what they think it is. 

And that’s how they can disapprove it.  They can show trickle-down… “Because the rich don’t give their money away!” Nobody gives their money away.  Well, some people do.  They donate it or what have you.  But they want you to believe that trickle-down equals the rich getting all the money and then hoarding it.  That’s not what trickle-down is.  Trickle-down is economic activity.  Trickle-down is commerce.  And the more of it going on, the better it is for everybody, at whatever level you are in the economy.  And that scares the devil out of ’em. 

So they have to discredit it.  My point is, Hillary Clinton ought to be able to read or ought to be able to recite Democrat opposition to trickle-down in her sleep, and she was having to consult her notes, and she seemed unsure of herself, and the lines that she was using were old and stale and tired and worn out. To those of us that pay close attention every day and have been for the last 30 years, there was nothing new in it, and it was… Grab sound bite number 14. 

You know what we can do?  We can kind of illustrate this.  There’s two things I can illustrate here.  We have done an A-B, side-by-side comparison of Trump and his Economic Club of Detroit speech yesterday, where he mentions his economic proposals.  And we’ve cut that with Hillary commenting on them.  Now, there’s two things here.  You’ll hear Trump and his style, and it’s reserved, and it’s professional, and it is purposeful. 

And then you’ll hear Hillary’s reaction to it.  And it’s — well, I don’t want to characterize it, because it’ll speak for itself.  You just listen to this.  It’s about a minute long, and I think you’ll get the drift.  Audio sound bite 14 in three, two, one.

TRUMP:  We will eliminate the carried interest deduction and other special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors and for people like me.

HILLARY:  He wants to roll back regulations on Wall Street.  I want to tighten them.

TRUMP:  I will issue a temporary moratorium on new agency regulations.

HILLARY:  We got to work together to make sure small businesses have a chance to cut through the red tape.

TRUMP:  We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports, and airports.

HILLARY:  Our roads, our bridges, our tunnels, our ports, our airports, our water systems, our sewer systems, they are in desperate need of being either repaired and maintained or built.

TRUMP:  The rich will pay their fair share.

HILLARY:  We’re going to make the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes for a change.

RUSH:  All right, now, what did you hear?  You heard Hillary screaming, right?  You heard her screeching and shouting, but how much of what Trump said did she repeat almost verbatim?  And some of you might be scratching, “Wait a minute, Rush, what is our guy doing sounding like Hillary?”  Well, I can explain that. 

Trump is reaching out to more than just his base in his speech.  You know, he makes references to NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  That is a straight shot to the white middle class blue-collar people fed up with how their jobs have been taken away from ’em, and he’s simply acknowledging it. 

Roll back regulations on Wall Street.  He wants to eliminate carried interest.  That’s stealing one of — you know, Hillary is bought and paid for by Wall Street.  And the sooner her supporters understand this, the better.  And they don’t know it, folks.  Her supporters do not know how tight she is with Wall Street.  They think it’s the exact opposite.  They think that Wall Street is exclusively Republican, that it’s a bunch of rich fat cats, and they don’t pay their employees.  In certain cases, they kill their customers. They’re Big Pharma. They pollute the planet, if they’re Big Oil. They destroy the planet with climate change if they’re this or that. 

All these people are in bed with Hillary Clinton because they’re cronyists. They want to sidle up to power.  It isn’t about America. It’s not about patriotism. It’s not about what’s best for the country.  It’s about being able to sidle up to power and be protected and have your competitors damaged.  But Wall Street, basically 80%, 90% of Wall Street donations go to the Democrats.  And they don’t know it.  Hillary voters don’t know it.  And when you tell ’em that, they scratch their heads, and when they finish shouting at you and calling you names, they scratch their heads; it doesn’t compute. 

They hate Wall Street.  It’s big rich, it’s big money. It’s rich fat cats that don’t care about the poor and they don’t care about the downtrodden and all that, and you tell ’em that they’re paying for the Democrats, and it doesn’t compute.  So a way has gotta be found to get that message out.  And Trump is again playing to people beyond his base by talking about carried interest and getting rid of loopholes that have been good for Wall Street. 

Who’s put those loopholes there?  Well, Democrats, for the most part.  But roads and bridges and so forth.  Trump can get away with saying it.  He hadn’t been in power.  He hasn’t had his chance to fix it.  Hillary and Obama have been promising us to rebuild roads and bridges and schools for eight years, and there’s zip to show for it.  So every time he gets her to recite something she’s gonna do that Obama promised to do in 2008 and 2009, if done the right way, it can be helpful.

She’s got to be tied to these failures, because she is.  And every criticism of the status quo that Hillary Clinton articulates, she’s gotta be tied to it.  She has to be attached to it because her party is indeed the architect of this mess in which we find ourselves now.  And she’s got a problem in trying to campaign on the premise of fixing it all because she’s part of the problem.  Her policies led to this dilapidated state, and her policies are not gonna fix it.  They’re gonna continue to make it worse. 

So she’s gonna attack trickle-down. She’s gonna attack all these things that promote self-reliance and promote wage increases and increases in standard of living because those things are not in the Democrat Party’s best interests.  While they have got you convinced they’re looking out for the little guy, take a look at who’s suffering in America.  The little guy.  And the little guy has had Democrat Party working for him, in some cases, for 50 years.  And the little guy is angrier than he’s ever been.  African-Americans, angrier than I can ever remember them being, and they vote Democrat exclusively.  At some point the Democrats have to be held accountable for this.  And we know the media is not gonna do it.  That’s up to Trump and his campaign.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Okay.  Audio sound bite number one.  There is an ad.  This is a brutal Trump ad on reckless, crooked Hillary Clinton.  It’s a new ad entitled “Short-Circuit” and it is focused on Hillary Clinton’s recklessness for using her private email server and lying about it. And it uses Drive-By Media people and their opinions.  It’s a 30-second ad.  You don’t really need to see the video.  The audio does a pretty good job by itself.  Here it is.WOLF BLITZER: Extremely careless.LESTER HOLT: Email system was breached by hostile actors.UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Gross negligence. ANNOUNCER: Hillary Clinton put our National Security at risk and she’s still lying. HILLARY CLINTON: (Fox News Sunday) Director Comey said that my answers were truthful.JAMES COMEY: (Congressional hearing) That’s not true. ANNOUNCER:  Even The Washington Post says Hillary Clinton lied, comparing her to Pinocchio.HILLARY CLINTON: (NABJ/NAHJ) I may have short circuited it and for that I uh… ANNOUNCER:  Careless, Reckless, Crooked… putting her interests ahead of National Security, don’t let Hillary Clinton do it again.RUSH:  Thirty-second ad, and it’s effective.  The video helps it, but you heard everything that’s depicted in the video there. Here’s Chris in West Alexandria, Ohio, as we head back to the phones.  Hello, sir.CALLER:  Hello, Rush.  Mega security police Air Force dittos to you.  If I could ask Hillary Clinton a couple questions, it would be, “Ma’am, you said you relied on your personal server for convenience.  My question is, as a senior executive in the government, where did all your classified email traffic go to?  Where did the Pentagon email you at?  Where did State send you messages?  Where did Justice send you messages?  Where did the executive branch send you messages?  How did your consulates contact you in case of an emergency?  What if you were away from your office, ma’am, and you were out of town and you needed to be contacted about classified material?” The fact is, Rush, as somebody who was — you know, I was in the military for 20 years.  There’s absolutely no way she could have done her job without access to classified email on a daily basis multiple times.  Ask any member of Congress.  Ask a senator.  Ask any of the SES guys you know.  They’re gonna go, “You know what, that’s absolutely true.”  So, Hillary, where did all that traffic go?  All the official traffic from all the cabinets, all the other parts of government that you have to do business with? RUSH:  All of this isn’t the problem.  The problem is that half the country doesn’t know what you know and the rest of us know because they haven’t been told.  What half the country knows is that Hillary Clinton said there wasn’t any classified data. The only classified data said “classified” on it, and if it didn’t say “classified” how could I know it was classified?  So I didn’t do anything wrong.  I wasn’t tracking in classified data. And that’s what people know because the media is simply reporting what she says.  However, there is one exception.  I have held this exception.  It’s an LA Times story from I think over the weekend.  I’m gonna mention this because I have a question about it.  The media makes an assertion in the reporting of this story that I’m curious about.  I’ll explain we get back.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So I got this LA Times story.  It’s from August the 6th.  So I think that was Saturday.  And this is what was curious to me about it.  “Hillary Clinton’s Post-Convention Bounce Runs Into a Familiar Wall: Emails.”  This is the only story of this type that I saw in the Drive-By Media, and here’s how it begins. 

“Friday could have marked the end of what has been arguably the best week of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Coming off a successful Democratic convention, combined with some of the most pronounced Republican infighting to date, Clinton took a commanding lead over GOP rival Donald Trump, both in national and many swing state polls.

“But instead of capitalizing on the momentum, she tripped up again on her political Achilles’ heel — emails — before an audience she has kept at arm’s length over the last 16 months — journalists.”

Now, this was after Hillary appeared before the Latino and African-American, black and Latino journalists association.  Now, this was the appearance where they applauded her.  This is the appearance where they cheered her.  They coached her and they applauded her answers, journalists!  I don’t know why I sound so shocked.  I think it’s because they were so open in their display.  We know journalists want Hillary.  We know they’re advocating for her, and we know they are actively opposing Trump, but this bunch was applauding. 

It would be no different than if you saw the White House press corps applaud the president any time he had a derogatory comment about any Republican.  You just don’t see it.  But you did in this.  So my impression watching that was it was a home run. That those journalists, the black and Latino journalists loved Hillary, and they applauded her and they encouraged her.  But the LA Times has a story here about how this was a bad experience for Hillary.  This portends very dangerous things for her.  Well you can understand my curiosity.  The Drive-Bys just don’t write things like this about Hillary, and about this event in particular. 

Now, the story has two authors, Michael Memoli and Kurtis Lee.  It’s a news piece, not an opinion piece.  Instead of capitalizing on the momentum, she tripped up again on her Achilles’ heel, the emails, before an audience that she’s kept at arm’s-length, media in general.  And then they write: “Speaking at a gathering of black and Latino reporters and editors in Washington, Clinton struggled to reconcile her previous public statements about the handling of sensitive information over a private email server with the critical assessment offered by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”  Comey.  I didn’t see her struggling. Well, she may have struggled with this group, but they didn’t care. They applauded her. 

This group did not treat her like she had just committed a faux pas.  They did not treat her as though she had run up against a wall.  They did not treat her like she had just made a mistake.  They were applauding her. 

“Over the course of nearly four and a half minutes, Clinton first feinted toward acknowledging a recent misstatement, saying she offered a ‘short-circuited’ response in a Fox News interview,” and then she “said there was no evidence that she had lied to the FBI.”  She was very defensive and all this. 

Now, the reason why this story stuck out is ’cause it’s exactly right.  This story does expand her vulnerabilities.  She is vulnerable as hell on this email story.  But the Drive-Bys are not holding her accountable to it, so her vulnerability is masked or limited.  But the LA Times is not playing to type.  The LA Times is acting like they are not in it for Hillary.  They’re reporting this and analyzing it as they would covering any politician who was in the circumstance Hillary is in.  And they’re finding big trouble for her, and it stands out because it’s the only example of this I’ve seen. 

And it raised a question.  This story from the LA Times states that Hillary ended up the best week of her campaign in trouble because of the way she dealt with questions from the black and Latino journalists on emails.  Why is she in trouble?  The journalists applauded her.  No other Drive-By Media reports are prosecuting her.  They’re not even bringing it up.  The LA Times does, but who else is gonna know how deeply she stepped in it? 

My question is, why would the occasion of answers she has given before all of a sudden be threatening and damaging?  What is it about these reporters, what do they see, what are they worried about that nobody else in the Drive-By Media is?  I’m not saying anything.  I’m trying to understand the journalistic take.  This is the way journalism theoretically is supposed to be.  Hillary Clinton lied. When asked about lying, she didn’t do a very good job of explaining it and dug herself in deeper.  That’s the story of her appearance before the black and Latino journalists, but only the LA Times writes about it that way. 

Why do they think she’s gonna be in trouble?  They have to know the Drive-Bys are covering it up for her.  They have to know she’s not being held accountable for it.  Why do they think she’s in trouble?  Why do they think she ended a glorious week on a bad note?  (interruption)  No, no, no.  I’m not saying there’s a hidden meaning here.  I’m asking a — well, I think it’s a genuine question.  I’m just curious here what they see.  I do think I do think that, in their private moments, these journalists all-in for Hillary know full well the damaged goods that they’re selling.  Don’t you?  I think they know full well they are all-in on this package that could blow up on ’em at any moment. 

Not even that they know what they would do if she were a Republican.  I mean, they’ve invested in her, but she’s, you know, one stair step away from disaster.  She’s one frozen moment with the mouth wide open, no words coming out, away from, “God, what’s wrong with Hillary?”  You know, there’s all kinds of potential pitfalls here.  And that’s why, folks, they don’t have, the Drive-By Media’s campaign — and they’re running one — is not to promote Hillary Clinton. 

You don’t find stories on how great she is.  Even now, after all these years, Yale, Arkansas, first lady, Senator, you don’t find stories extolling her virtues.  You don’t find stories extolling her achievements and her accomplishments.  Secretary of state.  All you’re seeing is negative stuff on Donald Trump.  That’s easily 90% of the journalism campaign against or for Hillary Clinton.  They’re not telling people how wonderful she is, how smart she is, how accomplished she is, how deserving she is, what great things that she’s going to do.  Everything in this campaign — they’re following her lead.  Her lead is Trump’s unfit. Trump is ill tempered. He doesn’t have the right temperament, he’s unsuited.  That’s the sole focus.  That’s all they’ve got. 

And in the midst of that, she does have these vulnerabilities over there.  I’m telling you, Benghazi is a big vulnerability, and they know it. And the emails and the server are a big vulnerability.  The Clinton Foundation and the all of this money that they have raised from foreign entities is a big vulnerability.  Yeah, $20 million in speeches in two years to Wall Street firms is a big vulnerability.  And they have to keep all that hidden. 

The reason they don’t do stories extolling how wonderful and great she is is because people would want to hear more and they would want to understand the details. And there’s nothing great in getting $20 million in two years doing speeches to people you supposedly want to punish, Wall Street bankers.  And then, of course, we have the lies, the never-ending, one lie on top of another.  She lies about the lies.  Her lying is so bad that she’s long past trying to remember who she told what lie to.  

It doesn’t matter.  Just keep lying.  From how she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, to avoiding sniper fire, to the big stuff.  So the sole focus of the journalism campaign to elect Hillary Clinton is to destroy Donald Trump.  That’s why the Trumpsters have to do everything they can to turn this back on her.  They have got to turn the focus back on her: Her lack of qualifications, her problem points, her danger points, her incompetence, her exact ties to the policies that have resulted in the disaster that is the United States today. 

And right at the top of that list is Obamacare. 

And then immigration. 

And then these trade deals that she was for, and then all of this stuff on foreign policy that they have done that has put this country at greater risk than ever before since the end of World War II.  


Related Links