10-01-2004, 11:42 PM
And Republicans are very scared after last night. Rush is invoking Reagan in order to spin this in a good way for Bush.
Quote:To our previous caller and all the rest of you out there who share similar sentiments, may I remind you -- and I know there's a caveat to this -- can I remind you of the first Reagan-Mondale debate in 1984. If you weren't around, that was painful. We were all. We were devastated. Reagan looked 99 years old and totally out of it. And the stories after that debate, "Is something wrong? Is Reagan? going senile?" The word "senile" was used in 1984. And now at that point, Mondale, he wasn't down by landslide proportions, that was yet to come. But Reagan still held a lead. It was not a huge, huge, huge lead but Reagan had a lead. And that debate didn't change that election at all. Because Reagan came back the next week and hit a home run. Or the next debate and hit a home run for making a joke about, you know, not exploiting the youth of his opponent, Mr. Mondale. But that first debate in 1984, it was bad. And this last night was nothing like that. Zilch, zero, nada. And we were right smack-dab in the midst of the Cold War. We had Mondale promising to raise taxes. We had Mondale saying the Soviet threat wasn't that big of deal, typical liberal stuff. What I'm trying to do here, folks, just so you know, I mean you can focus on Bush all you want. I mean, if the idea here is persuasion, if the idea here is victory, you got to focus on what Kerry said. Kerry said a number of truly damaging things to his own campaign last night.
Now, just because other people aren't focusing on them doesn't mean I'm not going to. And that's my focus here today. That's why we're playing the sound bites and reviewing some of the things that he said and putting them in some sort of context to counter the notion that Kerry put it all together last night. Everybody thinks Kerry put it all together, finally put it together last night, finally made some sense last night. He was the same old John Kerry last night. The thing that saved him, I think, was the time limit. Had there been no time limit, he would have wandered on and on and on and he didn't have time to contradict himself in two minutes.