http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/02/22/jeb_did_it_he_ran_against_the_base_lost_the_primary_and_100_millionJeb Did It! He Ran Against the Base -- Lost the Primary (And $100 Million)
February 22, 2016
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I have something here, ladies and gentlemen, I'm holding in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. It is from the archives of RushLimbaugh.com. That be my website. December 2nd, 2014, about 14 months ago. "Jeb Bush: To Win the Presidency, You Have to Run Against the Base."
Greetings, my friends, and welcome. Rush Limbaugh. I'm almost hyperventilating right now. There is so much to try to squeeze into three hours today and I don't think I could do it all just -- I mean, I could squeeze it all in, but some of it would just be scant few seconds of mention just to qualify that I talked about it. There is so much roiling out there and so much of investing out there. So just hang in there. We'll get to every bit of it we can. It's why the program is three hours long. 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program. We'll be talking to you, of course, as the program unfolds.
The mother of all See, I Told You So moments -- by the way, there are two postmortems today on the Jeb Bush campaign and what went wrong with it. One's in the Washington Post. It prints out to seven pages. There's another one in The Politico. It prints out to five pages.
Both of them pretty much say the same thing. And if I had to synthesize it down, it would be the Republican establishment and the establishment's consultants class raised over a hundred million dollars believing in an old paradigm, that all it took was money. The message, that could come later. The candidate, yeah, that was somewhat important, but we can't use his last name.
They went into this knowing that there was in the population for the Bush family and fatigue for the Clinton name as well, in terms of Republican voting. And they did it anyway. They went out and they raised over a hundred -- well, a hundred million dollars for the super PAC and whatever they raised for the campaign itself. And they've got zilch to show for it. And as these people are quoted in interviews, it sounds like they're from the Stone Age.
This is the establishment. These are the people with access to all the donors. These are the people that could put their hands on that kind of money and they had no idea what to do with it. They had no idea what they were doing, all the while thinking they were the only ones who knew what they were doing. Neither of these pieces are hit pieces per se. I mean, they're mostly retrospectives and postmortems. And both contain highlights I want to share with you.
But here it is, December 2014, from my website: "We have a Jeb Bush audio sound bite. Let's see. It's last night in Washington at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council. It's an invitation-only event featuring some of the nation's most powerful CEOs. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush spoke, and this is what he said about running for president." Remember this? I don't have the sound bite. I'm gonna quote what he said. "I don't know if I'd be a good candidate or a bad one. I kind of know how a Republican can win, whether it's me or somebody else, and it has to be much more uplifting, much more positive, much more willing to, y'know, to be practical now in Washington -- lose the primary to win the general -- without violating your principles.
And there it was. Lose the primary to win the general. So we embark on a crusade to define that. And it didn't take long, we all figured out what it meant, because eventually they said so. They wanted to win the Republican primary for Jeb Bush without securing a majority of vote support from the base, i.e., the conservative grassroots of the party. They set out to do that, and they thought they could do it with money. They thought they could do it with money, strategy, and message. But both of these postmortems make it clear that even before they started, they had polling data that told them not to do Jeb Bush. There was nothing personally against Jeb Bush that anybody had; it's just the Republican base was tired and wanted to move on from the Bushes. They knew this.
They had every bit of polling data they could have had that told them, "Don't do this. Don't go into it. Don't start raising the money. You're gonna waste it." And they did it anyway. And what becomes perfectly clear is that a bunch of people were in this for themselves, and how out of touch they are and were within their own party and where the country is headed. Nothing that you don't know. So I'm not saying this is earth-shattering stuff except that it...
Well, actually it kind of is when you see the depths to which everything was misunderstood, miscalculated, or actively known and nevertheless fought against to absolutely no avail. So Jeb Bush is out, and this is creating an entirely new paradigm.
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