This is a rush transcript from “Hannity,” January 26, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
SEAN HANNITY, HOST: All right, in my hand I am holding an e-mail. An e-mail that you and I were never supposed to read. Now this is an e-mail containing the official White House pre-State of the Union talking points.
And tonight, right here on this program, we are going to expose this document for the fraud that it is.
Now earlier today we spoke directly with the White House, and although they would not confirm nor deny the authenticity of this e-mail we believe it is the real thing.
Now this document proves that this White House is out of touch with mainstream America. It shows that the president is living in a bubble, one that shields him from the economic and national security challenges that face this country.
Now the official talking points, they’re split into three specific categories that the White House calls rescue, rebuild and restore. But each and every bullet point on this two-page document simply ignores reality.
Now take for example the ridiculous assertion that the president, quote, “took strong and politically difficult steps to rescue the country from a potential second Great Depression.”
Now this is what the White House wants its surrogates to go on TV and tell you the American people? That we narrowly avoided a second Great Depression in the year 2009? Now could they get any more reckless and careless than that?
Well, yes, they can. Now the document claims, quote, “President Obama has begun the hard work required to restore America’s standing and leadership in the world.”
Well, he’s restored America’s standing? Well, I guess he could say that if by standing he means bowing to each and every world leader that he comes into contact with.
But folks, the insanity does not stop there. No. This White House also wants its talking heads to claim the president is, quote, “making government more accountable, accessible and transparent to all Americans.”
Now the only people this president has made government more accessible to are the Salahis. And frankly, I don’t that’s anything to brag about, do you?
Now by the way speaking of transparency, when does the president plan to make good on this promise?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
THEN-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BARACK OBAMA, 11/14/2007: We will work on this process publicly. It will be on C-SPAN. It will be streaming over the Net.
OBAMA, 12/31/2007: Here’s the thing, though. This will all be televised on C-SPAN.
OBAMA, 1/4/2008: And when we are negotiating for that plan we are going to have C-SPAN on and you will see who is compromising the American peoples’ interests.
OBAMA, 1/21/2008: In bringing all parties together, not negotiating behind closed doors, but bringing all parties together and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HANNITY: Now the president’s hollow rhetoric extends well beyond that C-SPAN pledge. But this document that we have here of White House talking points simply ignores all of his broken promises.
Now the final bullet point reads, in part, “President Obama has remained faithful to the central commitments of his campaign.”
It is simply not true. In fact this is a guy who began making promises almost on day one.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA, 1/22/2009: Guantanamo will be closed no later than one year from now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HANNITY: All right, so the White House wants you to forget about the double-digit unemployment rate, the soaring deficit and all the broken promises. And tomorrow night, well, it’s going to shove these talking points right down your throat. So don’t let them. It’s time to hold this president and this administration accountable to their promises.
Joining me now with reaction is Fox News contributor, the architect, the one and only, Karl Rove.
Karl, I’d be embarrassed, you know, to go on TV, restore, rebuild — the most transparent administration, we’ll be on C-SPAN. How do you defend what they are asking you to defend here?
KARL ROVE, FORMER BUSH ADVISER: My personal favorite is the second section where they talk about the jobs. They said, you know, we took these top decisions to create jobs. We passed a rescue package. And we rebuilt the economy.
Wait a minute, when the president had Congress pass that $787 billion stimulus monstrosity, he promised us three things. These were his standards. He said if you pass the bill, it will create — unemployment will never go above eight percent. He said if you pass the bill, I will create 3,650,000 new jobs and 90 percent of them will be in the private sector.
And yet the talking points themselves use only descriptions of government jobs. They haven’t created 3.6 million new jobs. And best, using their own numbers, they’ve created two million and even those are phony numbers.
They’ve changed the definition so that any job that — government job, any kind of job that gets any kind of stimulus money is quoted as saved or created, regardless of whether or not it’s a pay increase or whether or not that job would have gone away.
• What do you want to hear Obama say Wednesday night?
And unemployment is 20 percent higher than the president promised.
HANNITY: Yes.
ROVE: … us it would go if he passed this stupid stimulus bill.
HANNITY: All right. Obviously, this is all poll testified and focus groups.
ROVE: Sure.
HANNITY: And they’re just trying to repackage. He’s going to try and portray himself as a fiscal conservative tomorrow night. Rescue, rebuild and restore, and all those meetings that were supposed to be on C-SPAN weren’t there.
Is he going to be able to successfully read the teleprompter, convince the American people that everything that we know to be true is false?
ROVE: Well, first of all, let’s put this in just a little historical perspective, apart from President Obama. The idea that a president can restart, reset everything by a State of the Union address is not true.
If you take a look at the last 25 years worth of State of the Union addresses, the — only in eight of those instances has a president gone up in the job approval rating afterwards, and only four of those instances has it been by a statistically significant measure.
The rest of the time the president has gone down. In fact, if you average it all out, the president has declined basically 0.1 percent after the State of the Union address in the polls.
And if you take a look at the first time the president makes it, in his first midterm year, 2010 for President Obama, 2002 for President Bush, 1994 for Bill Clinton, you’ll find that over the most — over modern American presidents they dropped 1.8 percent.
So this is not a way for him to, quote, “reset.”
HANNITY: Yes.
ROVE: As he said in one of his interviews this week. But no, look the bottom line is, is what we think that he’s going to say, at least what they’re leaking out of the White House, is not going to stand the president any good because he’s going to be saying things that the American people sadly think are simply not true.
HANNITY: All right. I got to get this in. We have two more questions. Seventy percent of the American people like the fact that the Democrats no longer have a super majority. Stu Rothenberg, Charlie Cook said the Democrats are headed for a train wreck in November.
And Robert Menendez who heads the DSCC, he says well, we’re just going to divide the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Is that a successful political strategy, in your mind?
ROVE: That’s desperation is what that is. Look, they lost Joe Biden’s son, Bo Biden, the attorney general of Delaware, bailed out this week of the U.S. Senate race in Delaware. They had a Democrat member of the leadership from the first district of Arkansas, Marion Berry, who bailed out after he met with President Obama who told him the difference between 2010 and 1994 was that Democrats were going to have him in the White House in 2010 to help them out.
And after the president made that compelling argument to him, Marion Berry pulled the rip cord and bailed out of Congress.
HANNITY: All right, I got to ask you on the fiscal side, they’re trying to make a big deal. They’re going to try and portray themselves, after we now have increased spending 24 percent, nearly quadrupled the deficit in a year, and the debt ceiling is now $14.3 trillion.
So now they’re going to talk about freezing domestic discretionary spending which is only $15 billions when the deficit next year is going to be almost a trillion and a half.
ROVE: Yes.
HANNITY: It’s not even a drop in the bucket.
ROVE: Look, this would have been a good idea if they had done it when they came into office. But look, think about this. The president says he’s going to save $15 billion next year, fiscal year ’11, by freezing discretionary domestic spending. But in the middle of fiscal year ’09 he came into office and increased it by $40 billion. And then for the FY ’10 budget he increased it by $100 billion.
So after increasing — since last January discretionary domestic spending by $140 billion over the baseline that was in — that existed when he came into office now he says he’s going to step back $15 billion.
Now what does that mean over the long haul? He claims that it will save $250 billion over the next decade. Not an insignificant amount of money. But the spending increases that he put into the budget are going to cost us $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.
So take, you know, five steps forward and half a step back. You know close the door after the cows have gotten out of the barn. Whatever (INAUDIBLE) you want to use he’s trying now to tell us oh, I’m fiscally responsible after I’ve just let the spending go through the roof.
HANNITY: They’ve obviously are a little tone deaf. They think all he needs to do is read that teleprompter and the American people are going to say — start chanting yes, we can. I think.
ROVE: Yes.
HANNITY: They’re not reading what’s happening.
ROVE: No. In fact, you know what? They’re also — they think we’re stupid because this excludes the $787 billion stimulus. That’s not subject to the freeze. There’s $512 billion of unspent money.
Hey, if the economy is already back on its feet, don’t spend that $512 billion. It doesn’t include $150 billions for a second stimulus and it doesn’t include the $247 billion we’re getting back from the banks that we loan them. He wants to recycle those into more spending.
HANNITY: All right, Karl Rove, great analysis. Thanks for being with us. Appreciate it.
ROVE: You bet.
HANNITY: We’ll be watching the propaganda tomorrow.
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