You might be surprised by how many of Rush’s listener would agree with that statement. That is one of the problems with talk radio. It lowers the discussion to a simplistic, sloganeering level where intellectual discussion is looked on as elitist. The problem with that is that conservatism will never compete well with liberalism in the world of sound bites. Conservatism is about ideas and thinking unlike liberalism which lives on emotions. Rush sells emotion to the hard core conservative masses looking for a leader, but in doing so turns off the moderately conservative majority who could be swayed by the intelligent debate that is sorely lacking.
Ooohhhh, I think you need to be very careful about such statements. You're confusing the liberal "operatives" with their political targets.
Considering the repeated thrashings liberals have administered to conservatives over the past several decades, it is obviously dangerous to dismiss them as you seem to be doing.
Liberal politics is very much about ideas and thinking. In the realm of goals, strategy, and tactics, "liberal politics" as a movement evidently has much better ideas and far clearer thinking than we conservatives do. The proof is in how they always seem to control the agenda: we're always in response mode.
You're looking at the targets -- and there, too, "liberal politics" generally has the upper hand. Liberal tactics certainly do appeal -- generally quite cynically -- to the emotions of the voting public; but the emotional appeal generally works because there's some real problem in play. We conservatives tend to spout theory at such times -- which is not only unhelpful to those who are actually hurting, but also extremely unhelpful to our own political viability.