Hillary and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy - Village Voice

[BridgeTheGap]

The prime movers of both political parties have long tried to game the presidential nominating process—not only to choose their eventual winner, but also to pick their November opponent. And in this landmark election without incumbents, the media wing of the Republican Party, in particular, has quite visibly been playing that game. Right-leaning pundits for months now have very openly not just called for Hillary Clinton's head, but also coddled and promoted Barack Obama, salivating over the prospect of facing him in November.

Meanwhile, voters have been echoing that program: Barack Obama has been beating Hillary Clinton in part because Republicans are helping him.

Sixteen of the 45 Democratic primaries and caucuses held before this week were open affairs, allowing Republicans and independents to take part, and Barack Obama has won 11 of those contests. He almost invariably carried the Republican vote, which accounted for as much as 9 percent of the total in Wisconsin and Texas, and frequently ran even stronger among independents, who represented a fifth or more of Democratic primary voters in state after state. The 75 percent of the Republican vote that he won in Missouri, for example, may have pushed him over the top, and certainly, when combined with his 67 percent of the state's much larger independent vote, it delivered many of the district-apportioned delegates to him. Republicans in Obama states like Washington, Wisconsin, and Virginia were even freer to cross the aisle, since by the time they voted, John McCain had already sewn up the GOP nomination. While Obama often won some of these states so handily that Republicans and independents could not have provided his margin of victory, there is no way to know how many delegates in close congressional-district contests will wind up in Denver because of the impact of Republican or independent voters. And there is no exit-poll data to measure their impact on the caucuses.

Nor can the exit data reveal the motive for so many crossovers. These voters may have been attracted by Obama's message of transcending politics as usual, or they may simply have been trying to tilt the scales to help nominate the candidate they believe Republicans can most easily beat. In the lead-up to Texas and Ohio, Rush Limbaugh, whose radio show reaches 13 million, dropped his "mafia wife," "Nurse Ratched," and "testicle lockbox" descriptions of Hillary Clinton long enough to urge his listeners to vote for her "if they can stomach it." His rationale was to keep the bloodbath going. Up to then, he was unabashedly boosting Obama with the same perverse purpose. Obama still carried most of the 252,000 Republicans who voted in Texas—a Limbaugh stronghold—but his percentage dropped from 72 percent in Wisconsin to 52 percent.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0811,374100,374100,2.html

[TwilightGardener]

1. Limbaugh never told his listeners to vote for Obama. I listen to him

most days, and he never did that.

[leftofcool]

2. Yes, he as much said, "get HIllary out of the way first, then go for blood"

[tabatha]

3. read the comments to this stupid, dishonest article