archived: 11 - 17 May, 2008         Back                 Next

UPDATED:  MAY 13, 2008 

“THE CHAOS FACTOR”  

   Following the Pennsylvania Primary I wrote elsewhere that there were three magic numbers for the Clintons to consider, as the time is winds down on their campaign to claim the Democratic nomination for President or at least prevent Barack Obama, in one way or another, from becoming president (http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/108). They were, at that time: 178,000, 19, and 1. In this column, we are further considering the first of these.

 The number 178,000 is the estimated number of Pennsylvania Republicans who changed their registration from Republican to Democratic since Jan. 1, 2008. (Pennsylvania, unlike Indiana where the Chaos Factor was easier to unleash because they have open primaries, has a closed primary.) There is a widely conflicting range of estimates on how many of these folks actually voted in the Democratic primary and who they voted for.  Exit polls indicated that the total of those persons who switched registration who actually voted in the Democratic Primary ranged from 100,000 to most of them.   

   The estimates for Pennsylvania I have seen, based on exit polling, of for whom they voted range from 4% to 60% for Obama.  BuzzFlash Editor/Publisher Mark Karlin thought that the number is the latter.  Others (including myself and The Planetary Movement publisher and former TPJ and present Huffington Post columnist Michael Carmichael [(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-carmichael/rush-limbaugh-claims-vict_b_98652.html]) were not so sure. Of course we are all guessing. One thing we do know is that Republicans who switched over to Democratic to vote for Clinton were instructed by "Operation Chaos" to lie to exist pollsters about why crossed over and who they voted for.  One thing we don’t know is how many of the cross-over Republicans who voted for Clinton did so because they taking part in the said Operation.

   The guesses as to why these folks previously registered as Republicans changed over to a Democratic registration range from them wanting to be able to vote for Obama because they like him and what he stands for, to being part of the “Operation” for which Rush Limbaugh (sorry Keith Olbermann, no comedian he) is most likely just the front man. Who else is involved with the campaign and what their links are to the Republican Party are so far unknown. But the Operation surely has the fingerprints of the late Lee Atwater and the very much alive Karl Rove (currently fronting as a Fox "News" Channel analyst [ho, ho, ho]) all over it.  Further, it’s not just Limbaugh who is promoting this tactic.  Right-wing Republican Screamer O’RHannibaugh wanna-bees all over the country are doing so too.

   Whatever its provenance, the campaign’s goal is very well known: at the most to help deliver the Democratic nomination to Clinton and at the very least to make the Democratic Convention a scene of pitched political battles, up to the Limbaugh wish list for riots to occur there (http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/15980105/detail.html). It has been very well known for many months now that Hillary Clinton is the Republicans’ desired Democratic candidate (whatever the McCain camp, and in the past few days Limbaugh himself, puts out for public consumption).  She has those incredibly high negative ratings among Republican voters.  Since John McCain is hardly a magnet with which to draw Republican voters, especially far-right ones, to the polls, for the Republican leadership how could she not be the desired Democratic nominee?

   The political problem for Obama that is “analyzed” by the MSM in frequency second only to their continuing “analysis” of the so-called “Rev. Wright controversy” (for which it is the media that keeps the pot boiling --- several opinion polls have shown that most voters just don’t care) is that he "just doesn't connect with blue-collar voters."  But in Pennsylvania, and even more so in Indiana with its open primary system, is the latter real?   

  Or is it that Republicans who would never vote for a Democrat, no matter who, have crossed over to vote for Clinton just in the primary, artificially inflating her vote total? And that's Clinton's problem too, as she tries to persuade the rapidly dwindling remaining number of uncommitted superdelegates (http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/113) to thwart the position of the majority of the voters in the legitimate (not Florida, not Michigan) Democratic primaries and give the nomination to her.  

    And so the question remains: just how many of those 178,000 Republican cross-overs in Pennsylvania and the unknown number of cross-overs in Indiana voted for her? Of those who did, how many did so as part of Operation Chaos? If a significant chunk was in the latter group (a group who, by the way, apparently also formed some unknown but significant chunk of her votes in Texas and Ohio), well there goes her "popular vote" argument.  Recall too, that Clinton’s margin of victory in Indiana was only about 20,000 votes, a margin that could easily have been provided by OC.  

    And so we have a problem for Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama and the Democratic Party.  Has their electoral process been skewed (some would say screwed) by Republican voters who will in November vote for the Republican candidate (currently McCain, but given his age and what is possibly lurking in his closet, hey you never know) in November?  But there are even more important questions than what effect, if any, the Operation is having on the internal affairs of the Democratic Party.   

   First, one would want to know what role the Republican Party, or some sector of it, is playing in all this.  Republican “dirty trickstering” goes all the way back to Tricky Dick himself.  In fact, it is useful to recall that he eventually lost his Presidency because of an attempted dirty trick that went bad.  When Watergate first came to light, well before the 1972 election, anyone suggesting that Nixon personally had anything to do with it --- George McGovern was among them --- was pooh-poohed all over the place.  (Having known of Nixon since his first dirty run for the House of Representatives back in 1946, I must say that when I saw that first headline in the New York Times about the break-in, my first thought was “this one has Nixon’s finger-prints all over it.”) 

The list from Watergate to “Swift Boating” is long.  Ah, you might say, but it was Limbaugh who started all this.  But Limbaugh is not simply the Dark Force at the head of the Right-Wing Republican Scream Machine. Not widely known are, for example, the facts that when Gingrich took over the House of Representatives in the 1994 election it was Limbaugh who he brought in to be a major leader of the orientation of his Freshman acolytes.  It is not widely known that when the Heritage Foundation held an internal symposium on torture last year, to develop the ideas for justifying it beyond the “legal” memos of Yoo et al, it was Limbaugh who chaired the panel.  Virtually all of the Right-Wing Republican Screamers on the air are just that, Screamers.  Limbaugh is cut from a different cloth.

   Second, whether or not there is official or even semi-official Republican (plausibly deniable, of course, Republicans are really good at that one) participation in the Operation, just what does its existence, whether it has had any meaningful impact on the Democratic primaries or not, say about American Democracy and the Republican attitude towards it?  Limbaugh’s Rule on elections is: “Never elect Democrats.”  I have heard him say this, live.  And if to achieve that end means interfering in the other Party’s internal mechanisms for choosing their candidates, then do it.  And these are the people whose reason for warring on Iraq and continuing to do so, once the WMD and al-Qaeda link reasons were shown to be total falsehoods, is “to bring Democracy to the country.” 

   The MSM has begun to talk about OC.  We’ll see if that continues, especially after Indiana.

Oh yes, 19 is the number of delegates pledged to John Edwards.  1 is the number of US officials who, Hillary Clinton, tells us, would make the decision to “obliterate Iran” if it attacked Israel.  That 1 would be herself, sounding oh so much like a Georgite “Decider.”

This column is based in part on “Dr. J.'s Commentary: Hillary's Magic Numbers,” that appeared on BuzzFlash, 04/29/2008, http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/112.

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