For a variety of reasons, I haven’t heard more than a few snippets of Rush Limbaugh’s show in years. I haven’t figured out yet whether his “Operation Chaos,” where he’s urging the Dittoheads to register as Democrats and vote for Hillary Clinton, is a serious bit of agitprop or camp. Regardless, he’s weighed the latest developments in the Obama-Wright debacle and issued a new set of marching orders: An operational pause.
My gut reaction, after the audio sound bites, was to issue new orders, because I saw, you know, AP/Ipsos poll has Hillary up over McCain by nine points, 50-41. My gut reaction here, after hearing Obama, was to issue orders changing directives, i.e., vote Obama in remaining primaries. But I’m holding back. That’s why I’m calling an operational pause. Because I want to see what the Drive-Bys are going to do and I want to see how the superdelegates are affected by this. You can’t vote in North Carolina and Indiana ’til Tuesday anyway, so there’s really no pause. It’s not as though the election is tomorrow. I just wanted you to know your commanding officers are eagerly, diligently, and effectively planning the next strategy here, based on this speech and the reaction to it.
Aside from moral qualms about interfering in another party’s primary, I’ve believed from the beginning that these sort of things are foolish precisely because there’s no way to know months ahead of time how these things will play out. I continue to believe that Obama will be the more dangerous opponent in the Fall because Clinton is such an unpleasant personality and starts with near-fatal negative ratings. But who knows, really? It’s better to just let these things play out and worry about getting your own team ready to play.
In the shorter term, though, Jim Geraghty‘s quip that, “Oddly, potential support from Rush’s listeners may be the best news Obama has gotten in the past 72 hours,” is likely right.
