Rush Limbaugh yesterday urged his listeners in Texas to vote for Hillary Clinton, so as to keep the Democrats pounding one another a little longer.
Limbaugh has been actively urging his Texas listeners to cross over and vote for Clinton in that state’s open primary Tuesday, arguing it helps the Republicans if the Democratic race remains unsettled for weeks to come. “I want Hillary to stay in this…this is too good a soap opera,” Limbaugh told fellow conservative talk-show host Laura Ingraham on Fox News Friday. He reiterated the comments on his Monday show and replayed the exchange with Ingram.
He also said Clinton is more willing than the Republican National Committee and John McCain’s campaign to criticize Barack Obama. “We need Barack Obama bloodied up politically. It’s obvious that the Republicans are not going to do it, they don’t have the stomach for it,” Limbaugh continued. “As you probably know we’re getting all kinds of memos from the RNC saying we’re not going to be critical. Mark McKinnon of McCain’s campaign said he’ll quit if they get critical over Obama. This is the presidency of the United States we’re talking about. I want our party to win I want the Democrats to lose.”
[…]
“Wouldn’t you love to cream Hillary though…why are you so afraid of her? Look at how ineptly she has campaigned against Obama,” Limbaugh responded to one listener who said she wanted to see Clinton out of the race immediately. “I’m asking people to cross over, and if they can stomach it and I know it’s a difficult thing to do, vote for Clinton,” he also told Ingraham Friday. “But it will sustain this soap opera, and it’s something I think we need and it’ll be fun, too.”
It would indeed be fun. Like the previous efforts by Democrats to take advantage of open primaries and damage Republicans, though, I would consider it foul play. Perfectly legal, of course, but certainly not within the spirit of the rules.
Like the Kos-led effort in Michigan, I’m pretty sure this won’t work. As Alex Mooney notes, “exit polling showed Democrats who voted in that primary favored McCain,” not Romney (although Romney won on his own accord). Dave Weigel points out that a similar effort in Wisconsin failed spectacularly, with “Republican crossover voters” going “72-28 for Obama over Clinton.”
While I subscribe to the conventional wisdom that Clinton would be the weaker opponent in the fall, we really don’t know that with any certainty. Far better, it seems to me, to let the process play out fair and square. Certainly, Republicans wouldn’t want to have any complicity in electing Hillary Clinton president.
Image: A Progressive Alamedan via Google
