COLUMNISTS I had been thinking for some time that more attention should be paid to Rush Limbaugh – not to what he says, because it is pretty much the same old rightwing bombast he has been selling for 25 years, but to what he has been urging his legion of 20m similarly inclined radio listeners to do.
This is, wherever state laws allows, that they should register in a Democratic party primary and cast a vote for Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama, the front-runner to be the Democratic presidential nominee. He calls it “operation chaos” and he has been revelling in its claimed success, in Ohio and Pennsylvania, which Mrs Clinton, the senator from New York, won.
This strategy may have met its Waterloo in Indiana. Even though the Limbaugh factor may have handed Mrs Clinton her margin of victory on Tuesday night, it was so wafer-thin – at a 2 per cent margin – as to be immediately deemed insufficient. It certainly did not work in North Carolina, which Mr Obama won comfortably, and where “crossover” voting for the unaffiliated is allowed, but only with complicated strings attached.
I actually do listen to Mr Limbaugh, preferably on the sanitised car radio, which leaves no trace that a liberal wife could decode. I do so on the Flashman principle that you should always know what the enemy is thinking, even if he talks in tongues, and especially if he is smarter and more entertaining than the average conservative, which Mr Limbaugh certainly is.
And you can see the point of operation chaos from his vantage point, both in the short and longer term. If he believes Mrs Clinton would be the weaker candidate against Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, he can beat up on her until the first Tuesday in November and his ends will have been served if she loses. If she becomes the next president, then he can assault her much as he did her husband for his eight years in office, however long she lasts, maintaining his audience ratings in the process.
Finally, if his strategy of operation chaos does not work out and Mr Obama becomes the nominee, which is now even more likely with his North Carolina victory, then he can ratchet up his harangues against “garden variety liberals” (his standard description of the Illinois senator) who would sell the country down the river and into the slavery of the Chinese.
I think even Mr Limbaugh would concede he has never been Mr McCain’s greatest fan. He preferred Rudy Giuliani early on, with qualifications, and then shifted, with zero enthusiasm, to Mitt Romney, because he was not Mr McCain, whom he considers an apostate from his authorised version of conservatism. But now he is stuck with the Arizona senator.
Now, all this might be fine theory if Mrs Clinton were not playing to his audience, as she reinvents herself from the “garden variety liberal” she certainly was into the San Francisco-denigratin’, huntin,’ shootin’ and shot-drinkin’ mama that is her new political persona. It is not just her espousal of the populist idea of a holiday from the federal petrol tax, also advocated by her vodka shot-drinkin’ friend, Mr McCain, and derided by every economist who has ever been to any known university (including the lawyer, Mr Obama).
It is also the fact that she chose to appear on Bill O’Reilly’s television show on the Fox network. For those who live in Luxembourg or Borneo, Mr O’Reilly is Mr Limbaugh minus several IQ points. He has devoted much of his career, like Mr Limbaugh, to eviscerating the Clintons, but now his blue-collar persona is convenient to her.
All that said, the Limbaugh-O’Reilly-Clinton axis, one that can only have been drawn up on the dark side of the moon where strange bedfellows meet, has cut Mr Obama deeply, if not necessarily fatally as Tuesday’s primaries still leave him holding the whip hand.
There is something compelling about Mr Obama’s cerebral cool, his refusal to play the political game as it is conventionally played. But I am not the audience, even if I could vote, that the game is being played for.
We are slicing and dicing the great American community as it has never been sliced and diced before. Every component part is in play – black, white, men, women, Hispanic, Asian, rich, poor, old, young, Protestant, Catholic, evangelical, Jew and non-believer. Every primary exit poll, which, at least, purports neutrality if not the gospel, carves up the apparent electoral preferences until our minds boggle.
Does, for example, Mr Obama’s long association with his pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, matter or not? Old people say it does, the polls tell us, young people say it does not. And then there is Mr McCain’s relationship with the Rev John Hagge, another “man of the cloth” prone to views that are not in the gospel either.
And when Mr Limbaugh goes on a rant, as he did this week, about “Jerry” Wright allegedly counselling a troubled couple in his church and then marrying the wife after their divorce, then I have to wonder where the war in Iraq, the looming financial crunch and everything else that is out of kilter in this country feature in the election.
Ultimately, the next president will be the one with whom America feels more comfortable and who has a vision for tomorrow not yesterday. I do not think Mr Limbaugh, or operation chaos, figures in that, but I may be wrong.
The writer was twice the FT’s Washington bureau chief
More columns at www.ft.com/martin
