Vote for Hillary, Limbaugh tells Republicans

Rush Limbaugh is urging Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton in the Ohio and Texas Democratic primaries. However, his reason is not that, like VFR, he prefers Hillary over Obama (and over McCain). It’s that he wants to keep the Democratic Party “at war with itself.” He says: “Remember what this is, this is about us winning. You have to understand, it’s not about Hillary winning; It’s about us winning. It’s about our party winning. It’s about those people losing.”

I don’t like that. It’s bad enough when non-members of a party are allowed to vote in its primary, such as a Democrat voting in the Republican primary because he likes John McCain. But to vote in another party’s primary purely for the intention of damaging and defeating that party is simply wrong. That Limbaugh would openly urge his millions of listeners to do such an unethical thing strengthens my conviction that the open primary system is an outrage against democracy should be eliminated.

I realize my comment will be seen as goody two shoes and all, given what the Democrats would do to this country if they get into power. But if Limbaugh doesn’t believe in the democratic system anymore, because half the American people have become so leftwing or demented or low-IQ or greedy for government handouts that they cannot be trusted to elect decent leaders, then he ought to come right out and say so. He has a lot of good company over the ages, starting with the father of political philosophy himself, Plato.

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Ken Hechtman writes from Canada:

I agree. When you’d argued against open primaries before, I always thought you’d missed the point. Good-faith cross-over voting (Democrats for McCain, Republicans for Obama) isn’t the end of the world. Both parties want their nominees to be electable and swing-voter appeal is one part of that. So in theory, if everyone acts in good faith, it makes sense to let it be one part of the primary process, say half a dozen mid-sized states in the middle of the calendar—no more than that. But nobody acts in good faith and that’s why open primaries need to be banned. Ann Coulter’s accusation might be shrill and outrageous, but it’s not wrong. The Democrats also organize primary votes for their least-electable Republican opponent and have been for years. My father remembers doing it in the 1964 primary. Lyndon Johnson had the Democratic nomination sewn up and his ward bosses suggested he “do something creative with his vote.”

Alex K. writes:

Rush was saying vote tactically so that “we” can win; i.e. he was trying to help McCain, he wasn’t saying stop Obama because he’s more dangerous in the broader political sense. His listeners, like GOP zombies everywhere, continue to assume Hillary is the wickedest leftist in the country and Obama is the safer scenario.

Anyway, he reversed himself yesterday:

RUSH: Dick in St. Louis. You’re next, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hi. Rush?

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: I want to put a stake into the Clintons now, while we have the opportunity. I don’t want to depend on the central election to do so. And yesterday you were urging Republicans to vote for Hillary. I don’t want to take that chance.

RUSH: Yeah, but even I, in good conscience, can’t continue that. In fact, I was thinking about—until I received news of Mr. Buckley’s death today, I was going to open the program praising her performance, talking about how masterful it was, how she really, you know, cut Obama down to size. But I didn’t think I’d be able to pull that off with any credibility. I understand where you’re coming from. There are a lot of people like you, too, Dick.

CALLER: That’s what I was going to say. I voted in the Missouri primary, and my whole family, we’re Republicans, and we all voted for Obama. We didn’t want to take any chance on Hillary.

RUSH: Yeah, I understand. There are a lot of people like this. The effect the Clintons have on people. When you got a chance to show Dracula the cross, you do it. When you got a chance to drive a stake in the heart of the vampire, you do it. You don’t wait for some more opportune time. I know that there are people who are looking at this as an opportunity to be done with these people forever in the sense, in the context in which they have been so dominate in Democrat Party life since 1992.

Limbaugh still has no idea what he’s doing. He doesn’t know what position to take on McCain. He doesn’t know what he thinks of Obama, or of Hillary in light of Obama. And while it’s one thing not to know quite what do this year, he doesn’t even know what he thinks of the predicament itself, or even what the predicament is.

LA replies:

You’ve described his confusion very well. As I said a couple of weeks ago, figuring out this election and which candidate one should support and why is like three dimensional chess, or even four dimensional chess if there could be such a thing. So it’s no wonder that Limbaugh is not just confused, but openly wallowing in his confusion—urging a crossover vote for Hillary for wholly cynical partisan reasons one day, then admitting the next day he can’t in good conscience do that (which meant he was admitting that what he was urging the previous day was unethical, just as I said it was), then seeming to veer back to what seems the majority view of his listeners that Hillary is Dracula who must be done away with now, and through it all, as you point out, appearing not to know how he feels about McCain, about whom he implied many times that he could not support him.

If Rush were to go deeper into it, he would ask, if I don’t want McCain, the nominee of my own party, to win, then do I prefer Hillary or Obama to be president? Or, if I do want McCain to win, do I want Hillary or Obama to be the Democratic nominee because I think that person will be easier to beat? And when underneath all these calculations there is the reality that all of these candidates seem like a total disaster, it’s enough to blow one’s circuits.

But, as you said, it’s one thing to be confused—and the situation is objectively confusing. It’s another thing not to realize that one is confused or even attempt to untangle the confusion. And that seems to be where Limbaugh is at

Tim W. writes:

I think one of the reasons many conservatives continue to feel warmly toward crossover voting is that for a long time it tended to benefit conservatives. Voter registration in the South was once overwhelmingly Democrat. But those southern white Democrats were conservative, often more conservative than the country club Republicans who ran the GOP. There was a period of about two decades, roughly from 1964 to 1984, when Southern whites began shifting in loyalties to the GOP, but millions of them remained registered as Democrats because they were slow to abandon completely the party that had traditionally represented Southern interests. They also continued to elect conservative Democrats to local offices. For example, nine of the ten U.S. representatives from Georgia after the 1976 election were Democrats, but only one of them (black congressman Andrew Young from inner city Atlanta) was a liberal. The other eight ranged from fairly conservative to extremely conservative, including one (Larry McDonald) who was a member of the John Birch Society. It was widely believed that Ronald Reagan benefitted from these conservative Democrat voters crossing over to vote for him in many primaries in both 1976 & 1980. These were the famous Reagan Democrats, which also included a lot of blue collar, white ethnic voters in the North.

But the Democratic Party today has very few registered members who are conservative. There’s no real value to the GOP in allowing them to cross over and vote in the Republican primaries. Ditto for the Democrats, who have no real reason to allow GOP crossovers. And on principle, of course, you are correct that it circumvents the reason for having a party primary in the first place to allow crossovers.

LA replies:

Very interesting, thanks for that information.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 28, 2008 06:54 PM | Send