How Republicans Gamed the Pennsy Primary

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/04/22/how_republicans_gamed_the_penn/

How Republicans Gamed the Pennsy Primary

For six weeks, as Democrats' hope of unity rode on Barack Obama's hope that Pennsylvanians would prove his national lead to be more than a wish, most tribunes of the news media ignored breathtakingly cynical Republican news-media ploys to keep Dems bitterly divided. You had to admire the artistry of it all, even its virtual invisibility.

Few pundits wondered, for example, why 160,000 Pennsylvania Republicans switched registrations, most of them in order to vote for Clinton, if demographics are a guide. That strategy -- promoted by right-wing Clinton scourge and sudden "supporter" Richard Mellon-Scaife and his Pittsburgh Post-Tribune -- is to keep the Dems divided and just maybe to give them the nominee whom Scaife has more reason than most to believe Republicans can demolish this fall.

Few commentators questioned why Clinton didn't reject Mellon-Scaife's endorsement, as she'd challenged Obama to reject Louis Farrakhan's. Few asked why she instead actually courted the Machiavellian funder of a "vast, right-wing conspiracy" that had implicated her in Vincent Foster's murder and more.

Clinton's desperation was one thing, but her abdication of all dignity was another. Yet journalists who'd scrutinized Obama's handling of Farrakhan indulged her collapse into Mellon-Scaife's arms. No prissy New York Times op eds parsed whether she, like Obama, ought to have "denounced" or "renounced" or "rejected" the come-on.

The vigilant blogger John Campanelli noted Big Dog's even-more amazing appearances on Rush Limbaugh's show to urge Ditto-heads to vote for Hillary, even though he knew they'd do so only for Mellon-Scaife's set-up reasons. Now, there's desperation for you, and, in Bill's case, we needn't even mention lost dignity. I wouldn't say that the Clintons are Stalin and that Mellon-Scaife is Hitler, but show me how this mesalliance is any less cynical than the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1939, and I'll show you a bridge to the future I have to sell.

Not all Republican-leaning media agree that Clinton's the one they're most likely to beat. Republicans do have "new" dirt on the Clintons, but Americans are gagging on these tactics, effective though such ugliness remains. Obama will be easier to take down, reason the post-Rove Republicans, because, often, they can stand back and, with a wink and a nudge, let racism do its work in the privacy of the voting booth.

That's certainly the strategy of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, which actually endorsed Obama for the Democratic nomination and showed that when it endorses someone, it delivers! The paper has turned every tabloid trick to slant its coverage toward Obama, no doubt endearing itself to blacks I've watched perusing the paper on the subway. Today's primary-day headlne: "Hill's 'Osama' Scare Tactics." The Post even ballyhooed the fact that the voter who loudly protested Obama's observations about "bitter" small-town Pennsylvanians is a life-long resident of New Jersey!

The paper's intended message to politicos of all persuasions: Always kiss the ring of Rupert, and forget his imported editors and their mini-con minions have turned the once-liberal Post into a daily reminder that Australia was founded as a penal colony. They are now busy turning the Wall Street Journal into the Voldemort of big dailies.

When Obama is nominated, the Post's editors will announce soberly that upon agonised reflection they've decided that McCain is the man America most desperately needs. After a suitable pause, they'll begin tearing into Obama on non-racial grounds (his latte liberal backers, his weakness on defense, etc.) while promoting McCain relentlessly and relying on racism to do the rest as they keep their hands clean with New York's multiracial populace.

Come to think of it, that's what New York Times columnist David Brooks has already done, as I predicted he would long ago: "Brooks has pretended to admire Obama so much... that you expect him to swim over to the Democrats. Don't count on it...." He was merely accumulating credibility with liberal readers for giving Obama a serious chance before reeling in as many as he can for McCain. Brooks turned that corner pre-emptively last week, ahead of the Post , either to "help" Clinton or to look smart himself by being the first to show how to champion John McCain, hero of Selma and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, against Obama, that deracinated Hyde Park liberal.

I'll say more about these conservative journalistic ploys soon, but for now it's worth emphasizing that few commentators have noted how corrosive the cynicism and duplicity of Mellon-Scaife, Murdoch, and Brooks have become of the very civic-republicanism, virtue, and freedom they claim to defend.

The philosopher George Santayana noted that Americans are "inexperienced in poisons," owing to their forthright civic-republican candor and courage in controversies, no matter how bitter and partisan. No more. Unless, that is, as I dearly hope, Pennsylvanians carry Obama strongly enough tonight to discredit the poisoned Clintons and their new Republican pushers.

Can't trust the Republicans not to fuck with elections.

Am I reading that right?

But Obama is the uniter not a divider.

Make Hillary embracing Scaiffe, makes Hillary look just as bad as McCain embrassing Bush knowing that Bush had engineered the smear campaign against him. Bad.

No open primaries at all anywhere. And a single day of primaries would help immensely too.