Bamboozling the American electorate again [View All]

[BeatleBoot]

http://www.thecityedition.com/Pages/Archive/Winter08/2008Election.html

2008 Presidential Primaries:

Bamboozling the American electorate again

Bush-Cheney strategy involves G.O.P. crossover voting to take out Hillary, marketing newcomer Obama, an "independent" ticket, and maybe even martial law...

Updated February 21, 2008

Evidence of a covert campaign to undermine the presidential primaries is rife, so it's curious that the Democractic Party and even some within the G.O.P. have ignored the actual elephant in the room this year. That would be Karl Rove. After rigging two previous presidential elections, this master of deceit would have us believe that he's gone off to sit in a corner and write op-eds.

Not so. According to an article in Time Magazine, Republicans have organized to throw their weight behind Barack Obama, the democratic rival of frontrunner Hillary Clinton. Early in Obama's campaign, three former fundraisers for President Bush flushed his coffers with cash, something the deep pockets hadn't done for any candidate in their own party. With receipts topping $100 million in 2007, the first-term Illinois senator broke the record for contributions. It was a remarkable feat, considering that most Americans had not even heard of him before 2005.

The Time magazine article goes on to explain that rank and file Republicans in red states have switched parties for the Democratic primaries to vote for Obama. Some states, like Virginia and Texas, have open primaries, allowing citizens to vote for any candidate regardless of their party affiliation. In Nebraska, the mayor of Omaha publicly rallied Republicans to caucus for Obama on February 9th. Called crossover voting, the tactic is playing a crucial role in the Rove push to deprive Clinton of the Democratic nomination. Even with the help of his more familiar array of dirty tricks - swiftboating, phone bank sabotauge, bogus polling data, electronic voting equipment, Norman Hsu, etc. - Rove would be hard pressed to defeat Clinton in November, since she's generally popular nationwide and has promised an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq. If the contest isn't close, the vote-rigging won't matter.

If, on the other hand, Obama wins the nomination (or even the VP spot), Rove's prospects brighten considerably. Largely unvetted by the media, the self-described agent of change carries considerable baggage from his stint as a state legislator, particularly his long-running relationship with a Chicago slumlord Tony Rezko, who's about to go on trial for defrauding taxpayer-funded social service programs. So far, the mainstream press has paid lip service to the connection and instead portrayed Obama as a fresh new face in American politics. The author of the Time magazine article, Jay Newton-Small, offered the following explanation to account for the bizarre love affair G.O.P. voters say they're having with an African American senator on the other side of the aisle. "It seems a lot of Republicans took to heart Obama's statement in his rousing speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that 'there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.'"

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