Hillary's Chaos

Rush Limbaugh, the man who virtually invented modern right-wing talk radio, is loudly taking the credit for Hillary Clinton's squeaker victory in Tuesday's Indiana primary. "The only reason Mrs. Clinton won Indiana," he bragged in yesterday's show with his usual lack of modesty, "was because of me and Operation Chaos."

Operation Chaos, for those who have not yet encountered this delightful little perversion of primary elections, was Limbaugh's plan to have lots and lots of nominal Republican voters cross party lines in states with nonpartisan primaries and cast their ballots for Clinton. This would hopefully swing the nomination to Clinton, thus allowing the GOP to rehash all the "Lady Macbeth" rhetoric with which they pilloried her in the 1990s. Barring that, the objectives (as quoted from the official T-shirt) are:

Crossover to vote in Democrat primaries
Prolong the Democrat primary battle
Allow the Clintons to bloody up Obama politically, since our side won't do it
Enjoy liberals tearing each other apart
Drain the DNC of campaign cash
Annoy the Drive-By Media...
And WIN IN NOVEMBER!

In so gleefully plotting the sabotage of a political opponent, Limbaugh seems to be channeling Richard Nixon's 1972 campaign organization, the Committee to Re-Elect the President. CREEP, as the group was popularly known, similarly torpedoed Ed Muskie's Democratic primary campaign with dirty tricks, clearing the way for the counter-cultural George McGovern to win the nomination and get creamed in November.

As odious as it may be to consider, Limbaugh's boast could possibly be right. With such very public fumbles as the Bosnia sniper fiasco, her "3AM" campaign ad, and her GOP-style pandering on a gas-tax holiday, she needed all the help she could get. His shenanigans may well have put her over the top.

With superdelegates jumping ship to support Obama and her staff leaving in droves, Clinton's campaign is imploding messily. And she just had to loan herself another $6.4 million to stay afloat, for a total self-financing of $11.4 million. This means that the big donors are either already maxed out to the legal limit or are unwilling to finance a losing battle and are thus keeping their wallets shut. This is even affecting Democratic Congressional candidates, who find that the ongoing primary contest is leaving them unable to raise funds.

It also doesn't help that Clinton has turned to waging a scorched-earth battle to the absolute bitter end, undercutting Obama every chance she gets and cozying up to potential McCain voters.

She is even using racial themes, telling USA Today that "Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me." (Translation: "Listen up white people! Don't vote for the black guy, vote for me because I'm white.") She's getting hammered for such blatant race-baiting, as she should be.

This may make for a good movie screenplay but the Republicans are drooling in anticipation of a badly damaged Democratic nominee limping into the general campaign.

If Clinton really has gotten to the point where she needs Rush Limbaugh's help to win a primary, then it's over. She's run a great campaign, but it's time to focus on the November election rather than her own advancement. It's time for her to drop out.