Either Rush Limbaugh believes that Mitt Romeny’s on a roll, or he’s mad as hell at the political routing he may be sensing up ahead. Either way his dependably outlandish comments have really hit overdrive in recent weeks.
This week the portly pundit, who reportedly makes around $40 million dollars a year as the unofficial leader of the Republican Party, raised eyebrows when he claimed that some voters pulled the lever for President Obama just to prove to themselves they were not racist.
‘Some people voted for Obama in 2008 to prove that they weren’t racist, you know it and I know it,’ Limbaugh. ‘Now what’s going to happen in 2012 is that some people are going to vote against Obama to prove that they’re not stupid. You understand, folks really, now I…if the election were today it would be the biggest blowout that you could possibly imagine. You imagine somebody coming out of the ballot box today and say that they proudly voted for Obama? If the election were today…’ya I voted Obama,’ What? Why? Who could back up a vote?’
Poll after poll fail to support Limbaugh’s dramatic claims however, and attempting to inoculate his listeners against any charges of racism for despising both the man and his politics may not actually be helping.
Besides, racists don’t suddenly reform themselves in the voting booth, do they? The truth is racist voters were more likely to vote against Obama in 2008 and they they will be less likely to vote for him in 2012, regardless of Limbaugh’s preposterous rants.
Perhaps it’s all the advertising revenue he lost over his so called ‘Slut Gate’ comments, or perhaps its sour grapes at having lost that round to Sandra Fluke, but these are particularly blunt comments from the conservative commentator, even by his own standards.
Critics say Limbaugh knows that the 2012 election will very likely be a tight race, with poll after poll finds the president leading his Republican challenger, so he is hoping to energize his base with frequent calls to arms.
The strength of the economic recovery could be the deciding factor in the outcome of this years presidential election and so it’s clear the next few months will be crucial to President Obama’s reelection.
Pundits on both sides will fume and fulminate until then, but surveys by groups like the Pew Research Center don’t lie: ‘Americans are more politically divided today than they ever before which means the 2012 election will be a nail biter for both conservatives and liberals alike,’ they said.
The truth is no one knows who will win yet, so Limabaugh’s amped up rhetoric won’t help one way or the other.
That basic reality is not stopping him from being particularly unpleasant to his political enemies in recent weeks however. Just over the last month Limbaugh has compared the Occupy Wall Street protesters to the unhinged cannibal murderer in Miami, Florida. He also compared President Obama to both communists and Nazis (which suggests an imperfect understand of their widely diverging political outlooks).