Via CB:
The Dems’ Texas primary on Tuesday is open to independents and Republicans, and they may give Obama an edge: “If the latest polling data are to be believed, those Republicans aren’t whispering in Texas, where 195 of the 228 delegates the state will send to the Democratic National Convention will be chosen in a primary and caucuses Tuesday. As many as a tenth of the Texans voting in the Democratic contests could be Republicans, and overwhelmingly they favor Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, the polls show.”I've been posting comments to a few different sites for a while now suggesting that the unusual youth turnout for Obama in Iowa, the unusually strong turnouts in our primaries and caucuses in general, and the big leads Obama has been getting have been partly due to Republican raiding, or switching parties in a primary to vote for who they believe is the weaker of the opposition's two candidates. I hope for some people this will be more believable now that they are presented with this evidence standing right in front of their faces.
There are a few reasons why I think the Republicans would want us to run Obama. One is that, I think they think Obama is going to end up being easier to beat. If there's a whisper-campaign to get Republicans to raid for Obama, it may also be part of it to get them to respond to polls about the general election saying that they are Democrats and are going to vote for Obama, so pollsters might not necessarily reveal the raiding. They may think he is easier to beat because they may think that voters are still too racist to vote for him when it comes down to the day of the general election- even if they think the polls show him as strong, they may be relying on a Bradley Effect, and on Republican gap-closing propaganda to work especially well on a black man with Obama's foreign, Muslim-sounding name. Also I think they may think Hillary is more wise to Republican trickery and dastardly political maneuvers than is Obama. Finally, I think for some core Republicans, misogyny may just be stronger than racism when picking a Commander in Chief.
If this last reason is really the biggest reason why the Republicans are favoring Obama, then we have the least to worry about if the Republicans really have monkey-wrenched our primary election process and got us to favor a candidate who, for all his public speaking aptitude, is really the less-electable and less smart candidate. If however the other two reasons represent better what's going on, than if the Republicans have cause us to nominate Obama instead of Hillary, we have steered ourselves into something of a jam.
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