Can’t say Matt Lauer didn’t try. This morning, RNC Chairman Michael Steele appeared on NBC’s Today Show. Lauer asked Steele three separate times whether he agreed with Rush Limbaugh and hoped Barack Obama fails. Steele avoided answering all three times, insisting that his own opinion was inconsequential.
The man who called himself the de facto leader of the Republican party a few days ago can’t even bring himself to speak ill of a DJ.
Maybe Steele is behaving this way because he’s so disorganized — he does not have a chief of staff, a political director, a finance director, or a communications director.
And maybe the elevation of Rush Limbaugh to the perceived head of the Republican Party has been planned for a long time — by the Democrats.
Last night, I was talking about how it almost seemed like Obama had this planned out months ago when he first mentioned Rush’s name. At the time it seemed crazy that the White House would deign to speak Limbaugh’s name, but today, on Politico, there is an article that arrived at the same conclusion, Rush Job: Inside Dems’ Limbaugh plan:
Top Democrats believe they have struck political gold by depicting Rush Limbaugh as the new face of the Republican Party, a full-scale effort first hatched by some of the most familiar names in politics and now being guided in part from inside the White House.
. . . liberals quickly realized that trying to drive a wedge between congressional Republicans and Limbaugh was unlikely to work, and their better move was to paint the GOP as beholden to the talk show host.
Holy smokes! This is brilliant! And all of the biggies are in on it — Begala, Carville, Rahm, and David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager last year and a member of his inner circle still, published an op-ed in today’s Washington Post called “Minority Leader Limbaugh.”
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