The “CREEPS” are at it again. The Watergate dirty tricksterism of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (Nixon) is back in business, if it ever went out of it. Once the nominee of the party (McCain) was determined, GOP operatives have focussed their campaigning on trying to manipulate the Democratic primaries to their benefit. By all present indications, their operations are succeeding quite nicely, thank you.

Like all shady “operations,” this one needed to operate in the shadow of public awareness; but the bean-spiller Russ Limbaugh spilled a bowl of them just after the March 4 Democratic primaries in Texas and Ohio when he “bragged” on the air that he had urged his friends in the Republican Party to vote for Clinton, since she was on the ropes after Super Tuesday and it was to the Republicans’ advantage to prolong the Democratic primary race to allow Obama and Clinton to clobber one another to help do the party’s dirty work for it. Of course the “dirty” Clinton campaign obliged and Republican bottom-suckers aided the clobbering process by going back through Jeremiah Wright’s old sermons and putting together a hair-raising montage of utterances designed to embarrass Obama which is, of course, exactly what happened. The loud-mouthed Limbaugh labeled all this muddy business Operation Chaos.

After the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, John Nichols wrote an article for Nation claiming that Chaos had little or no influence on the outcome of the PA race. I’ve done the math and some educated guesses on the election results (which I will be glad to furnish as a paste to this site if requested) to show quite the contrary: that of the 215,000 vote margin of Clinton’s win in PA, about 100,000 of them could be attributed to Republicans who, in PA’s “closed” primary, re-registered as Democrats and voted for Clinton; without that Chaos boost, she would have won by 5-6% rather than the 10% that was the agreed-upon “magic number” of the margin by which she had to win to stay in the race. After her “big victory,” the campaign contributions rolled in and she stayed in the race… at least until after May 6. Operation Chaos, Mission Accomplished!

Like other accomplished missions, this one is still a bit incomplete, especially after the semi-melt down suffered by Obama by virtue of his handling of the Jeremiah Wright “affair.”

Next to the plate step the May 6 twin primaries in Indiana and North Carolina and it remains to be seen whether Operation Chaos will still be operating. For reasons mentioned below, I rather doubt it.

To consider Indiana first, it is the first totally “open” primary since Limbaugh described the operation, one in which any voter can vote in either party’s primary. This might seem tailor-made for Chaos except for a couple of things. (1) There are other primary races, Congress for example, in which Republicans may feel that they have a stake, even if the presidential “stake” has been removed by McCain clinching the nomination. Some may feel, as I tend to agree, that the mission has indeed been accomplished and they can safely “stay home” and vote in their own party’s primary. (2) Although I called Indiana a “totally open” primary state, it is not quite that. True, Indiana does not even record party registration on voting records but when a voter asks for a ballot, he/she is expected to request the ballot of his/her “party affiliation:” that party in whose primary he/she has been voting in the recent past. If his/her indication of this affiliation (records of which are maintained by the state) is “challenged” (by whom?), the “challengee” will be required to execute an affidavit indicating his/her intention of voting for the “majority” of that party’s nominees at the next general election. But, as the “green pages” for Indiana elections point out, officials at the polling place do not have access tp a voter’s affiliation records and his/her actual voting at the general election is secret, so the truthfulness of the affidavits is seldom, if ever, challenged. So Chaos-bent persons could presumably violate their “affiliation” even after a sworn affidavit to the contrary, but would I (for example) want to risk the possibility of being prosecuted (in ignorance of the inefficacy of the “challenge” threat) because some hot shot “voter abuse” prosecutor wanted to make a test case of me… all because I was so Republican-or Russ Limbaugh oriented that I was willing to go to jail for a “cause” that had perhaps already been accomplished? No way. Bottom line: in contrast with PA, I don’t expect Operation Chaos will make much difference in IN.

Then there’s North Carolina which, like PA, is a “closed primary” state but, again, it was possible for people to change their registrations before the change deadline of April 11, in plenty of time to implement Chaos directives from the party. Did this happen? Current registration numbers show that, since the beginning of the year, approximately 105,000 have been newly registered as Democrats, about 14,000 as Republicans, suggesting some Chaos potential. With a state with a large black population so decisively leaning toward Obama, one might wonder how many of these 105,000 new “Democrats” are Chaos operatives who will vote for Clinton to “prolong” the race; and how many are respondents to Obama’s campaign to enlist those Republicans, mostly I should think, white males who are in fact attracted to a “black” candidate who is the closet racist’s dream of a black politician who would tell Jeremiah Wright, in effect, to go the back of the bus and New York City blacks, incensed by the exoneration of police who killed Sean Bell, to “accept the verdict” and to avoid “violent” reactions. So again, bottom line, I doubt that Chaos will have much effect in NC.

This brings me to a final observation on these Republican efforts to manipulate the Democratic primaries. Here I’m going to offer a guess at what the “operation” is all about; how I wish I had a “mole” who sits with these creeps and plots strategies. Failing that, I have to guess. I’m thinking that, all along, the Republican preference as a November opponent was Obama, who is vulnerable to the same kind of “swift-boating” operations that were the undoing of John Kerry in 2004. Whether it was his not wearing a flag pin, his suggestion of “negotiating” with Hamas, his association with Reverend Wright or maybe their ace in the hole, the real possibility of a criminal indictment in connection with the public housing scandal in Chicago, they would have a candidate who could be smeared far beyond the rather vague “Hillary hatred” that would make her as well a relatively easy November election opponent. In the several “open primary” election states leading through Super Tuesday, it is my impression (I haven’t done “the math” on these) that Obama won most of these states, perhaps with a boost from Republican voters–provided these occurred in primaries after the Republican primary contest was effectively decided. When it appeared after Super Tuesday that the “operation” did such an over-kill that it threatened to foreshorten the Democratic race and deprive the party of “dirty work” done within the Democratic Party, then Operation Chaos was born: an operation whose mission may indeed be accomplished so that Republicans can vote in what remains of “their own” primary contests and let happen what was originally intended: that a “flawed” Obama would be nominated.

One more thing I hope to accomplish by this article: to keep open a discussion, while the “pain” of the present election mess is still fresh with us, of needed structural changes in the way we “do business” in American democracy. Primary elections should, in my view, be reserved for participation to whose people who are genuinely committed to advance the causes of a party: “open” primaries are practically oxymorons. To prevent changes in party registration for the specific purpose of doing mischief with other peoples’ elections (a la Operation Chaos), states could enforce earlier deadlines for registration changes, perhaps to the beginning of an election season, before parties could calculate who was winning or losing in the other parties’ primaries. (Kentucky now does this, as registration changes for its May 20 primary closed on December 31, 2007). Finally, and this one is debatable for several reasons: the institution of a single “Primary Day” in say June or July could avert not only the situation in which parties with “already settled” races of their own would feel free to enter their rivals’ party primaries, but also perhaps obviate the bandwagon effect of earlier on later primaries. All these reforms are open to discussion and critique, but wouldn’t it be good strategy to begin the debates now while the problems with the present system are laid out before us?