Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh bucked conventional wisdom on the 2016 presidential election Monday, expressing disbelief that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee and claiming Democrats are trying to “trick” the GOP into picking a moderate candidate.
Limbaugh began by highlighting James Carville’s remarks from Sunday that the GOP must focus on electability in 2016 — which means backing a nominee who can beat Hillary Clinton. (RELATED: Carville: GOP must win presidency in 2016 or go ‘extinct’ [VIDEO])
Rush warned against falling for Carville’s trick. “If you had a dollar for every time the Democrats threw out this kind of scare tactic, you would be wealthy,” he said. “What do they tell us? They say, ‘If you guys don’t win the independents you’re not going to win anything, and if you criticize us, you’ll lose the independents.'”
“‘You criticize Obama, the independents are going to go running to the Democrats, so you can’t criticize Obama,'” he continued. “So the Republicans don’t criticize Obama. Don’t wanna lose the independents. Thereby, [they] fall for the trick.”
“Now here comes the Hillary trick,” he said. “This trick was played in 2007, before Obama surfaced. ‘You better come up with somebody who can beat Hillary, because if you can’t come up with somebody who can beat Hillary, you don’t have a prayer.'”
“And the odds are, the Republicans are going to listen to it, the Republican consultant class,” Limbaugh asserted. “Hell, everybody I know is already scared to death that Hillary IS the nominee. It’s amazing!”
“Meanwhile, what’s the reality?” he continued. “She didn’t even get the nomination in 2008! All it took was an unknown African-American — relatively unknown — to come out of nowhere, and the powers that be in the Democratic Party dropped her like a hot potato.”
“Despite the fact that everything they gave her politically she made a mess of — and she made a mess of Benghazi, she made a mess of secretary of state, and YET, people on our side seemingly are scared to death,” Limbaugh claimed.
“Look at what happened,” he continued. “The reality is that the first chance that the Democrats had to renege on their promise to her, they did.”
Limbaugh explained that many Democrats feel Hillary is simply not liberal enough, and that a challenge from left field — be it socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders or others — may well derail her campaign in the run-up to 2016.
“My point is, there will be other people that are going to want this besides Hillary,” he concluded.
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