2008 was supposed to be Hillary's year, but she lost the caucuses and won the primaries, leading to the Democrat super-delegates abandoning her due to racism charges by Barack no-middle-name Obama.
I can't see that Obama had the capabilities at this time to nationalize the Chicago machine.
The 2010 mid-term wave discredits the idea that the machine was in place even then.
That leaves 2012, where Obama running the table of every swing state is the proof, furthered by dozens of precincts with zero votes for Romney. All it takes is a few extra votes in a few key precincts to swing a state, which is what happened in toto in 2012.
-PJ
What I should have said is that 2008 was our last “honest” national election, where the manipulation and systematic corruption was not enough to completely ‘steal’ a national office.
2010 was a ‘surprise’ only because the hubris of the political caste assumed that the Praetorian media still had a stranglehold on public opinion. I think 2010 pushed the Machine into overdrive.
And when I say Cook County machine - I’m simply talking about the methodology of party and system-induced corruption, not that the Daley Machine was now running the co-opting of the national election process.
2012 is indeed the proof that we went Soviet. I saw that early on in 2010 when Obama announced that he was ‘most concerned’ about Romney being a challenger in 2012. The Soviets used to do similar things by picking the weak patsy ‘choice’ for the people while the Party actually ensured their man ‘won’.
Picking the opposition’s candidate is the surest means to make the manipulation easier.