Placing Rush Limbaugh as the face of the Republican Party is part of a strategy begun by top Democratic strategists and now partially coordinated from inside the White House, Politico finds in an article this morning. Liberal strategists James Carville and Stanley Greenberg launched the strategy after they found Limbaugh’s favorability ratings low amongst average Americans in an October poll.

Soon it clicked: Democrats realized they could roll out a new GOP bogeyman for the post-Bush era by turning to an old one in Limbaugh, a polarizing figure since he rose to prominence in the 1990s…

If Limbaugh himself were to coin a phrase for it, he might call it Operation Rushbo – an idea that started out simply enough but quickly proved to be deeply resonant by a rapid succession of events, say Democrats inside and outside the West Wing.

The seeds were planted in October after Democracy Corps, the Democratic polling company run by Carville and Greenberg, included Limbaugh’s name in a survey and found that many Americans just don’t like him.

“His positives for voters under 40 was 11 percent,” Carville recalled with a degree of amazement, alluding to a question about whether voters had a positive or negative view of the talk show host.

Paul Begala, a close friend of Carville, Greenberg and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, said they found Limbaugh’s overall ratings were even lower than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s controversial former pastor, and William Ayers, the domestic terrorist and Chicago resident who Republicans sought to tie to Obama during the campaign.

Then came what Begala called “the tripwire.”…

But 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.

According to sources that spoke with Politico, the White House isn’t exactly ignorant of the strategy.

Neither Democrat would say so, but a third source said the two also began pushing the idea of targeting Limbaugh in their daily phone conversations with Emanuel.

Conversations and email exchanges began taking place in and out of the White House not only between the old pals from the Clinton era but also including White House senior adviser David Axelrod, Deputy Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Woodhouse…

By Sunday morning, Emanuel elevated the strategy by bringing up the conservative talker, unprompted, on CBS’s “Face the Nation” and calling him the “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party.”

Basically Democratic polls show that Limbaugh doesn’t go over well with most Americans. Therefore they’ll paint him as the Republican Party in of itself, driving non-conservatives away from it. I’m not so sure it’s a flawless strategy and neither is Peter Daou at the Huffington Post. Do you really want to elevate Limbaugh and expand his platform to oppose the administration? As Limbaugh himself says, more people are tuning in to hear what he has to say. You’re taking a large gamble that people aren’t currently basing their opinions of him on what they’re told but rather what he’s actually said. We’re still a center-right nation and some of his anti-Obama rhetoric may ring true with people now paying attention to him.