They’re not called the Stupid Party for no reason,
Republicans are telling themselves that a political wave is building that could carry them to big election gains next year. Judging by their performance so far in a special election in New York, however, they deserve to wander in the minority for another generation or two.
The November 2 contest will replace nine-term Republican John McHugh, who resigned to become Secretary of the Army. President Obama carried the district along the Canadian border with 52%, but George W. Bush carried it twice and Republicans outnumber Democrats by 45,000 or so. With voters alarmed about the economy and runaway spending, this ought to be an easy GOP retention.
Yet party bosses have managed to nominate a rare Republican who could lose: Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, whose liberal record has caused voters to flee to Doug Hoffman, a business executive who is running on the Conservative line. Mr. Hoffman has more than 20% support in the latest poll, which is only a few points behind Ms. Scozzafava, who is only a little behind Democratic lawyer Bill Owens.
Democrats want to portray this race as a familiar moderate-conservative GOP split, but the real issue is why Ms. Scozzafava is a Republican at all. She has voted for so many tax increases that the Democrat is attacking her as a tax raiser. She supported the Obama stimulus, and she favors “card check” to make union organizing easier, or at least she did until a recent flip-flop.She has run more than once on the line of the Working Families Party, which is aligned with Acorn. Her voting record in Albany puts her to the left of nearly half of the Democrats in the assembly. She also favors gay marriage, which is to the left of Mr. Obama.
GOP county chairmen pushed Ms. Scozzafava for the job in July at the behest of GOP state party chairman Joe Mondello, who has since (and blessedly) stepped down. Mr. Mondello also hand-picked loser James Tedisco in another special Congressional election earlier this year. Our sources tell us the backroom boys picked Ms. Scozzafava because she is a woman with high name recognition who could appeal to Democrats. Too bad she doesn’t appeal to Republicans.
One lesson of the Democratic gains in Congress in 2006 and 2008 is that a party needs to nominate candidates who fit their districts. Conservative stands won’t always fit in the Northeast the way they might in the South. Single-issue litmus tests can be self-defeating.
But GOP candidates ought to at least agree on some core principles, such as limited government and limits on the power of unions that have done so much to bust New York’s budget and drive jobs from the state. Some Republicans think Ms. Scozzafava might even switch parties if she wins and faces the prospect of a tough GOP primary next year.
Some other tidbits about Dede Scozzafava – she apparently has some, ah, unpaid tax issues, and has flirted with the Democrats before about switching parties – including running for this very open seat. She called the cops on a reporter from Weekly Standard for asking her questions. Republican county chairmen in her district are openly holding her at arms length and writing the election off. Scozzafava is also allied with the election-fixing, child-prostitution supporting group ACORN.
So the obvious question is – how did someone like this become the Republican candidate for an open seat that was vacated by a reasonably conservative Republican, in a rural upstate district that typically votes Republican, and in which the GOP has a massive registration advantage?
The answer – the usual “scratch my back” politics that always infests a party apparatus when you have people who care more about getting theirs than they do the good of the country. And we should note that that is what always seems to characterise leftists like Scozzafava – they don’t care about the good of the country, they just care about advancing their own political power. If Scozzafava cared about the country, she’d take Doug Hoffman’s advice and leave the race, instead of stealing Republican votes from the actual conservative.
This special election highlights the utter political tone-deafness of the Republican Party’s leadership. Here we are, with one of the most radical socialist Presidents and Congresses that we’ve ever had, who are utterly enraging the American people with their radicalism, and we have a GOP apparatus that thinks it’s a great idea to anoint the most leftist candidate they could find, since she’s a friend of the other leftist who decided not to run for the office. Great thinking. What next, using jello in the smoke detectors at HQ instead of batteries, since it smells pretty?
To top it off, the GOP establishment has the gall to expect rank-and-file Republicans to just lump it. Because we’re beholden to the GOP, doncha know.
Sorry, doesn’t work that way. It’s about time conservatives stood up and openly challenged the GOP leadership. It’s also about time that conservatives got serious about flooding their local county GOP organisations, and using Roberts Rules of Order to their advantage to take them over, and work their way up to the state conventions, then the RNC. If done aggressively, it could be done in two years. Any why shouldn’t we? It’s OUR party, it doesn’t belong to the county-club prissy-pants crowd.
Face it – conservatism is the wave of the future, at least for the upcoming election (and I would argue that the backlash against Obama that we’re seeing is just part of the trend towards conservatism that has been in action since the late 1970s – a couple of lost elections doesn’t mean a movement is over, people). The polls are all showing that, as if the ground-level anger from people who never were political before didn’t drive the point home.
Republicans just opened up their widest lead since 1994 on the generic Congressional ballot poll. Obama is in negative double-digits pretty consistently on Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll of political polarity. Only 43% say they’d vote to re-elect Obama. And – perhaps mosting damning of all for the Democrats – for the first time that I can ever remember at least, the GOP leads the Dems in ALL TEN of the “voters trust” issues – including “Democrat friendly” issues like health care, social security, and education. Also note, the GOP has a sizable trust advantage on abortion – so don’t tell me that social issues are a loser for the GOP. I’m not buying it.
If present trends hold, Republicans look set to take back Senate seats in Pennsylvania and Delaware (two bluish Northeastern states), and conservatives look like they’re going to be sweeping the big three races in Virginia handily (showing that conservative Republicans can definitely win in purple states). The Iowa governourship appears set to revert to conservative Republican hands (another purplish state), and in Ohio (another purple state), a relatively unknown Rob Portman has caught up with and is now virtually tied with each of the better-known, statewide Democrat elected officials that he is matched up against for the open Senate seat. How are Democrats faring in red states? Not good at all – if the news that Blanche Lincoln, Arkansas’s incumbent moderate Democrat Senator trails all four of her potential Republican opponents is any indication.
So please, don’t try to feed me this blithering nonsense about how the GOP needs to run to the centre to win, and is currently perceived as too right-wing to be viable. Quite the opposite is in fact true. The GOP is viewed by its own base as being full of squishes, and is viewed by independents as incapable of providing the leadership on the issues that they want. If that were to change, the GOP would win elections solidly, even in purplish and northeastern districts like NY-23. The reasonably conservative Jim Tedisco lost the special election in NY-20 by only a few hundred votes – and that is a district where the Dems had won handily in both the previous elections, and which Obama easily carried. If that special election were being held today, Tedisco would probably win it.
For the love of mercy, is there anybody up there in the GOP power structure who will look past the backslapping and backroom wheeling and dealing and the PAC-paid dinners and the first-class airliner seats provided by taxpayer monies for a minute and start exercising some political intelligence? The McCain model is not the answer. The Palin model is. Wake up and smell it, wudja?
BTW, if anyone wants to help support Doug Hoffman – a REAL conservative – who is running on the Conservative Party ticket in NY-23, please click the link below and donate. Hoffman has been endorsed by the Club for Growth, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Gary Bauer, and others, so you know he’s a solid, all-around movement conservative. Last poll I saw, showed him behind Owens by only 10%, and behind Scozzafava by six, and the trend indicates a rapid erosion of Scozzafava’s support, which will mostly go to Hoffman, which means he has a real chance of winning, and there’s a real chance of taking this seat back for CONSERVATIVES (not just the GOP).
You can donate to Doug directly or through PayPal. Please do! Hopefully, my $50 will help elect a solid conservative to this seat!
[Update: Forgot to link to the VA polling – linked now!]
