Fury prods candidate from race
By FRED LEBRUN COMMENTARY
Sunday, November 1, 2009
It was a shocker to see Republican Dede Scozzafava pull the plug at the last minute on her campaign for the 23rd Congressional District seat vacated by John McHugh to become secretary of the Army.
Shocking, but not surprising. Her numbers among potential voters have been sinking in the past couple of weeks, while those of her two opponents, Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman and Democrat Bill Owen, have been climbing. According to the latest Siena poll of voters, Owen, at 36 percent, and Hoffman, at 35, are in a dead heat. Scozzafava, the region's assemblywoman, dropped to 20 percent.
More significantly, money had dried up for Scozzafava. The trend, with only a few days left in the race, sealed the deal. Dropping out made sense. Painful sense, but sense.
While Scozzafava is taking one for the party by clearing the field for Hoffman, her name remains on Tuesday's ballot. She released her supporters so they could donate and work for anyone else if they wished, but she did not tell them not to vote for her.
Good for her. It has to be galling to the nth degree to be a lifelong, faithful Republican and then to get chased off the ballot. Marginalized because she is cast as not Republican enough by high-profile outsider conservatives who have hijacked this contest and made a major national issue of it. What constitutes a good Republican has been imperiously redefined. That is, deep right or not at all. Moderates, line up against the wall.
Scozzafava was ripped apart in a savage advertising campaign. And the mud stuck. Constituents who have known her for years began turning their backs, and here we are.
This has been an intensely Republican district since the 1870s, so it seems that with Scozzafava backing off, Hoffman should be a shoo-in. Ah, but beware of the shoo-in label. It doesn't always fit.
John McHugh was re-elected from this district by more than 60 percent of the vote every time out, and he was almost the same kind of Republican as Scozzafava. Moderate, a Rockefeller Republican, and not afraid to buck the more conservative elements of his party.
McHugh championed progressive action on acid rain and climate change issues, for instance, during the Bush administration, when the party line denied climate change altogether. If it were McHugh running again, he would have been easily re-elected.
The point here is that the natural scale of Republicanism in this North Country district, when you factor in colleges in Plattsburgh, Canton, Oswego, Potsdam and elsewhere, and past voting patterns, is moderate. Not deep right. They went for Obama, for goodness sake.
So there's no such thing as a shoo-in here. Remember, Jim Tedisco should have been a shoo-in down here in the 20th Congressional District special election a scant six months ago.
But an intensely negative campaign lambasting his opponent, Scott Murphy, backfired. As in the contest up north, the national big boys and girls took over the reins of the local campaign. It was disastrous for Tedisco.
We'll know soon enough how an intensely negative campaign, abetted by nightly haranguing on national talk radio, and the intrusion of the likes of the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, plays out in the 23rd.
After the voters have their say. Oh, them. My sense is while the highly vocal cadre that supports Hoffman seems determined, there is a soft middle of undecideds who won't make up their mind until Tuesday. Now that Dede has stepped back, that soft middle is mighty big in my view.
How voters feel about being played for pawns on a national chessboard by those whose agendas have nothing to do with issues in the district has yet to be weighed where it counts.
And then there's the possible whiplash effect of too much negative advertising jarring local sensibilities.
That was the lesson of the Tedisco race. Then again, we might be getting a whole new set of lessons from this race that will do nothing to quell negative advertising in the future.
National Democrats are not unmindful of opportunity here as a result of all these conservative high jinks. They've poured money and talent into the Owen campaign. Even Vice President Joe Biden was making a last-minute pass through the district for Owen, a corporate lawyer from Plattsburgh.
Hoffman, a Lake Placid businessman, doesn't live in the district and won't be able to vote in this race, has his own big-name visitors. When he met recently with The Watertown Times editorial board, he was accompanied by Dick Armey of Texas, a former House majority leader. Hoffman reportedly became flustered and objected to the heated questioning at the session.
Armey sprang to his defense, dismissing regional concerns as "parochial" issues that wouldn't determine the course of the election. A mind-boggling corruption of Tip O'Neill's truism that all politics is local.
Sadly enough, considering the undeserved pounding Dede Scozzafava took while few came to her defense, and now her exit from the campaign, Armey may be right. It would be nice to think the voters will set him straight.
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