| Conner has been critical of Tedisco's campaign before, and he's even more critical now that all remains is the fat lady's song.
Conner is, like Tedisco presumably, already looking to next year:
If, as seems likely now, Jim Tedisco winds up losing this election, he should not run again for the congressional seat unless he acknowledges the egregious errors made by his campaign this time around.
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Tedisco got into the race because he thought he would easily beat whoever the Democrats put up, and he should have done just that to the political novice Murphy.
Tedisco lost because he and the NRCC ran a lousy campaign, and failed to correct their strategy and tactics (despite feinting in that direction) when it became glaringly obvious that the negative ads were counterproductive.
They failed to mention major local issues like dairy prices that could have helped in Republican areas like Washington County where they performed very poorly, failed to tell voters about Tedisco's substantive record in public service, indulged in lame gimmicks and talking points and lived in a bubble of denial.
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The Siena polls showed Tedisco failed to get enough votes from what should have been his Republican base, which doesn't suggest that it's his conservatism that did him in. Nor was it his waffling for too long on the stimulus. It was the overall campaign incompetence.
Unless Tedisco admits that, and in effect apologizes to Republican and conservative voters for sticking them with liberal Democratic representation for the next two years, he will not deserve their support in 2010. And if he does run then, and runs the same kind of campaign, then no matter what happens to the country and the district in the meantime, Murphy will clobber him.
Conner's analysis is mostly correct, especially the bits about Tedisco's using "lame gimmicks and talking points and liv(ing) in a bubble of denial."
But his idea that Tedisco just needed to energize the conservative base does not recognize that that base is no longer large enough to win in the 20th -- the district is a lot more purple than it once was, and some substantial number of Republicans there have gotten into the habit of voting for solid, somewhat moderate Democrats like Murphy and Kirsten Gillibrand.
In Dutchess County, today's count was hampered by the decision of Elections Commissioner David Gamache to attend the Yankees' opener against the Indians this afternoon.
Gamache went to the game with John Ciampoli, Tedisco's lead lawyer. I wonder who paid.
According to Jimmy Vielkind (who's been covering the after-election better than anyone), fewer ballots were counted as a result:
Daniel French, a Democratic official with the Dutchess County Board of Elections, said that they couldn't complete the recount because Republican elections Commissioner David Gamache was attending a Yankees game this afternoon with John Ciampoli, an attorney for state Republican Party chair Joe Mondello.
French says that Gamache had authorized a deputy commissioner, Patricia Hohmann, to fill in for him at the table, but says that Gamache only authorized her to count military ballots -- which generally tend to skew Republican -- from towns from which domestic absentee ballots had already been counted.
Once the military ballots were counted, French said, Hohmann simply left, with three towns' worth of absentee ballots -- from Stanford, Unionvale and Washington -- still unopened.
Tedisco has been seeking to delay and extend the counting process, as he hopes to get yet another extension for reception of overseas military absentee ballots.
It won't help him win, but it's the only slim reed he has left.
Here's the karma part -- Gamache and Ciampoli got to watch the Yankees get creamed 10-2 by the Indians.
Tedisco's loss will be closer, but it's just as certain.
Even so, please do whatever you can to help Murphy ensure that every legal absentee ballot is counted and that he wins by as much as possible. |
