| Conner caught up with Tedisco in the Assembly chamber, and blogged that he was "bearing up, not sulking in his tent."
Reporters who have been trying to get calls returned over the last six days would not agree with that.
Whatever, Conner got Tedisco to talk, somewhat:
I just had an interesting chat with Jim Tedisco, who was eating jellybeans at the back of the Assembly chamber, about what went wrong with his congressional campaign. He took personal responsibility, saying a loss is always the candidate's fault, but went off the record when getting into the nitty gritty of what mistakes were made.
Of course, I wonder what was in the "off the record" part, but Conner does get Tedisco on the record about some campaign issues:
But, I said, what about the Siena polls showing your own negative ads were turning voters against you? Don't you remember me pressing you to denounce the NRCC ads, and, when you wouldn't, me asking (perhaps too heatedly, I now recall) if you were conceding the campaign? (He was still four points up at that point.)
Yes, he said, he remembered me asking that question. But he didn't agree about the negative ads, because he said the later ads tying Scott Murphy's support for the stimulus bill to the AIG bonuses were effective, bringing Tedisco back to almost win the election.
There's something to that, I guess, since the Siena poll released the Friday before the election showed Murphy four points up, and he wound up squeaking home by much less than that. Tedisco indicated his own polling showed him six points down then.
I, too, thought Murphy would win on Election Day, and not three weeks later. Maybe Tedisco's mendacious stimulus/AIG ads closed the gap, but that gap existed partly due to other negative Tedisco ads that had helped Murphy, in name recognition and voter disgust.
Conner is a conservative, pro-life Catholic like Tedisco, so he thinks a last-weekend campaign by out-of-state Christianists and a pro-life, anti-Murphy ad I never heard (and I was listening to too much talk radio back then) were what really closed the gap.
But I think the Tedisco ground game which included social conservative supporters, and a late radio ad from the National Right to Life Committee, had more to do with his recovery of some lost ground -- although the negative AIG ads were somewhat better than the negative Murphy-invested-in-India ads.
They chatted some more about TV ads, as if they were the only thing that mattered:
Tedisco defended the negative ads about the Synacor bonuses, which I think were as bad as the counterproductive India ads, but he didn't really try to defend his over-the-top campaign assertion that Murphy was a poster boy for corruption.
He complained with justice about the negative ads directed against him by the Democrats and their union allies, and their lack of veracity.
That's rich -- Tedisco complaining about "lack of veracity" in Murphy's ads, when he had personally endorsed ads that lied that Murphy had outsourced jobs to India.
The race, as we all know, came down to the absentee ballots, where the (stupid again) conventional wisdom was that Tedisco would win them by a 3-2 margin.
In the real world, Tedisco lost the crucial absentee ballot part of the campaign, but he's got a rationalization for that:
Tedisco said most of the absentee ballots were cast before his late surge, which explains why they went for Murphy. Of course, that doesn't explain why Tedisco's people were expressing confidence on election night that he would win the absentees.
Tedisco noted today that the second-home owners in Columbia County went overwhelmingly for the Democrat, and I guess that's a factor that I and the Republicans I talked to that night were not taking into account.
Conner neglects to mention that Tedisco's lawyers tried mightily, but unsuccessfully, to disenfranchise property owners in the 20th who also have residences in New York City.
Re: the off-the-record stuff, Conner hints that it involved Tedisco complaining about negative ads paid for by the National Republican Campaign Committee and other third parties.
The idea that Tedisco wanted to run an all-positive campaign -- because that's the kind of guy he is -- is absurd. Tedisco himself echoed all the negative themes in the ads in his personal appearances -- because that's really the kind of guy he is.
This is speculation, but here's part of what I think Tedisco went off-the-record about -- the lack of support from Republicans in the district, especially state Sen. Betty Little.
Murphy crushed Tedisco in the northern part of the district (Warren, Washington and Essex counties), which is where the popular Little lives.
Little wanted to run for Congress in this special election, but Tedisco, who has never lived in the district, screwed her out of that.
So she naturally did the minimum to help him.
And I'll bet Tedisco is not happy about that.
Finally, if Tedisco is not "sulking" after his loss, then why is he talking only to a sympathetic blogger who happened to run into him in the Assembly chamber.
Tedisco has never been shy with the local media -- that's how he got his high name recognition. So almost a week of refusing to return phone calls is quite out-of-character.
And only increases the impression that Tedisco is not taking his loss well at all. |
