| I feel badly for Dede Scozzafava, I really do. She's been stuck with the position of trying to run as a moderate Republican in today's GOP climate. If the GOP is ever going to regain it's former status as, well, a party made up of more than kooks and racists, then it's desperately going to need people like her leading the charge back to the middle.
Unfortunately for her--and for the future of the Republican Party--that doesn't look too likely at this point. Under barrages from both the right and the left, Scozzafava's campaign seems to be coming apart under the strain.
Although the story is from Politico (and thus untrustworthy until proven otherwise), the Scozzafava campaign confirmed that they did call the police on a particularly aggressive reporter from the Weekly Standard. Since we have no objective account of the incident, it's hard to tell whether the police intervention was justified, but either way it's not going to sit well with a conservative base that already wasn't happy with the candidate's moderate tendencies.
Today Scozzafava, apparently trying to regain the initiative, went to Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman's headquarters to stage a photo op, demanding that Hoffman engage in more debates.
This was one of the classic blunders.
Everybody knows that you don't go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line, but only slightly less well known is this: never give your opponent free advertising. Such as, say, allowing your photo op and couple of supporters to be overrun and hijacked by the medium-sized horde of sign-bearing campaign workers that usually are present in campaign HQs.
With election day less than two weeks away, little committment from the national party, and more missteps with the base, I don't envy Scozzafava the position she's in. It's not going to be pretty.
UPDATE: Just to complete the job of brewing up a civil war between the sane and lunatic wings of the GOP, Glenn Beck decided to stick his head in and declare that Scozzafava was "endorsed by... an arm of ACORN!" (Oooh, boooga booga!), and "isn't a Republican."
Of course, being Glenn Beck, he manages to sound bat-shit crazy while he's saying it, first claiming not to follow "local" elections, then pulling out Scozzafava's previous WFP endorsement which he'd obviously been prepped on, then saying he knew nothing about her (not even apparently knowing at first that "he" was a "she"). He rounded out his loonery by saying "She's John McCain or Barack Obama." Which doesn't even make sense as a sentence, but then again, it's Glenn Beck. |
