NY-23: Wasted Money, Wasted Effort
The race for New York's 23rd Congressional district could have been so simple.
Dede Scozzafava, like Jim Tedisco, was a bad pick from a dysfunctional New York Republican Party. Worse yet, she was the second pick, and the worse pick. If the conservatives of New York and the conservatives of the ACU had simply withheld their support, she would have lost well enough on her own. If they were feeling even more Machiavellian, they could have endorsed the moderate Democrat against the liberal Republican, and buried her. Message sent. Done.
But no.
They had to pretend some accountant who was gerrymandered out of the district years ago was the second coming of James Buckley, and get the money wheels a-spinning.
How was this a good plan? Really?
(For the sake of disclosure, I got this race wrong -- badly wrong -- in my prediction. Interestingly, I was wrong in my New Jersey and in my NY-23 predictions for the same reason. I thought the third party votes would break counterintuitively; Daggett for Corzine, Scozzafava for Hoffman. As it turned out, the Daggett voters were more moderate-conservative than I thought, and the Scozzafavans were more moderate-liberal than I hoped. I blame these two.)
Like I was saying, it could have been an embarrassment for Republicans instead of for Conservatives, but the ACU Traveling Circus had to jump in with both feet. Blogbursts, fundraising drives, Twitter hashtags, tea party coordination, demands for endorsements, flat tax advocacy (really? The Flat Tax? At least the FairTax sold books!), and to top it all off, a Glenn Beck appearance that all but proved Newt Gingrich 100% right. Everything but, you know, an intern trawling the Watertown dailies for the local issues that he'd be asked about. That would have come in handy.
So much effort. So much "activity". So much money.
Oh well. This race was two things: not that important, and kind of a long shot once Scozzafava was endorsed, so in the end, it served as a Phony War. It gave the ACU and the disaffected conservative crowd something to do while two relatively healthy Republican establishments put it away on a grand scale in Virginia and New Jersey.
So we celebrate -- and we reflect. 2010 can't come soon enough.