POLITICAL TRANSVESTITES AND PETTINESS IN NY STATE
Principles And Pettiness In NY-23
Election ’09: The true colors of Republicans who act like Democrats and Democrats who act to silence real opposition became visible over the weekend. The principles of freedom are under siege on multiple fronts.
You have to be pretty deeply immersed in the cesspool already to come up with a term like “tea party drag” to describe grass-roots activists who fear that America is descending into bankruptcy and depravity.
Yet, that was how New York Times columnist Frank Rich this week described the right’s refusal to lie down and play dead as the Democratic Party tries to turn the U.S. into a socialist paradise. (Maybe Rich saw “La Cage aux Folles” a few too many times back in his Broadway critic days.)
Those who thought the Republican nominee for the 23rd congressional district in upstate New York should act like a Republican are, according to Rich, invading “GOP Stalinists.” GOP leaders ranging from Sarah Palin to Steve Forbes preferred New York state Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman to the Daily Kos-endorsed liberal Republican anointed by local party bosses, Dede Scozzafava.
By Rich’s logic, it’s “better for Democrats if Hoffman wins” because conservatives will do the same thing all across the country. Why shouldn’t they? Republican success has always had to do with ideas and principles, not “pragmatism.”
That’s why the Gerald Fords and the Bob Doles were losers, while the Ronald Reagans and the George W. Bushes were winners. It’s why backslapping old Bob Michel was a permanent House Minority Leader who could never become speaker of the House, while firebrand Newt Gingrich was propelled to third in line to the presidency by nationalizing the 1994 congressional elections.
Unfortunately, one of the people forgetting that lesson is Gingrich himself. First, the former speaker endorsed Scozzafava. When she withdrew late last week, Gingrich endorsed Hoffman but in a back-handed sort of way, warning that local party hacks should be allowed to nominate liberal Democratic clones.
But the reason Hoffman was able to end Scozzafava’s candidacy is that the people in NY-23 preferred a Reaganite citizen politician to a party machinist doing an impersonation of liberal Sen. Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican.
Now that Scozzafava has, in an act of incalculable pettiness, endorsed the Democrat in the race, Bill Owens, Gingrich looks like a professor at the Mister Magoo school of political science.
The Politico reports, “the White House got Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, one of the most powerful figures in the state, and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to place calls to the assemblywoman on Saturday evening to coax her into” endorsing her former Democratic opponent in the race.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., also got involved, and there is reportedly a great chance now that Scozzafava, a state assemblywoman, will change parties and become a Democrat.
That means all the people — inside and outside the state — who were charging that she was a Republican In Name Only, or “RINO,” are vindicated. Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., (until last April, R-Pa.) call your office.
The New York state Republican Party called Scozzafava’s endorsement of Owens “a betrayal of the people of the North Country and the people of her party” and a “corrupt bargain.” But the state party has no one but itself to blame. They’re the ones who made her the Republican candidate.
To top it all off, there was the outrageous remark from Vice President Joseph Biden, while campaigning in New York for Owens: “I say to all those moderate Republicans, those decent-thinking folks who are pragmatic Republicans, join us. We welcome you.”
Imagine if former Vice President Dick Cheney, campaigning, say, in 2006 in the South had said, “I say to all those moderate Democrats, those decent-thinking folks who are pragmatic Democrats, join us. We welcome you.”
It would immediately have been considered thinly veiled racism, and the Bush administration as a whole would have been accused by the media and leading Democrats of appealing to bigotry.
But to the Frank Riches and the Joe Bidens of this world, no one can be “decent-thinking” and vote for a candidate who espouses the principles of low taxes, spending restraint and traditional moral values. Apparently, a lot of GOP big shots think the same.
In upstate New York, fed-up voters are teaching them a lesson that may well spread from coast to coast in the next 12 months.
Comments are closed.
