The First Step

In politics, as in sports, success is a function of expectations.  So the question, tonight, is whether the dead heat in the special election to fill the vacant House seat of New York's Twentieth Congressional District is a downer for Republican Jim Tedisco, who just a few weeks ago was up by double-digits and was running in a "red"-leaning district, or for Democrat Scott Murphy, who, both personally and from his party, had more campaign cash than God and was running in the wake of the biggest comprehensive Donk electoral victory since 1964 with the supposedly invincible False Messiah having (belatedly) blessed him at the eleventh hour.

I look upon it as a wash, personally.  Kirsten Gillibrand, the Dem who swiped that district in 2006, rode Red Barry's coattails to a twenty-four point blowout re-election last November.  Murphy is dramatically to her left, as it happens, and thus is a much poorer fit for that district.  But he also [*ahem*] plugged himself into B.O. from day one, as one would expect a candidate to do with a president of his own party who, allegedly, enjoys honeymoonesque popularity.  Meanwhile, the GOP has been on a special election mini-winning streak, starting with Senator Saxby Chambliss' runaway runoff victory last December and running through a congressional contest in California and the fall of "Icebox Willie" Jefferson in Louisiana, in which the swings toward the Republican side compared to November 4th have been by double-digit margins.  Yet Tedisco ran a less than scintillating campaign, turning off district voters with ads ridiculing Murphy instead of focusing on the ruinous Obamunist economic policies Murphy was embracing.  Indeed, Tedisco didn't even take a public stance on Hogzilla until he plummeted into a virtual tie in the polls and experienced a "deathbed conversion" to fiscal sanity.  And the AIG bonus tempest in the context of the Dems' bailout-mania was more than a little serendipitous.

Overall, one gets the feeling that this race shouldn't have been close.  Maybe not a blowout for the Republican candidate, but not another piece of "recount" bait, either.

But Dick Morris, who has run a few more campaigns than yours truly, is a tad more effusive:

Veteran political analyst Dick Morris tells Newsmax that the showing by Republican Jim Tedisco in Tuesday’s too-close-to-call special election in New York was “extraordinary.”

Morris also said that with Tedisco and Democrat Scott Murphy separated by less than one hundred votes heading into the counting of absentee ballots, Tuesday’s result shows that President Barack Obama is already “in trouble.”...

“My feeling is that it was a terrific showing for the Republican,” Morris said.

“This is a seat held by a Democratic congresswoman in one of the bluest of the blue states, seventy days after [the inauguration of] a president [that] was overwhelmingly elected who’s a Democrat.

“Let’s remember that 57% still approve of what Obama is doing, and the fact that Tedisco came so close that the absentee ballots might put him over the top I think was an extraordinary showing…

“To expect a takeaway to the Republican Party this early in a president’s administration I think is facile. I think what it really demonstrates is that Obama is in trouble. The fact that he can’t win an election like that by a significant margin I think really shows that people are beginning to tire of his agenda.

“His approval rating started at about 65% and now it’s down to 55%-57%, and I think you’re going to find it slipping further as more and more negative data come in and people more and more are convinced that he’s not bringing us out of this recession. So I think ultimately it was a fairly positive result…

Remember one other factor: it was a special election.  Special elections tend to have putrid turnout, which means voter motivation is an even bigger factor than it typically is.  The needle moving fourteen points in the GOP's direction bespeaks a like movement in respective partisan energies that has become a trend reminiscent of Bill Clinton's early days in the White House.  Which, of course, culminated in the 1994 GOP congressional landslide.  Possible translation: Obama, like Clinton, is (for the time being, at least) still personally popular (for God only knows what reason), but support for his policies is dwindling at a sufficiently rapid clip that voters want to slam on the brakes by re-empowering the Oppressed Opposition on Capitol Hill.

Two other hopeful developments for Tedisco:

(1) "Tedisco aide Bill Sherman said that of the 5,907 ballots that had been received, there were 798 more from enrolled Republicans than Democrats."

(2) Like the cops and the military finally learned in the third X-Men picture to stop using metallic weapons against Magneto, so the GOP may have finally learned the necessity of pre-empting the Democrats' insatiable lust for stealing elections:

New York Republicans Tuesday slapped the state’s Election Board with a wide-ranging injunction to prevent Minnesota-style snafus seen in the Al Franken-Norm Coleman race from disrupting the hard-fought 20th congressional district race in upstate New York....

State GOP party officials say they want to ensure that the goings-on in Minnesota - which saw an initial Coleman lead of over 775 votes steadily dwindle to a deficit of 225 votes, with an indeterminate number of ballots being counted twice and other ballots either disappearing or being discovered weeks after the election – don’t occur in the Empire State.

The Minnesota election has dragged on five months, and despite a long-awaited election panel ruling Tuesday, that marathon dispute still has no end in sight.

The 28-page order issued Tuesday by New York state Supreme Court Judge James V. Brands of the County of Dutchess impounds voting machines, ballots, ballot envelopes, and restricts the counting of absentee ballots to central locations rather than precincts.

One state election official tells Newsmax that Greene county election officials had planned to permit each precinct in the county to determine which absentee ballots should be opened and counted on Tuesday evening. That may have triggered the state GOP injunction.

Really?  You think?  Republicans are finally finding multiple brain cells to rub together?  Wow, this IS a red-letter day.

Here's a prediction: the absentees, minus Donk chad-hanging and "creative" tallying, will put Jim Tedisco over the top.  Another congressional seat will have been reclaimed from the forces if evil.  And nineteen months from now, several dozen more of Representative Tedisco's friends will be joining him.

UPDATE: Well, THAT didn't take very long, did it?