Revenge Of The Nerd

I do not live in New York's 23rd Congressional District, but rather Washington-8.  On the rarer-than-hen's-lips occasions when I do blog about anything local, I usually end up finding something national to blog about after all.  Plus I have a very limited time for running this establishment around my day job, wife, kids, choir, Bible studies, etc. as it is.  So ordinarily - heck, pretty much under any other set of circumstances but these - I wouldn't post anything about this particular special election.

These circumstances, though, are unique because of the rising possibility of making next Tuesday an anti-Obama hat trick and harbinger of midterm doom to his mangy, misbegotten, worm-eaten, egg-sucking party, as well as bitch-slapping the RINO establishment at the same time.

As a matter of fact, I was all set to cover last week's events in the NY-23 triple-threat match between DIABLO (Democrat In All But Label Only) Dede "The Blob" Scazzafava, Obamunist Bill Owen, and mild-mannered CPA and Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman who has redefined being in the right place at the right time.

Catching up the history of this race is beyond the scope of this post, so go here and here to get fully caught up.  In a nutshell: the eleven GOP county committee chairs interviewed candidates to hold the seat vacated by RINO John McHugh, who swooned for The One back in June and took the job of dismantling the U.S. Secretary of the Army.  Jettisoning principle for....hey, why DID they choose the Blob anyway?  Anyway, they went with Scazzafava, despite her pro-abortion, pro-sodomarriage, pro-card-check, shiftily-squishy-on-everything-else positions, over Hoffman because he was so DULL, you see, and ill-informed on local district issues.  So Hoffman, who would ordinarily have run on both the GOP and New York Conservative tickets as is SOP in the Empire State, ended up the candidate only of the latter.

Fast forward to last week and the Blob's meltdown over a Weekly Standard reporter's routine questions of her issue stances.  Jim Geraghty pretty much summed it all up in the second link above.  Suddenly the NY-23 special election was drawing national attention.  Sarah Palin endorsed Hoffman.  He raised two hundred grand in a day.  Other national GOP endorsements followed, except, curiously, for Newt Gingrich, who endorsed the Blob a few days before her candidacy disintegrated, and has stuck to that endorsement rather like the guy who accepts a blind date because of her sexy phone voice only to find that in person she looks like....well, like Scazzafava, and goes through with the date to be polite, all the while counting the picoseconds until it's over and he can forget the whole thing.  At least I hope that's Newt's true motivation.

At any rate, in the space of a week NY-23 has gone from a two-person race to a two-man race, and by a less than entirely objective poll, the mild-mannered accountant is winning:

A poll released today by the Club for Growth shows Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman surging into the lead in the special election in New York’s 23rd congressional district to replace John McHugh, the former congressman who recently became Secretary of the Army.

The poll of three hundred likely voters, conducted October 24-25, 2009, shows Conservative Doug Hoffman at 31.3%, Democrat Bill Owens at 27.0%, Republican Dede Scozzafava at 19.7%, and 22% undecided. The poll’s margin of error is +/- 5.66%. No information was provided about any of the candidates prior to the ballot question.

This is the third poll done for the Club for Growth in the NY-23 special election, and Doug Hoffman is the only candidate to show an increase in his support levels in each successive poll. The momentum in the race is clearly with Hoffman.

“Hoffman now has a wide lead among both Republicans and Independents, while Owens has a wide lead among Democrats. Dede Scozzafava’s support continues to collapse, making this essentially a two-candidate race between Hoffman and Owens in the final week,” concluded Basswood Research’s pollster Jon Lerner, who conducted the poll for the Club.

The significance of the result is not in the current spread but in the giant trend it represents.  It's the teeter-totter effect: as Scazzafava was exposed as both a disastrous candidate and a flamingly LIBERAL candidate all, um, lumped into one, the GOP grassroots around the country, led by Barracuda, stampeded to Hoffman's banner overnight.  And from this survey, it isn't just Republican likely voters who are in the thundering herd, either.

The Dems certainly realize it, if the local Pachyderm poobahs still refuse to.  Even if their choice of attack ad premise - economic hand-wringing when (1) the Dems run the entire federal government (as well as New York's), (2) Hogzilla was supposed to have fixed the economy, and (3) it makes equally as little sense to attack Hoffman as an eeeeeevil rich guy when it's the Dems that represent the richest districts in the country - is a tad....misplaced.  Why highlight attention on your own party's economic mismanagement and debt orgy when you can go after Hoffman as a carpetbagger instead?  Not that that would make much of a difference, but still.

How about a bipartisan tag-team effort?:

Two party officials tell POLITICO that the NRCC will continue to air TV ads propping up Scozzafava in the days leading up to the November 3rd contest and plans to keep
up a near relentless barrage of press releases slamming Hoffman…

The NRCC plans to spend between $200,000 and $300,000 on TV ads in the final week-and-a-half of the campaign. The ads will focus on Owens and Scozzafava and will not mention Hoffman…

[A GOP] official also noted that, as a Republican, Scozzafava would have a far larger base of support to tap into. As of April 1, voter registration in the district was 43% Republican, 31% Democrat and just 1% Conservative Party.

“I have yet to see a poll that shows a path to victory for the Conservative,” the official said. “They have no base.”

Um, have you seen the polls in your district lately, chum?  You DO know that the GOP is the party of the Right, even in NY-23, yes?  Sure, we've batted around the nickname "the Stupid Party" on and off for years, but come ON, Scooter.

Is the RNC and NRCC really that obtuse?  Or are they paranoid about getting sabotaged by a wave of base-splitting third-candidacies next year?  OR are they secretly trying to help Hoffman by splitting the Owen-Blob vote, since Scazzafava can't have any GOPers still backing her?

I'd like to think some combination of #2 and #3, plus maybe not wanting to be seen as frontrunners.  But is that worth squandering three hundred grand?  And what if they really are that perfidiously stupid?