Election Day: A brief consideration of a before and after

Frank Rich, "The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York" (Oct. 31, 2009)

The New York fracas was ignited by the routine decision of 11 local Republican county chairmen to anoint an assemblywoman, Dede Scozzafava, as their party's nominee for the vacant seat. The 23rd is in safe Republican territory that hasn't sent a Democrat to Congress in decades. And Scozzafava is a mainstream conservative by New York standards; one statistical measure found her voting record slightly to the right of her fellow Republicans in the Assembly. But she has occasionally strayed from orthodoxy on social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage) and endorsed the Obama stimulus package. To the right's Jacobins, that's cause to send her to the guillotine.

Sure enough, bloggers trashed her as a radical leftist and ditched her for a third-party candidate they deem a "true" conservative, an accountant and businessman named Doug Hoffman. When Gingrich dared endorse Scozzafava anyway — as did other party potentates like John Boehner and Michael Steele — he too was slimed. Mocking Newt's presumed 2012 presidential ambitions, Michelle Malkin imagined him appointing Al Sharpton as secretary of education and Al Gore as "global warming czar." She's quite the wit.

The wrecking crew of Kristol, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Michele Bachmann, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the government-bashing Club for Growth all joined the Hoffman putsch. Then came the big enchilada: a Hoffman endorsement from Palin on her Facebook page. Such is Palin's clout that Steve Forbes, Rick Santorum and Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor (and presidential aspirant), promptly fell over one another in their Pavlovian rush to second her motion. They were joined by far-flung Republican congressmen from Kansas, Georgia, Oklahoma and California, not to mention a gaggle of state legislators from Colorado. On Fox News, Beck took up the charge, insinuating that Hoffman's Republican opponent might be a fan of Karl Marx. Some $3 million has now been dumped into this race by outside groups.

Who exactly is the third-party maverick arousing such ardor? Hoffman doesn't even live in the district. When he appeared before the editorial board of The Watertown Daily Times 10 days ago, he "showed no grasp" of local issues, as the subsequent editorial put it. Hoffman complained that he should have received the questions in advance — blissfully unaware that they had been asked by the paper in an editorial on the morning of his visit.

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Eugene Robinson, "Attack of the Palinites" (Nov. 6, 2009)

The "tea party" conservatives -- led by Palin, Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Armey and others fed up with the GOP "establishment" -- managed to get Democrat Bill Owens elected in a solidly Republican Upstate New York congressional district. They accomplished this feat by driving the Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, from the race because of her apostasy on abortion and gay rights.

The Palinites -- because of her star power, she's the de facto leader of the movement at this point, so it's fair to name it after her -- backed a third-party conservative named Doug Hoffman. Scozzafava pulled out and threw what support she had to Owens, who won by four points.

The net result is minus-one for the Republicans and plus-one for the Democrats in the House. That arithmetic seems to have escaped Erick Erickson, editor in chief of the Web site RedState.com, which is almost as influential in the tea party world as Palin's Facebook page. He wrote: "This is a huge win for conservatives. . . . We did exactly what we set out to do -- crush the establishment-backed GOP candidate."

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele crowed about winning the two governorships. "Assume the Heisman position. Yeah, baby. That's my moment," he said Wednesday on MSNBC. But even Steele couldn't find joy in the New York debacle. "I don't see a victory in losing seats," he said, quite logically.

The tea party people have made clear, however, that logic doesn't count -- and that this is just the beginning. The next target, now that they've made the world safe from Scozzafava, seems to be Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who is running for the Senate. Crist committed the unforgivable sin of supporting Obama's stimulus bill and must face a conservative former state legislator, Marco Rubio, in the primary.

Erickson wrote that "if Crist wants to own the mantle of 'GOP Establishment Candidate,' let's tie it around his waist and throw him in one of Florida's many lagoons."

I guess Florida lagoons are a substitute for Siberian tundra.

Pudding and Pie

David Horsey, "Bush lays down for Big Oil"

Sometimes political cartoons just fall from the sky. Someone in the world of government will do something so absurdly self-destructive or propose an idea that is so transparently a pander to a powerful entity that all the cartoonist need do is transcribe reality.

A timeless example comes from Gary Hart's aborted run for the presidency in 1988. Who would have thought one of the smartest guys in politics would have been dumb enough to take a mid-campaign break with a pretty, young blonde babe who was not his wife... and go cruising with her on a boat named Monkey Business... and have his picture taken with the woman on his lap... and then challenge the press to follow him around? No cartoon could top that kind of looniness.

While the unruly sexual proclivities of politicians often provide easy target practice for cartoonists (see Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer), often it's just the jaw-dropping, blatant prostitution to special interests that turns cartoonists into mere illustrators of the news. The latest case in point is President Bush's plan to give the oil companies a huge tax cut at a time when they are raking in the biggest profits in history. Can he possibly believe that the oil industry is so strapped for cash that a deficit-building tax break is required? Does he expect us to believe it?

The McCain Story Is, Thankfully, Not So Sexy

Michael D. Shear and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, "The Anti-Lobbyist, Advised by Lobbyists"

For years, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has railed against lobbyists and the influence of "special interests" in Washington, touting on his campaign Web site his fight against "the 'revolving door' by which lawmakers and other influential officials leave their posts and become lobbyists for the special interests they have aided."


But when McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington's lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways.

Senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon work for firms that have lobbied for Land O' Lakes, UST Public Affairs, Dell and Fannie Mae.

McCain's relationship with lobbyists became an issue this week after it was reported that his aides asked Vicki Iseman, a telecom lobbyist, to distance herself from his 2000 presidential campaign because it would threaten McCain's reputation for independence. An angry and defiant McCain denounced the stories yesterday, declaring: "At no time have I ever done anything that would betray the public trust."