Upstate New York Race Shows Insanity Rising in GOP Base

UPDATED: The Washington Post is reporting that New York State Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava (R) (pictured at left), who dropped from the special election in Upstate New York yesterday, has now thrown her support to Democrat Bill Owens. Scozzafava said: "It's not in the cards for me to be your representative, but I strongly believe Bill is the only candidate who can build upon John McHugh's lasting legacy in the U.S. Congress," said Scozzafava in a statement released moments ago.

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One might wonder why I am writing about an upstate New York congressional race, but there are two reasons: first, we still have a family summer home in the district in question and second the race shows that instead of learning that far right craziness is not what attracts independents and moderates needed to win elections (other than perhaps in backward states like Virginia where far right crazies can run stealth campaigns and get away with it), the GOP base is out to impose litmus tests on who can run as a GOP candidate. As the Washington Post is reporting, Dede Scozzafava, the moderate Republican nominee for a vacant U.S. House seat in northern most New York state, unexpectedly withdrew from the race Saturday, bowing to a revolt led by conservative GOP activists who found her to be insufficiently reactionary. While the district is conservative, from my experience, the populace is not batshit crazy, so the Democrats may well win the seat. Here are some highlights:

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With campaign funds drying up and support in public polls eroding significantly, Dede Scozzafava suspended her campaign three days before Tuesday's special election in New York's 23rd Congressional District. Her move paves the way for a more conservative third-party candidate, Doug Hoffman, in his effort to deny Democrats a seat that has been in the Republican column for more than a century.

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Scozzafava's sudden departure represented a clear victory for the right flank of a fractured Republican Party that is trying to rebuild itself nationally after consecutive losses in 2006 and 2008 left the White House and both branches of Congress in Democratic hands. The sudden turn of events in this Upstate New York district sends a signal to Republican candidates across the country that the populist forces are prepared to exercise their muscle against GOP candidates they regard as insufficiently conservative.

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For weeks, conservatives had assailed Scozzafava, the handpicked candidate of local party leaders, over her relatively liberal positions on fiscal issues and her support for gay rights and abortion rights. Her withdrawal underscored the potency of the conservative populist movement that has risen up to challenge President Obama's domestic agenda and shape the future of a Republican Party lacking in strong leadership and a clear agenda.

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Frank Rich in the New York Times under the title G.O.P. Invades New York has some great commentary on the affair and what it means for the GOP which in most areas needs moderate candidates to have a chance of winning:

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BARACK OBAMA’S most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.

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New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.

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The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.
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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.

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The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure.

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The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes.

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The right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the campaign, that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a “microcosm of America.” (New York’s 23rd also has few blacks or Hispanics.) But most Americans like their country’s 21st-century profile. That changing complexion is part of why the McCain-Palin ticket lost every demographic group by large margins in 2008 except white senior citizens and the dwindling fifth of America that’s still rural. It’s also why the G.O.P. has been in a nosedive since the inauguration, whatever Obama’s ups and downs.

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No wonder even the very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues. . . . Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white hope.