THE hard-fought battle be tween the left, the near-left and the right being waged in New York’s 23rd Congressional District has attracted national attention because of its serious implications for scores of congressional races across the country next year.
The stakes for national Democrats and Republicans are enormous. The three-way North Country contest is a referendum on President Obama’s policies and on the GOP’s willingness to back RINO (Republican In Name Only) candidates in traditionally moderate-to-conservative districts.
The stakes for New York’s own hapless GOP — moribund, disillusioned and virtually leaderless as it is — mirror those for national Republicans, but the effect will be more immediate.
Nothing short of the survival of the state GOP is at stake — because the party here, unlike its national counterpart, isn’t benefiting from the president’s dramatic plunge in the polls.
With every statewide office and 212 state legislative seats on the line at this time next year, the New York GOP must either get its act together quickly or (after a Democratic-controlled Legislature, aided by a Democratic governor, gets done drawing new district lines) resign itself to permanent minority status.
But it’s shooting itself in the foot.
The Republican candidate, Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, is a past ally of the radical Working Families Party who’s to the left of Obama on gay marriage and abortion and who has agreed with him on “card check” legislation and the “stimulus” package. She is in keeping with a string of losing RINO candidacies New Yorkers have seen during the last decade, compliments of former US Sen. Alfonse D’Amato and former Gov. George Pataki.
Their claim was that only a Republican-light contender, not a Republican-“right” candidate, could win in heavily blue-state New York. But such losing candidates as D’Amato, Dennis Vacco, Rick Lazio, Howard Mills, Dora Irizarry have made it clear that the theory is false. (Even D’Amato now recognizes this: Last night he was considering endorsing the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, and not Scozzafava.)
Republicans saw the devastating end result of that approach in 2006, when Democrats won every statewide office for the first time in modern times.
The aftershock of that devastation came last year, when the Senate GOP, which had signed a Faustian pact with the state’s leading leftist labor unions, lost control of the Legislature’s upper house for the first time since 1964.
Making matters worse for Republicans in 2009 is that Scozzafava has a bright scarlet letter “A” — for “Albany” — figuratively tattooed on her forehead, as both the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, a businessman and retired military officer, and Hoffman have made clear.
How the New York GOP could have picked an incumbent insider from the most dysfunctional Legislature in the nation to run in a heavily overtaxed and economically distressed district is hard to fathom.
What was the GOP thinking?
Just seven months ago, after all, the GOP did almost the very same thing when it picked Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco to run against Democratic businessman Scott Murphy for the congressional seat vacated after US Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand was named to Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat.
Tedisco, who had his own scarlet letter “A” emblazoned on his forehead by Murphy’s highly effective TV advertising, went down to a stunning defeat in another heavily Republican district.
“Being an ‘Albany politician’ was seen as a positive in past elections because an elected official could claim the ‘experience’ factor,” said Brendan Quinn, a Republican consultant and former state GOP executive director. “Today being an Albany insider is a big negative because Albany represents everything seen as failing in state government.”
Albert Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
By that standard, the New York Republican Party has surely lost its mind.
Fredric U. Dicker is The Post’s state editor.