Bad News For The GOP

An unknown Democrat, campaigning on his support for Obama's stimulus plan, is leading a Republican with 26 years in politics for a U.S. House seat in a heavily Republican district.

Scott Murphy has a 65-vote lead of state Assemblyman Jim Tedisco, and there are 10,000 absentee ballots yet to count. Murphy may yet lose, but it doesn't matter anymore. If what you hear on Fox "News" and all the radio talkers, not to mention what comes out of the mouths of the GOP senators and representatives, was true, Tedisco shoulda claimed victory seconds after the polls closed.

But instead, the race is too close to call. And Tedisco is preparing the Norm Coleman defense in case he does end up losing -- stall the thing in court until everybody is sick to death of it -- but that doesn't matter either.

What matters is that a well-respected Republican who has represented the area for years in the state assembly -- and is, in fact, the minority leader in the assembly -- couldn't claim a quick and easy victory over a venture capitalist from Missouri who had never run for political office before. Oh, and that Democrat is a strong supporter of Barack Obama, who, according to the conservatives, is dropping in the polls because no one likes his policies.

Registered Republicans outweigh registered Democrats by 70,000 voters in New York's 20th Congressional District. And yet, Tuesday night, with everything counted but those absentee ballots, Murphy was leading 77,344 to 77,279.

Tuesday's vote was a special election to fill the empty seat of Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat who was tapped by Gov. David Paterson to fill Hillary Clinton's Senate seat when she became secretary of state. Gillibrand first won election to the House in 2006 and easily won re-election last year, writing the district's dissatisfaction with the Republican brand in large block print.

Oh, by the way, did you know that polls are showing Secretary Clinton is even more popular than the president right now? Interesting.

But still, given how loudly and how often the Republicans tell us that the American people aren't happy with Obama and the Democrats, you'd a thunk that Tedisco woulda won hands down. That he hasn't -- and may actually lose -- tells us all we need to know about how popular the GOP is right now.

In fact, Tedisco would have been on the receiving end of a rout had it not been for the AIG bonus brouhaha. But he took advantage of my colleagues' refusal to tell us that it was the Bush administration that failed to do anything about executive bonuses back in September when they negotiated the original bailout package.

Tedisco capitalized on the "populist" anger that my colleagues' stirred up by pointing out that Chris Dodd's amendment that would have banned such bonuses was watered down by the administration -- and without pointing out that there had been no check on bonuses whatsoever before then.

But Tedisco had hemmed and hawed about whether he would have voted for the stimulus bill until that moment, when he emphatically declared that he wouldn't.

Oh, and by the way, Tedisco doesn't live in New York's 20th Congressional district. And, he had to kiss Ayatollah Limbaugh's ass just like Michael Steele, Mark Sanford and Phil Gingrey. Tedisco said that Limbaugh was "meaningless to me," and within hours his spokesman and issued an incomprehensible statement about how the candidate was talking about the issues and any attempt to characterize it as anything else "is a distortion of facts."

So y'see, no matter how this vote finally ends up -- and officials say counting of the absentee ballots may not begin until early next week -- the Republicans have lost. Oh, they'll spin and spin and spin and tell you that, should Tedisco win, it's a loss for the president. But that's a lie.

And don't believe 'em when they tell you that a Tedisco win, should he win, spells danger for the Democrats in 2010 and for Obama in 2012. Don't believe it when my colleagues spend hours pontificating about that either.

Something far worse than a Republican winning in a district that a Republican should win in -- and by a handful of votes -- will have to happen before you should believe any of that bullshit.

And if Murphy should pull it out -- well, there won't even be anything to spin, now, will there?


News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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