Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Aren’t Civil Wars Fun?   [Rich Lowry]

There’s been a lot of focus on NY-23, for understandable reasons—it’s a great fight in a year with only a few races to pay attention to. But there’s a lot of wild over-interpretation going on. Among more excitable folks on both the left and the right, there’s a tendency to think this heralds some broader GOP civil war. Not likely. The circumstances of the race are entirely unique. In most districts of the country, the Republican nominee is going to be acceptable to conservatives (most Republican primary voters are conservative, after all), and certainly almost never as noxious as Dede Scozzafava. What is happening in NY-23 is a product of how bad Scozzafava is coupled with the fact that New York has a long-standing conservative third party. I think Newt has made the wrong call in this race—Hoffman is not only much better on the issues, he can win—but his broader point shouldn’t be lost in the uproar over his misbegotten Scozzafava endorsement: Congressional candidates have to be tailored to their districts, and conservatives have to reconcile themselves to 75 percent candidates in some of them. So, let’s hope that Hoffman pulls it out, which looks increasingly plausible, but no one should make apocalyptic extrapolations based on this one race.

Meanwhile, the campaign that potentially has the most applicability nationally for Republicans is Virginia’s gubernatorial race. There, you have a candidate who has united and energized his base and his party, is winning on just about every issue, and may well lead a stinging defeat of Democrats up and down the ballot in a purplish state that is increasingly suburban and diverse. It’s Bob McDonnell that Republicans around the country will look to for lessons on how to make their comeback happen when the electoral rubber hits the road.

10/28 05:18 PMShare