The Loss of the 23rd - We Made Our Point

There is a fight going on for the soul of the Republican Party, and the Tea Party protestors are its face. We are not going to be swayed by pleas not to rock tthe boat. We are not going to stop until the Republican leadership embraces candidates who will fight for smaller government, less regulation and a balanced budget. As I said in an earlier post, we may lose some battles, but we are out to win the war.

Our tent is big enough to accomodate those with different social views, but when a competent conservative is running in a primary against a RINO, the RNC better not support the RINO. I reached this level of outrage when the RNC supported a liberal, Chafee, who voted with Democrats most of the time, against a successful conservative mayor in the Rhode Island primary.

The next battleground appears to be Florida.

'Worth the Fight'

By Robert Stacy McCain on 11.4.09 American Spectator

SARANAC LAKE, N.Y. -- If a Hollywood producer were casting for the role of a revolutionary hero, no talent agent would send Doug Hoffman to the audition. Yet the Hoffman congressional campaign has ignited a revolution within the Republican Party, the results of which are already being felt.

Even while the Hoffman campaign's early-evening "cautious optimism" gave way to concern -- with staffers huddling in the "war room" here at the Hotel Saranac -- one official of New York's Conservative Party was already in a celebratory mood, laughing as he yelled into his cell phone: "Guess who will not be representing 23rd District? Dede Scozzafava!"

The liberal Republican Scozzafava suspended her campaign four days before Election Day, but still got about 7,000 votes -- a number greater than the margin of victory for the Democrat she endorsed, Bill Owens. Her defeat was victory enough for some conservatives, on a night when the GOP swept the off-off-year gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. And the candidate who drove Scozzafava out of the race struck a defiant tone in conceding his narrow loss to Owens.

"This one was worth the fight.…. And this is only one fight in the battle," said Hoffman, an accountant who began his campaign as an utter unknown but finished as the hero of what John Gizzi of Human Events called a nationwide "crusade" by conservatives.

Like Hoffman, conservatives are in a fighting mood and in the 23rd District campaign, they demonstrated a willingness to fight -- and win -- against a GOP establishment that showed its political tone-deafness by picking Scozzafava for the nomination and then spending a reported $900,000 on her doomed campaign.

"There were two fights here," Hoffman press aide Sandy Caligiore said after the candidate's wee-hours concession speech. "We won one and we lost one."

Republicans who supported Scozzafava, including Newt Gingrich, had warned that the Hoffman campaign risked electing a Democrat in a district that had sent Republicans to Congress since before the Civil War. They will likely rush to claim vindication, but the fight that conservatives waged for Hoffman has not ended with this one battle.

Erick Erickson, whose Red State blog helped lead the online brigade of Hoffman's grassroots army, declared the 23rd District result a "huge win for conservatives."

The Hoffman campaign "demonstrated to the GOP that it must not take conservatives for granted.… The GOP had better pay attention," Erickson said, indicating the next key target in the conservative fight against the Republican establishment.

"For all intents and purposes, NY-23 is a trial run for Florida.… If John Cornyn and the NRSC do not want to see Florida go the way of NY-23, they better stand down," Erickson said.

That message was aimed at the Texas senator who, as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, endorsed Florida Gov. Charlie Crist in next year's Senate race more than a year ahead of the August 2010 primary. Conservatives have rallied to the insurgent campaign of Marco Rubio, the former speaker of the state House.

Unlike the unusual New York special election -- where GOP insiders picked Scozzafava without voter input -- the Florida Senate race will give conservatives a chance to fight the establishment head-on in a Republican primary. The NRSC's premature choice of Crist is already looking like a bad bet, and the conservative defiance of GOP leadership that drove the Hoffman campaign may once more prove its potency in Florida.

In conceding defeat, Hoffman said his campaign had proved that ordinary citizens could "fight back" against the establishment. "You don't have to be polished. You don't have to be poised. You don't have to be a rock star," he said. "Stand up and fight back."

Hoffman was willing to fight, and whatever the future may hold for him, his willingness to stand up against the Republican establishment has already made him a hero.

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The Amazing Sinking Charlie

By Larry Thornberry on 11.3.09 American Spectator (Excerpt)

TAMPA -- "Florida Governor Charlie Crist didn't have as bad a week as Dede Scozzafava, the up-state New York RINO who pulled out of the congressional race there because of increasing pressure from the conservative independent candidate and his supporters. But things are steadily unraveling for Crist, the Florida RINO who wants to run for the U.S. Senate in 2010 against conservative former Florida House speaker Marco Rubio.

Crist's problems aren't confined to polls, though a new Miami Herald/St. Petersburg Times/Bay News 9 poll indicates Floridians rate Crist's performance as governor at the lowest level in the 34 months he's been in office. Just 42 percent of 600 respondents in a telephone poll conducted Oct. 25-28 rated Crist's performance as good to excellent, while 51 percent rated Crist fair to poor. Not terrible, but for much of Crist's first two years in office he enjoyed approval ratings in the sixties.

Even these mostly less-than-enthusiastic Floridians have a more charitable take on Crist than Reihan Salam, a political columnist for Forbes magazine who suggested last week that Crist may be "America's worst governor." Salam concedes that Crist is a gifted politician. But in discussing Crist's actual performance Salam's piece is full of expressions such as "opportunist," and "light-weight."

Salam gigs Crist for various forms of "free-lunchism," but especially for being so wildly enthusiastic about president Obama's stimulus slush fund. He quotes the giddy way Crist spoke to the Miami Herald about Obama's deficit-ballooning scam just a few months ago: "I think it's fantastic. Are you kidding me? We don't have to raise taxes…. We might be able to cut property taxes some more. We have more money for education, so we can increase per-student spending. We can spend more money on our roads and infrastructure. We can provide health care for our people. I mean it's remarkable.

Those comments are indeed remarkable. How many conservative Republicans are nearly so enthusiastic about the absolute healing powers of "free" money from Washington? No one but Obama fundamentalists believes the comically-specific reports, coming out of Washington and Tallahassee, on how many jobs the stimulus slush fund has supposedly created or saved.

Salam points out that Crist wanted the Florida Legislature to rely on non-recurring federal slush funds for about 12 percent of Florida's budget. When the legislature passed a budget containing some unpopular spending cuts, Crist vetoed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of them. The final result was a budget containing $2.2 billion in new state taxes and fees. After all this Crist has tried to paint himself in speeches and political ads as a fiscal conservative, a move that has gotten the horse-laugh it deserves in Florida political circles and from much of the Florida media." American Spectator

When Crist's first official acts as governor were to grant voting rights to convicted felons and to commit Florida taxpayers to combat man-made global warming, I knew I had to oppose him. He followed this up by pushing legislation penalizing insurance companies that only had the effect of driving every private windstorm insurance company to exit the state.