Re-canvassed votes in upstate New York’s 23rd Congressional District foreshadow the second coming of third-party candidate Doug Hoffman. As Mark Weiner of the Syracuse Post-Standard reported Thursday morning, Conservative nominee Hoffman’s 5,335-vote deficit behind Democrat Bill Owens has shrunk to just 3,026 after Election Night tabulation errors were corrected. Some 10,200 absentee ballots remain uncounted. State Board of Elections spokesman John Conklin told Weiner, “All ballots will be counted, and if the result changes, Owens will have to be removed.”
However this develops, before Election Day 2009 vanishes into the rear-view mirror, one big myth demands correction, lest it harden into “fact.” Dede Scozzafava is no moderate Republican. The GOP state assemblywoman who abandoned this special election boasts a solid liberal record of votes and activism far left of the GOP’s center, or even its wobbly port flank — home of Maine senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe.
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Nonetheless, the GOP’s detractors are showcasing Scozzafava as “proof” that reasonable centrists are unwelcome in today’s intolerant, extreme, far-right Republican party.
The Washington Post’s Jason Horowitz called the six-term legislator “a little-known state assemblywoman with moderate Republican views and a mouthful of a surname.” Horowitz’s November 10 piece was sub-headlined: “It’s a Grand Old Purging as moderate’s ouster spotlight’s Republican dysfunction.”
As CBS News’s Steve Chaggaris remarked: “Conservative Republicans will undoubtedly claim victory in sidelining the moderate GOPer, Scozzafava.”
UrbanDictionary.com now defines “Scozzafaved” as being “Purged of moderation, e.g., within a Congressional district.”
Scozzafava is no upstate version of Long Island’s Peter King (2008 American Conservative Union rating: 50) nor Florida’s Lincoln Diaz-Balart (52), truly centrist congressional Republicans who somehow go astray without offending the party’s beliefs or enflaming its base. Conversely, Scozzafava is a donkey in an elephant costume. Consider just a few lowlights from her previous record and recent campaign:
Scozzafava earned a feeble 15 out of 100 on the New York Conservative party’s latest legislative report card. Sheldon Silver, an ultraliberal Manhattan trial lawyer and State Assembly Democratic leader, earned a 10. Conservative party chairman Mike Long observed that in the state house, “46 Democrats have voting records more conservative than the Republican pick for Congress!”
Scozzafava voted not once, not twice, but 190 times to raise or extend taxes. Few issues are more sacred to the GOP faithful than tax limitation. There is nothing moderate about violating this core party tenet — not rarely, but nearly 200 times.
Indeed, Scozzafava’s tax votes are so bad that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee attacked her on them.
“Albany politician Dede Scozzafava voted to raise or extend taxes on New Yorkers over 190 times,” declared a September 22 DCCC press release, denouncing “increases on sales taxes to wireless surcharges.”
