Last night, the upstate wind was cool, with just a hint of the winter chill to come — the season when thoughts turn toward hockey. Doug Hoffman, the Conservative party candidate in New York’s 23rd congressional district, agreed. As the hour grew late and he made his final rounds of handshakes and hugs, something about the moment, and the cold air, stirred a memory.
“I think back to early 1980,” said Hoffman, as supporters buzzed around him. “That was around the time I first got involved with the Lake Placid Olympics.” As those games opened, Pres. Jimmy Carter was beginning his final, gloomy year in the White House. Ronald Reagan had just lost the Iowa caucus to George H. W. Bush and was jockeying for a good showing in the upcoming New Hampshire primary. And Hoffman, then a 27-year-old accountant, was working as a controller for the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee, helping to supervise a $150-million budget. Hoffman, supporting a young family, had landed the job after a few years in the Army reserves and grad school.
It was a memorable experience, Hoffman said — and not just for him. Hoffman is by nature a low-key fellow; but he recalled those frigid days in February 1980 with a fire in his eye. Hockey, not politics, was on his mind.
“The American hockey team was the underdog then,” said Hoffman. Coach Herb Brooks’s motley crew of tough amateurs wasn’t expected to do much of anything against the Soviet Union squad, then considered the best hockey team on the planet. Indeed, the world was thinking the U.S. was lucky to be down only 3–2 at the start of the third period. “Then, the American team came back,” said Hoffman, recalling the Americans’ 4–3 defeat of the Soviets in a medal-round game, in what was soon called “the miracle on ice.”
Maybe Lake Placid has one more miracle left.
Nearly 30 years later, Hoffman finds himself a long-established accountant in the region, just as America once again turns its eyes to New York’s North Country. But this time it’s Hoffman, not hockey, that everyone is watching. Since deciding in July to run for the House as a Conservative against liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava and Democrat Bill Owens, Hoffman’s campaign in NY-23 has become a national phenomenon. It, alongside today’s gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, is one of the most-watched races of 2009.
Hoffman decided to run because he was unhappy with Scozzafava, who was handpicked by local Republican leaders to run for the seat left vacant by GOP congressman John McHugh when he resigned to join the Obama administration. Hoffman approached Mike Long — the chairman of the Conservative party in New York — about mounting a serious campaign against the pro-choice, pro–gay marriage, stimulus-loving, and card-check-supporting Scozzafava. Long signed on. “Mike gave me a soapbox,” recalled Hoffman last night. “I wouldn’t be here, standing on this platform, without him.”
CONTINUED 1 2 Next > 
