How Is The Republican Party Trying To Spin Tedisco's Disastrous Defeat In NY-20?

Still the defining figure of the Republican Party

Reid Wilson, at yesterday's Hill, put forth the proposition that the GOP has learned a lesson and sees a silver lining in their latest electoral catastrophe (NY-20). No doubt everyone Inside-the-Beltway who saw the headline must have thought it was an announcement of Michael Steele's impending resignation as chair of the RNC. But, instead, Republican sources tried feeding Wilson a hilarious dose of Republican Party spin: "This race tended to be more of businessman versus politician," said one GOP strategist close to Tedisco's campaign when asked to offer a postmortem. "Fresh face [versus] guy who's been around for a while." Yes, they think it was that voters want more inexperienced businessmen instead of well-known and experienced politicians-- that and the fact that they forgot to put together an effective absentee voting outreach strategy.

Isn't that a convenient way of looking at the fact that voters hate obstructionists and hate Republicans? Do you think it ever crossed their minds mind that voters are concerned about the nature of the political experience, not just if someone has been in politics forever or not? Wilson didn't let that go by without a response.

Though Tedisco led by more than 20 points in an initial survey and was running in a district with a 70,000-person Republican registration advantage, Murphy strategists were able to label Tedisco as a career politician. Meanwhile, Tedisco's chosen line of attack -- that Murphy supported the economic stimulus package along with a provision that allowed executives at AIG to receive millions of dollars in bonuses-- fell flat.

The Repugs also claim that to even come close to a tie outside the old slave-holding states that seceded from the Union is a mindboggling accomplishment considering what they're offering voters. Right-wing activists in the district claim Tedisco wasn't extremist enough and should have tried to capitalize on the teabagger mentality; that would have probably have resulted in a 60% win for Murphy instead of the 50/50 split. Steele and the equally clueless head of the NRCC, Pete Sessions, claim they see this defeat as "real progress" (for Republicans). "The Republican Party must be competitive in districts like NY-20 if we are going to regain our Congressional majorities," Steele said in a statement released Friday. "While we were unsuccessful in this race, the combined efforts of our candidate, the national and state parties and NRCC show that the GOP is going to invest the resources necessary to regain our majority in the U.S. House of Representatives."

Carl Hulse in yesterday's NY Times looked at the Republicans' dilemma from another perspective, the problem they've begun encountering as the public comes to see them as the Party of No. They have no effective strategy, no message, no messenger (unless you want to count messengers that normal Americans say they absolutely hate, like Limbaugh, Coulter, Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Palin.) They're actually driven towards trying to figure out how to incorporate a ditzy and appropriately ignorant Miss California into their messaging initiative! And what do they brag about? Unifying to stop change and holding onto the Bush policies that the country overwhelmingly rejects:

Republicans point proudly to their ability to close ranks, noting that only three Senate Republicans backed the $787 billion economic stimulus measure (though they provided the crucial margin of victory) while not a single Republican voted for budgets approved by the House and Senate. They rightfully note that they have so far held the line against a measure that would ease union organizing in the workplace.

They say they are reconnecting with their core voters by emphasizing what they see as profligate Democratic spending. And they say they are laying the groundwork for a comeback by putting themselves solidly on the right side of multiple issues in preparation for the public souring on the Democratic agenda on spending, health care, energy, etc.

But not everyone in the country-- in fact, outside of Congress, almost no one in the country-- gets a piece of the $312,657,650 in bribes insurance companies have doled out since 1990 (63% to Republicans) and the $823,948,241 in bribes from the so-called "health" industry (57% for Republicans since 1990). Yes, something tells me that a revolt against universal health care, similar to what corrupt and hypocritical members of Congress get, is probably not something the GOP should be counting on to sweep them back into power. Some observers claim that the reason the Republicans are so frantic to stop the passage of effective universal health care-- and the reason they will stop at nothing to sabotage it-- is because if Obama succeeds in implementing it, it will relegate the Republican Party to the peanut gallery, at least nationally, for at least three decades.

Hulse points out that "while Republicans were effective in banding together against the stimulus and the budget, they have splintered elsewhere, most embarrassingly on a now-defunct Democratic House plan to levy a huge tax on executive bonuses. After Mr. Boehner, the Ohio Republican and House leader, heaped scorn on the plan, Republicans still split down the middle as dozens backed it out of fear of the political consequences of opposing a tax on executives cashing in on an economic crisis that they caused." He adds that the GOP defeat in NY-20 was "the ultimate reality check" and that "Republicans had the more experienced candidate and went at the contest hard, only to come up short. It is likely to haunt the party and potentially depress candidate recruitment and fundraising."