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wrote:

It is inconceivable that a person with this record is a Republican. Why?

I’m not sure.

She has been asked if she would switch parties when she gets to DC, after being elected as a Republican. She hasn’t answered that question, and some people think that she might jump ship once she gets there.

Apparently, she used to be more conservative than her voting record in the past few years. Before 2004, she often ran on the Conservative line in New York, in addition to the Republican line. More recently, she has run on the Working Families Party line in addition to the Republican line.

She was selected by the county party leaders from the counties in the district. I think they didn’t fully analyze their previous congressman and his positions and compare this to the available candidates. Instead, they looked at the Obama 52 point victory and thought the district was leaning more liberal. That could have been a rejection of a RINO (McCain) rather than an agreement with Obama policies. With McHugh, their conservative Republican congressman getting 65% of the vote in that election, that seems more likely.

I also read somewhere (sorry, I didn’t keep a link) that Scozzafava was expected to finance her own campaign. So there might have been a financial component to the decision at the local level.

Locals can make mistakes. That is understandable.

But then, Pete Sessions and the RCCC agreed to support this candidate. They should have vetted her a little more thoroughly. If they had said no, perhaps the locals would have had time to select a more acceptable candidate. Maybe the RCCC could have pointed out that McHugh got 65% of the vote last year, and they should select someone more like McHugh than Obama, who only got 52% of the vote in the district.

The real breakdown in all this is at the RCCC. Sessions has to go. He said that his staffers messed up with this, but if he delegated this decision to the staffers, that is not acceptable. He should be out for that dereliction of duty. If he made the bad decision, then blamed it on his staffers, that is bad too. No matter how you slice it, he needs to go.

And any Republican in the House now who supports Scozzafava should be targeted in the 2010 Primaries. At this point, I think there are 17 “party over principle” Republicans in this situation. They include Boehner and Cantor, as well as Sessions and some others. Hensarling and Kevin McCarthy are on the list. We need to look at the FEC reports on donations after the election to figure out all of the people involved.

From the desk of
cc2k:

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