NY23: What It Meant And What It Didn't Mean
By John Ellis
November 6, 2009

When dismal polls forced Dede Scozzafava out of the NY23 congressional race, the mainstream media were quick to interpret what had happened in a way that was unflattering to the GOP, and they have continued in the same vein after the election. In the New York Times, Adam Nagourney and Jeremy Peters wrote that Scozzafava's views "might not be in keeping with much of the national party, but are more reflective of the district." The Washington Post agreed that she "seemed a good fit for a moderate district but was out of step with national Republicans." And Thomas Fitzgerald in the Philadelphia Inquirer said that the race "had become a knife fight between conservative Republican purists and pragmatists over the future of the party." The thrust was clear: a moderate district wanted a Republican moderate, but the intolerant conservative orthodoxy intervened to enforce ideological purity.

But none of this was true. Scozzafava was not what the district wanted, as soon became obvious when polls showed local Republicans abandoning Scozzafava in droves once they had a chance to vote for Hoffman. The revolt against her candidacy began locally as soon as she was nominated, and it had been well known that the local Conservative party would run a candidate against her (but against none of her local competitors for the nomination) if the GOP ran Scozzafava. Nor was it true that she was a Republican moderate. How many GOP moderates do you know who are for card check, were endorsed by Acorn, the AUW, and the Daily Kos, were offered the Democratic nomination for the race, have been attacked by a Democrat opponent as too liberal, and have a voting record to the left of many Democrats? Scozzafava gave the answer to this question herself when she endorsed Democrat Owens rather than the now GOP approved Hoffman. And this was no Blue Dog: Owens was Pelosi's pick and he supports the Pelosi health care bill, unlike many in the caucus he has now joined. Nor was it true that her candidacy opened a split in the GOP; to the contrary, once the details of Scozzafava's leftist record became known the party united with remarkable speed, and the avalanche of high profile endorsements for Hoffman included both conservatives and moderates across the nation.

Where does the damaging and completely counterfactual mainstream press narrative come from? Sadly, it was given currency by a leading Republican: Newt Gingrich, who solemnly assured the nation on Fox News that Scozzafava was the top choice in every one of no less than four separate meetings in the district; that the eleven Republican county chairs had chosen her unanimously; and that her record was "adequately conservative in an upstate New York district." (He carefully avoided mentioning card check, Acorn, the Democrat nomination, etc., since those would have made his characterization of her as conservative look rather foolish.) He concluded: aren't the people of upstate New York allowed to pick their candidate? Stopping them from doing so, he suggested, was a "purge" of Republicans we disagree with.

But this was all complete nonsense. The true facts were documented in careful research done locally by Michael Patrick Leahy. In three of the four meetings the top candidates were Paul Maroun or Matt Doheny, local conservatives, with Scozzafava the choice of only one. And it soon became clear during the course of these meetings that only one candidate aroused widespread negative feelings: Scozzafava. Nor were the county chairs unanimous in their choice of Scozzafava, as Gingrich claimed. Most were for other candidates. One even warned the assembled county chairs vehemently (and correctly) of the damage that Scozzafava's nomination would do. Another was so despondent after the nomination that he thought the election was now a lost cause for the GOP. On the first ballot seven out of the eleven had voted against Scozzafava, and the only way that she got past 50% was a combination of a weighting system for larger counties, and a vote for her by a close personal friend in total disregard for the wishes of the county she chaired: its committee members had voted strongly against Scozzafava.

The account that Gingrich had given Fox viewers was simply a pack of lies. Did he know they were lies? If he did not, he certainly should have done. The facts had been posted on the internet almost a week before his disastrous Fox interview with Greta van Susteren. But in any case, after he had misinformed Fox viewers the true facts were brought to his attention. What Gingrich then did was not admirable. The honorable course was to go post-haste to the forum in which he had disseminated the false account that was so damaging to his party, apologize, and set the record straight. But what actually Newt did was rather different: he only changed the text of a statement on his web-site so that the claim about the win for Scozzofava in all four meetings became simply "There were four meetings." Then he added a footnote: "A previous version of this statement contained a description of the nomination process that was incorrect. We regret the error."

Gingrich had seriously misled millions of Fox viewers about what had happened in the nominating process, but limited his correction to a vague footnote hidden at the bottom of a web page that few will ever see, and it still conceals the truth. The false claim that Scozzafava won in all four districts is gone, to be sure. But what Gingrich avoids saying, and thus artfully hides from his readers, is that she lost in three out of four districts--a fact that would make nonsense of his whole argument for local choice. On the same page he continues to claim that the eleven chairs were unanimous, concealing the fact that there was spirited opposition to her from some of them, and that they split seven to four against her on the first ballot. And whether or not he at first knew that his version of the local process was untrue, there can be no doubt that he knew it when he made the minimal and misleading correction.

When after the election Gingrich finally appeared on Fox to discuss his embarrassing mistake in endorsing Scozzafava, he still shrank from doing his plain duty: he did not explain to the viewers how he had misled them about the result of the four local meetings that had not gone four to nothing for her, as he had said, but three to one against her. Nor did he explain that he had misinformed them when he said that the eleven county chairs were unanimous--in fact he continued to say that she was chosen by the eleven chairs. He even continued to use that ugly word "purge." No apology for serious misinformation on his part, and no attempt to correct it: it was a disgraceful performance, one completely lacking in integrity.

Contrary to the mainstream media's narrative, this race never raised any issues of a local district being dictated to by outsiders, nor was it about the national party's intolerance of Republican moderates, nor was it about a split in the Republican party. Instead, it turned on blind cronyism in the local party machinery that resulted in the district's preference being thwarted by a nomination so ridiculous as to create a unanimity in the GOP that was certainly absent from the meeting of the NY23 county chairs. The mainstream media's narrative, based on Gingrich's, is false from top to bottom. That narrative is still harming the GOP. Gingrich could have repaired some of the damage to his party by setting the record straight on Fox. Instead, he chose to protect himself by attempting to cover up his mistake, only making things even worse for himself as he did so.

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John Ellis is President of the California Association of Scholars, and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz

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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.