Boston Herald November 3, 2009 Michael Graham
Sunday I spoke to a room full of potential Republican candidates at a training session in Foxboro, MA. And while I don’t like to brag, I must report that, every time a certain name was mentioned, the crowd let out a cheer. And that name was . . . Doug Hoffman. If you’re like 70 percent of America - 99 percent one month ago - you probably don’t recognize the name. He’s the obscure, underfunded, third-party candidate for an Upstate New York congressional seat. And, just maybe, the future of American politics. When [Alleged] President Barack Obama picked Rep. John McHugh to be secretary of the Army, the White House thinking was that this usually GOP district could go blue on Obama’s coattails. But after 10 months of “hope and change,” Obama’s been cut back to a dinner jacket. However, when the GOP leadership in the 23rd Congressional District came out of the back room, the candidate who emerged from the smoke was ultra-liberal Dede Scozzafava. So a traditional conservative and Tea Party activist Doug Hoffman said “enough is enough.” He got on the ballot on the Conservative Party line and started running against the political establishment. It worked. His coalition of talk listeners, town hallers and the generally annoyed put him in second place in recent polls. Acknowledging the inevitable, Scozzafava dropped out on Saturday. On Sunday she endorsed the Democrat. It was the perfect move for the handpicked candidate of the National Clueless Party. The NCP, by the way, is completely bipartisan. When you’re at a GOP event and the attendees are cheering the candidate who drove the Republican out of the race, it’s not politics as usual. If Hoffman wins today, I predict those potential candidates I met last weekend will be joined by even more regular citizens lining up to challenge local pols. And if both Obama-backed gubernatorial candidates lose - R. Creigh Deeds in Virginia and Jon Corzine in New Jersey - it won’t be the challengers who are running. It will be the incumbents - for cover. The liberal media lapdogs like the Boston Globe-Democrat, can keep trying to feed us the line that all is well. They can present Obama’s laughable “created or saved” jobs numbers as if they were real. They can assure us that the Massachusetts ObamaCare plan just has a few kinks in it ($350 million kinks here, and counting). They can ignore the Tea Party movement in their own backyard, or arrogantly dismiss the millions of marchers as kooks. It won’t work this time. In the past, the knee-jerk party loyalty of Massachusetts Democrats usually kept incumbents in office. But now the cost of that loyalty is more evident than ever: A demonstrably inept governor, and a president who is adding more debt in two years than every previous president combined. The walls of party loyalty are beginning to crack, because voters are beginning to see that there’s really only one party - The Incumbents Spend Your Money To Keep Their Jobs Party. Six months ago I predicted that unthinking party loyalty would get Gov. Deval Patrick re-elected no matter what. If Hoffman beats both parties today, all bets are off. The same is true on Beacon Hill, where legislators thrive on voter apathy and hopelessness. That apathy has been swamped by voter anger. If a Tea Party outsider like Hoffman can beat the entire establishment - including the Obama administration - he will keep hope alive. Michael Graham hosts a talk show on 96.9 WTKK. Read more at bostonherald.com ... | 