How Not to Win Election 101

This week has been a real bad day for Dede Scozzafava.

It started a couple nights ago, when police were called to, of all places, the annual Lewis County Republican Dinner, a spot not necessarily on a par with, say, moe.down for suspicious activity. They were called by candidate Scozzafava’s husband, who wanted police to remove an obnoxious reporter from the vicinity of his wife. (No, it wasn’t Steve Virkler.)

Then on Wednesday, candidate Scozzafava marched down to the Doug Hoffman headquarters to give a sort of Twitterized press conference, and when the film hit the nightly news, there was Dede in a tasteful, muted salmon suit absolutely surrounded by a sea of bright red Hoffman for Congress posters. I don’t know what she was saying; all I could do was stare, mouth open in amazement, at this visual. I’m certain that about half the people who saw it thought she was quitting the campaign and throwing her support to the Conservative Party candidate, because that was certainly the image that lingers.

Any moderately competent political campaign manager will agree that on the campaign, you have to control your environment. It just doesn’t appear that the folks in charge of Dede’s run for John McHugh’s 23rd district congressional seat have constructively learned this. At the dinner, they obviously took the concept of control to its most absurd level. Even if a reporter is a complete dirtbag, it is seriously bad form for a candidate’s spouse to try to have him arrested. If Dede had taken this ambush journalist head on and answered his questions or demurred, it would have been an inside-politics blog post the next day. Calling the cops let the entire cadre of right wingnuts and all the Democrats start chattering about Dede’s disassociation from the First Amendment.

On Wednesday, geez, what was anyone thinking? The huge potentials for disaster with a photo op at the opponent’s headquarters had to be obvious to SOMEONE in the Scozzafava camp, didn’t it? No? Are you kidding me?

It appears that, as a congressional candidate, Dede is a fine assemblywoman. There is a very good possibility that her popularity will fade from first, when the first poll came out, to third on Nov. 3. She could be beaten by both Hoffman and Bill Owens, the Democrat. Owens may win simply because he has been astute enough to keep the campaign blood spatters off him.

Dede is a legitimate candidate. She is smart, she has heretofore always shown principle, she has shown she can be electable. But the difference between being a qualified candidate, and an effective campaigner, is as big as the drive between the two furthest removed points in the 23rd district. No part of her campaign has satisfied her supporters or frustrated her opponents. She is quietly sinking like an autumn leaf in a quiet pond, and she has precious little time to invigorate her campaign and turn this all around.