We have reached a point in the NY-20 special election race where it seems unlikely the Republican, Jim Tedisco, will win. The math just doesn’t hold up and according to Politico there are a bevy of Repubs jumping ship. It appears Tedisco could call it quits as soon as this afternoon. So what went wrong? Is this all just yet another sign that Obama momentum is strong and dislike for anything Republican is still rampant? How do we digest a race that Michael Steele and the RNC invested so much in and received so little in return? Was Tedisco worth all the time invested by those wanting to see a win? I have some thoughts.

My opinions are simple ones. For those not watching NY-20 you may have missed two tragic errors made by both Tedisco and the RNC. First and most important was over the stimulus. Tedisco hit his opponent over the bill resulting in a a simple and obvious question being asked; Tedisco, would you have voted for the stimulus? The answer? Inconclusive. That is right on the key issue that defines the difference between someone who believes in fiscal discipline, faith in both the free market and the Constitution and a Democrat, Tedisco failed to take a stand and he kept at it for weeks. It took WEEKS for the Republican to say anything definitive. Eventually he said he wouldn’t vote for it but by then it was too late. On the most important issue of 2009 Tedisco couldn’t come up with a coherent or definitive position.

I am so sick of candidates saying, “I won’t answer hypothetical questions, I wasn’t there, etc.” If you believe in anything or have any knowledge at all you can tell me how you would vote that day. Why should you? Because it will inform me how you will vote tomorrow when you are elected. Don’t want to get trapped into saying something now and face doing something different tomorrow? Don’t run! Plain and simple, being a leader means taking a stand and working hard. It doesn’t mean answering present or “that is too hard.”

I don’t know what Tedisco’s actual position on the stimulus bill was all along but I can tell you where exactly the kind of thinking that leads a candidate to believe they can ignore a question for weeks after attacking an opponent on said issue comes from. It comes from a “political strategist” someone or a group of them who get paid big dollars to tell politicians to ignore every instinct toward decency, common sense and what is right. They get paid big bucks to ruin campaigns and assist parties in their self destruction.

The longer these people are in business the less they know. We have a lot of them in the Republican Party and there are a lot of them in the Democratic Party too. People like Bob Shrum on the Democrat side who advised every losing Presidential candidate while building himself into an “expert” with an open seat on MSNBC. They are a plague upon our country and the rare moments they win are the ones where a candidate actually stands up for what they believe in and do the exact opposite of what they are advised. That or when the opponents strategists are even worse.

Of course there is another side to the coin, useless candidates who have no internal barometer for what is right and are probably better off being advised by these useless “political strategists” because they are befuddled with incompetence. Case in point, the second bozo move by the Tedisco campaign. After the RNC spent a great deal of time and money going “negative” against Tedisco’s opponent the candidate made a very public switch to a “positive” campaign. This lead to a whole new strategy of saying “positive” and other buzzwords over and over again to try to redefine Tedisco as a post-partisan Obama-like Republican. What did not follow was an actual positive campaign, just a bunch of marketing buzzwords that filled the airwaves between news stories of Tedisco’s people launching attacks against his opponent and vice verse.

The reason the whole “hope, positive, change” nonsense worked with Obama was because the media was on his side. He could launch into Sen. Clinton like a wolf and then have media pundits spend hours and days after a debate declaring Obama was forced by Clinton herself to be negative, against his “natural political instinct.” There is no such thing as a positive campaign any more than there is a happy tragedy. Rare positive moments in campaigns, like glimmers of positives born from tragedy, occur by happenstance and not design. Any time something is contested between two opposing sides exerting force, negativity always enters the equation. Of course one side will always be seen as being “more negative” by the public and that has nothing to do with their tactics but general perception.

In New York the perception will always be overwhelming that the Democrat is “positive” and the Republican “negative” regardless of what either side does. Because of this the only thing a Republican can do is optimize the negativity. They can say, “Listen, you hate me and I hate you but we both hate my opponent & know they will do a terrible job.” Additionally you add an appeal to an actual issue or set of values, “At least with me you get lower taxes or guns or trans-fats or criminals will be brought to justice” etc. All this getting people to “like you” is a useless waste of time. Hardcore Democrats want to fall in love with candidates, the rest of us settle for the least horrible person for the job. The problem is the RNC keeps running candidates who are so useless we wouldn’t trust them to cut plywood let alone run a budget or defend a Republic.

Democrats and the media are convinced right now that they are winning the appeal to issues, they aren’t. Republicans have lost the public confidence. The same thing happened when George Bush Sr. went against his word on taxes. It is why Sarah Palin has so intrigued and why John McCain so repulsed. We know McCain is the lesser of two evils, he always is. Palin is actually the real deal, someone who actually seems to believe in something and has the guts to say it and we are all just wondering if it isn’t a mirage because in recent times the only person like her was Ronald Reagan who had the same polarizing and corrosive effect but stood so proudly for something he absolutely destroyed his opponents once he reached national prominence. This isn’t to say I believe Palin is the second coming, just that she has the right idea.

The Tedisco campaign is now heading into the great dustbin of meek Republican campaigns. Campaigns that stand for nothing other than winning a campaign and cannot even achieve that. It is sad, I had hopes that the RNC would have learned something, the state Republicans would have learned something, Tedisco would have learned something. They didn’t, they probably lost and the search for people who stand for something continues.