Wingnut Wendy Long, the likely challenger to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, has been getting some free media this week.
Not all of it good.
Though some of it may help her win the GOP primary three weeks from Tuesday.
For example, Long won the endorsement of career neocon John Bolton, a hero to GOP war hawks, but a fringe foreign-policy wingnut to everyone else who knows anything about him.
Long, a Catholic ultra-conservative who opposes marriage equality, also argued on TV that she wished she could have married her terminally ill mother, to get her mom on her Wall Street-lawyer health insurance.
And Long fired her national-level campaign manager.
Then Long told Fred Dicker, under persistent questioning on his Thursday radio show, that she would support the winner of the GOP primary, even though she has the Conservative line in November.
Details, and more, below.
First, John Bolton is a blowhard asshole whose support in this Senate contest only matters to the micro-minority of the NY GOP base that wants to launch a few more wars in southwest Asia and want to be represented in the Senate by someone like Bolton's mentor Jesse Helms.
Bolton is a longtime member of the wingnut welfare club, Long is a fellow member of the club, and the far-right micro-minority does tend to vote in Republican primaries.
Second, Long's "I'd marry my mother" gaffe evolved from a discussion with Capital Tonight's Liz Benjamin about marriage equality.
Which Wingnut Wendy naturally opposes, but she can't just do the "traditional marriage" BS, she had to conjure up another absurd slippery slope:
In my own personal life for example, someone very dear to me, whom I love very much, my mother, who was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease and was having terrible problems with health insurance. I loved her very much. I would have loved to have legally married her so that we could have cured a lot of her insurance problems.
I was just saying there’s no rational basis to forbid me from doing that. So it was just a legal analysis. I wasn’t suggesting that we would have ended up with any of these other arrangements that we’re discussing.
ALS sucks. I know, it killed my mother last year, but I never considered marrying her.
Because she had Medicare (like Long's mother) and supplemental insurance from her being a retired teacher.
And because I'm not a wingnut Republican running for Senate who creates absurd fantasies for political gain.
The out-of-pocket costs for a year or so of mostly palliative care were negligible. Towards the end, two weeks in a nursing home cost about $4K, the last (and most expensive) week in the hospital cost our family nothing.
So Wingnut Wendy's story perplexes me, and not just because of the weirdness of marrying one's mother.
There are ways to extend life after an ALS diagnosis, which involve a ventilator and 24-hour nursing care. It works for Stephen Hawking under Britain's National Health Service, but over here, Medicare does not pay for that.
Perhaps Long's family put Mom in a nursing home for a year or two. But there is no way that her Wall Street-lawyer health insurance policy would have picked up that six-figures-plus in the unlikely event that Wingnut Wendy married her Mom.
So this fantastic hypothetical was just a weird way for Wingnut Wendy to say she hates the gays, which may help with the low-information, essentially bigoted GOP base in the primary.
But not much thereafter.
Third, Wingnut Wendy fired Dick Wadhams, and hired a bunch of Pataki hacks.
She probably thought that would save money for a campaign that has yet to show that it can raise serious money, but Pataki hacks don't work for free, and haven't won anything of consequence in a decade.
Fourth, Wingnut Wendy has the Conservative line in November, and is the CW favorite to win the GOP primary.
But, Fred Dicker asked, if she loses the primary, will she support the GOP candidate?
He asked the question SEVEN times, in various ways, and six times Long responded by saying it was hypothetical, since she expected to win the GOP primary.
But, after the seventh, Long said she would "support the person who ends up being the GOP nominee."
So, Wingnut Wendy would support a semi-one-term Congressman who is open to raising taxes (Bob Turner), or a semi-one-term comptroller of Nassau County which is operating under a state financial control board (George Maragos).
And, evidently, give up the Conservative line to the GOP nominee.
Here's the weird part -- Wingnut Wendy is by far the most conservative candidate, and yet she's employing Pataki hacks and has been a volunteer advisor to the Romney campaign since 2007.
Conservative Republicans in NY HATE Pataki, and don't much like Romney.
They'll decide the primary on June 26, and, weirdly, Wingnut Wendy, the Romney/Pataki establishment candidate, will probably win.
That's not showing in the polls yet -- the latest, from Quinnipiac, has all three Republicans in the mid-20s in head-to-heads with Gillibrand, who's in the high-50s.
But Long has institutional support (i.e., lots of endorsements) and, as the most conservative candidate, can expect substantial support from the very conservative Republicans most likely to vote in a low-turnout primary.