It did not take long, upon the shocking revelation that DeDe Scozzafava had walked the plank, for a number of political dominoes to begin to fall:
- The likely beneficiary of her decision, right-wing Independent candidate Doug Hoffman, commented on the suspension of the Scozzafava campaign, and it was hardly a magnanimous message--
This morning’s events prove what we have said for the last week; this campaign is a horserace between me and Nancy Pelosi’s handpicked candidate, Bill Owens. At this moment, the Democratic Party, the Working Families Party, ACORN, Big Labor and pro-abortion groups are flooding the district with troops and they are flooding the airwaves with a million dollars worth of negative ads. They are throwing mud; they are trying to stop me.
- While Hoffman was busy gleefully putting shovel to dirt in his burial of the Scozzafava candidacy, the state chairman of the Independence Party, an often important third-party that had cross-endorsed Scozzafava, stated that his endorsement would now go to the Democrat, Bill Owens. He also, in the ultimate expression of "too little, too late", said that he wished his party had endorsed Owens all along.
- Et tu, Newt? Gingrich, who once saw the Hoffman challenge as an affront to party unity, also quickly got in line to crown Hoffman as the de facto Republican nominee.
- As they had already done in everything but name, the House campaign wing of the Republican Party (the NRCC) has endorsed Hoffman. This means that the Republican Party will have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a candidate whom they eventually undermined and ultimately supplanted.
The spectacular flameout of the Scozzafava campaign, with the GOP rank-and-file providing both the torches and the fuel, inspires this observation:
During the 2008 electoral cycle, the public conversation had to endure the endless bleatings of political pundits who knowingly warned that women may not support Barack Obama because he had denied Hillary Clinton the presidential nomination.
During a very unifying Democratic convention, a media not ready to let go of the meme treated the viewing public to endless interviews with PUMAs from far and wide, talking about how, as women, they felt compelled to turn their backs on the Democratic Party for-EVAH. Some media outlets even went so far as to put "body language experts" on the air, telling disappointed Clinton backers that when Hillary Clinton endorsed Barack Obama, she didn't really mean it.
Later in the campaign, we were also told by many pundits (often through crocodile tears) that the criticism of Sarah Palin as the GOP Vice-Presidential standard-bearer was further evidence of the latent sexism of the Democratic Party.
Yet look at what just happened. We have just witnessed a woman, a moderate in her party, be awarded the nomination of the Republican Party, and then have it brutally snatched away from her: first by the fringe elements within the party, and then by some of the party regulars (including, ironically, Sarah Palin herself). Ultimately, it was the leadership of the party itself that elected to turn their backs on her, with the chairman of the Republican Party, Michael Steele, saying yesterday that a victory by third-party insurgent candidate Doug Hoffman was just like a Republican victory to him. Indeed, when Scozzafava called it quits today, Steele jumped in with a promise to assist Hoffman, a more sincere and more generous offer than was ever extended to the Republican nominee during the course of her campaign.
In the final analysis, the Republican Party could not control itself. It had to destroy one of its own nominees, because she committed the unpardonable sin of being "a moderate".
Of course, she also happened to be a woman. And the fact is that there are many women in America like DeDe Scozzafava, Republicans with an ideological disconnect with many facets (decidedly in the sphere of social policy) of the modern GOP. I'd hazard the guess that there are plenty more women in America (and, for that matter, in the GOP) that see the world as DeDe Scozzafava does, rather than as Michele Bachmann does. The GOP just gave them a giant middle finger, by replacing Scozzafava, in all but party title, with a middle-aged man.
Why is no one in the political media pointing out that the Republican Party just pulled up the welcome mat for a vast percentage of the Republican women in this country?
Will we hear about the latent sexism of the Republican Party? Or its ideological rigidity?
It's not like we didn't hear about it in 2008, guys. So "man up", so to speak. Tell us how the Scozzafava episode demonstrates that the GOP is hostile to women not named Palin or Bachmann. It is, after all, an infinitely more plausible theory than the Democrats being latently sexist because they (A) had a male candidate win more delegates than a female candidate OR (B) criticized an unqualified candidate for being...well...unqualified.
UPDATED 2:53 PM PT: According to commenter Ron V, there were a couple of other dominoes that fell in Owens' direction this afternoon. Both the AFL-CIO and the UAW, who had either endorsed Scozzafava or sat on the fence, have now endorsed Owens. That could provide some welcome GOTV support come Tuesday.