Jane Corwin's not smiling much now
By now, you probably know the outline of the incident: A Republican "tracker" armed with a camcorder confronted Tea Party candidate Jack Davis, provoking Davis into shoving the camera away (and inspiring the tracker to howl as though his ankle had gotten caught in a bear trap). After the video made the rounds, it turned out that the tracker wasn't some random young punk volunteer but actually the legislative chief-of-staff for Republican candidate Jane Corwin. Even worse, Corwin tried to deny any involvement, claiming that the entire affair had "nothing to do with me quite frankly."
Now she's being lacerated by fellow Republicans for getting herself mixed up in such a ham-handed affair:
“If I were Jane Corwin’s chief of staff, I wouldn’t have done that,” said Bob Davis, a former GOP chairman in Erie County who is unrelated to the congressional candidate. “I would have found somebody else to do it. If you had done that, this would have been an issue of Jack Davis’ temperament. But now you’ve got another issue — and it affects the other campaign.”
And there's more:
“I might have expected this person to be suspended from the campaign as the result of something like this,” said James E. Campbell, a Republican who is chairman of the department of political science at the University at Buffalo.
Saying Mallia’s acting “looked like it was a little over the top,” Campbell said the incident seemed contrived to make Davis look erratic.
“He is kind of erratic, but this seemed pretty trumped up,” Campbell said.
And still more!
Bob Lonsberry, a popular conservative radio host in Rochester, put things much more bluntly.
“A legislative professional, the boss of Jane Corwin’s Assembly office, and he’s hassling a man 50 years older than he is in a parking lot at the fire hall,” Lonsberry said on his blog. “It was an ambush, a setup, and an insight into just how black and depraved the Republican heart is.”
A right-wing radio jock talking about "how black and depraved the Republican heart is"? Wow! There must be mass hysteria in the streets. Cats and dogs living together! What's going on here? Apparently, this guy really means it:
“Afraid that Jack Davis was polling too high, apparently unable to argue against his platform, the Corwin campaign and the Republican Party decided to use character assassination, and they got a state employee to do it,” Lonsberry wrote. “This isn’t the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan. This is the Republican Party of Richard Nixon. This is the dirty tricks party.”
The dirty tricks party — and the pathetic hacks party, too. Look at this looney tunes operation:
But WGRZ-TV also had a cameraman at the Davis event Wednesday, and it showed that there appeared to be another Republican staffer, with another video camera, tracking Davis.
Asked if he would release that video, Langworthy said the battery in the camera was dead.
I'd almost believe that some stupid Republican would be dumb enough not to realize his camcorder wasn't actually working. Almost. But Nick Langworthy, the Erie County GOP chair, managed to top even himself:
Questioning whether Davis has the temperament to serve in Congress, Langworthy added: “Why are we putting Mike Mallia and this campaign through Nuremberg over the fact that one candidate lashed out, lost his cool and misbehaved?”
Yes! The full Godwin! Media scrutiny over this affair is just like the Nuremberg trials for genocidal war criminals. That is just beyond priceless.
In the end, I love this parting shot that the Buffalo News gets in at Corwin herself:
Corwin refused interview requests from The Buffalo News regarding the incident, choosing instead to speak to National Journal, a publication and website for Washington insiders.
How perfectly arch — and perfectly accurate. The wealthy Corwin is in full panic mode — after dropping in a million bucks of her own money in the month of April, she tossed in another half-million just a few days ago. That brings her to an eye-popping $2.5 million so far, for a campaign that's only been a few months long. Add in six figure sums from Karl Rove's American Crossroads and promised spending by the NRCC and you know the Republicans are fiercely worried about this one slipping away. And right now, the person they most have to thank for this disaster is none other than Jane Corwin.
UPDATE: Devtob points out that what Lonsberry, the conservative radio host, posted on his blog is even more incendiary:
In Western New York, the Republican Party has collapsed into Nixonian moral bankruptcy. The party leadership is worthy of nothing but indictments.
So venial and whoring is the party that it no longer pretends to care about what’s right, it bounces from con to con, screwing its principles, screwing its members, screwing our country. ...
I believe in the Republican Party, but only on the far side of the state line. I do not trust or respect its local leadership, and I consider that that leadership has neither integrity nor core belief.
They are a pack of corpulent knaves who have turned party politics into a petty organized crime. They are largely failed individuals who would have no significance whatsoever without the bossism of their offices. They whore the patriotism of others out for their own financial and ego benefit.
Jane Corwin is the straw that broke the camel’s back.
A one-term assemblywoman whose major campaign expenditures include her dues at “the premiere private social club in Albany” and a Minnesota firm that specializes in fund-raising, she became a Republican congressional candidate by waving a check under the noses of half a dozen weasels.
Devtob further observes that Lonsberry had originally endorsed Davis, then pulled his endorsement because Davis opposed the Ryan plan to destroy Medicare. So Lonsberry's right-wing credentials cannot be in any doubt.
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