It isn’t a Vermont campaign, but it’s been hard for Vermonters to avoid the attack ads in the increasingly bizarre special election for Congress across the lake.

Because Burlington television is also Plattsburgh television, we’ve been besieged by the merciless attack ads aimed at all three candidates – the Democrat, the Republican, the Conservative – in the race to replace former Rep. John M. McHugh, the Republican who is now Secretary of the Army.

Except for one apparently positive commercial saying only good things (depending on one’s views) about the Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava.

Bought and produced by a new organization called ”Common Sense in America,” the ad calls Scozzafava the only candidate who supports President Obama’s economic policy and gay marriage.

“On Tuesday, progressives have one candidate to vote for with pride: Dede Scozzafava,” the ad proclaims.

Hmmm. Interesting strategy. Get the district’s liberal voters to desert Democrat Bill Owens by painting the Republican as the real “progressive”?

Actually, no. “Common Sense in America” turns out to be the recent creation of a conservative Arkansas businessman who is a board member of the Club for Growth, the anti-tax, anti-regulation outfit squarely behind the Conservative Party candidate, Douglas L. Hoffman.

The ad is actually a dirty trick, designed to divert liberal voters away from Democrat Owens, who was slightly ahead of Hoffman in the polls. It was an honest dirty trick; Scozzafava really does hold the positions the ad claims she holds. And it’s a legal dirty trick, apparently complying with all campaign disclosure laws. It just isn’t what it purported to be.

A subject now moot. Saturday, Scozzafava suspended her campaign, leaving a two-way race between the Democrat and the Conservative. At first, it seemed that Hoffman would have the edge, especially after the entire GOP establishment in Washington got behind him.

But wait. Another weird development. One Republican did not line up behind Hoffman: Scozzafava. The (still) official Republican candidate endorsed Owens, the Democrat.

Even if Owens wins, the conservative pressure that forced Scozzafava out of the race seems like a big victory for the Republican right wing.

A Pyrrhic victory? No less a conservative than former Speaker Newt Gingrich thinks so, telling the New York Times that continuing conservative challenges to locally chosen candidates (Scozzafava was the pick of all 11 Republican county chairs in the district) could “guarantee Obama’s re-election.”

Results in Wednesday’s post.

And speaking of Election Day, here – first in the nation and exclusive to News Guy readers – is the complete, comprehensive, nationwide significance of Tuesday’s elections — that Congressional race and the contests for governor Virginia and New Jersey:

Zero.

As in: nothing, nada, bupkiss, rien de tout, gornisht or the translation in any language you choose.

This comes from someone who has tried (pretended?) to find some nationwide meaning from these odd-year elections in the past. If you’re the political reporter for a newspaper, there’s some inner voice telling you that in order to earn your keep you should write something about every political event. Hence the temptation to find meaning in the event.

The temptation should be resisted. This year, the likely Republican win in Virginia should enlighten those over-optimistic Democrats who deluded themselves last year into thinking that Virginia was now a Democratic state.

It is a swing state, itself a big improvement for Democrats over the situation a decade ago. But it is by no mean leaning Democratic.

New Jersey, on the other hand, is not a swing state, and won’t be even if Republican Chris Christie ousts incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine. A Christie victory would mean only that a tiny plurality (there’s an independent candidate) of New Jersey voters ultimately decided they found Christie marginally less unappealing than Corzine. That will not put the state “in play” in 2012, when it will remain as safely Democratic as…well, Vermont, come to think of it, which also has a Republican governor. If any news report tells you otherwise, dismiss it.

Speaking of strange news reports, consider the story in last Tuesday’s Times Argus, by reporter Peter Hirschfeld, about State Senate leader Peter Shumlin’s plan to help Vermont National Guard soldiers come home for Christmas before they get shipped off to Afghanistan.

Because Shumlin is almost surely going to run in the Democratic primary for governor next year, Hirschfeld said that when Shumlin “convened a well-publicized press event,” to announce his plan, he “faced questions about whether the event was as much about a nascent gubernatorial campaign as it was about the troops.”

Perhaps he did. But the rest of the article indicated that he faced such questions only from Hirschfeld.

Perfectly acceptable in a column. But, at least as it seemed from reading it on line, this was a news story, in which questions about Shumlin’s motivations would generally be considered “news” only if someone else raised them, preferably a prominent person speaking on the record.

A Republican, for instance. But the only Republican quoted, Northeast Kingdom Sen. Vince Illuzzi, said “to suggest it’s about anything other than helping the soldiers would be unfair.”

Judging from most of his work, Hirschfeld is a good, careful reporter, making one wonder whether an editor wanted the (quite reasonable) question asked, and ordered the story written even without getting the desired answer.

And speaking of odd journalism, there was real news in an editorial Saturday in St. Johnsbury’s Caledonian-Record. Taking note of the recent appearance of bedbugs in the St. J elementary school, the editorial proclaims that the infestation “should never have been allowed to fester to this point,” and that the landlord who owns the apartment building from which children carried the bugs to school, “should have been forced to immediately eradicate the problem or pay a hefty fine.”

Everybody knows, said the Cal-Rec that “certain landords (the dropped ‘l’ is in the original) won’t spend a nickel on their properties unless they are forced to by the law. Mandatory and immediate action should have been applied in this case.”

Wow! The Caledonian-Record endorses stricter regulation of private business, more power for government bureaucrats, and – at least by extension – higher public spending to pay for the staff and equipment to keep children safe from bedbugs.

Get me re-write.

Tags: Caledonian-Record

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 12:15 am and is filed under Politics & Elections, The News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.