A scuzzy campaign

I haven’t paid too much attention to the NY-23 House Race. But the Scozzafava campaign has managed to pique my interest this week by trashing a good friend of mine and stupidly justifying all the RINO attacks that were weighing the campaign down and created an opening for a third party candidate. Let’s rewind for a moment.

New York’s 23rd district is very purple, going closely for Bush twice and closely for Obama once. The GOP decided to throw a liberal Republican (Dede Scozzafava) in the race to pick up the win. Conservative activists in the state decided she was too liberal and threw their support behind a third party candidate (Doug Hoffman) who has split the Republican vote and turned what looked to be a relatively sure, if tough, win for the GOP candidate into a dog fight.

Scozzafava is angry that she has been challenged and, after John McCormack from the Weekly Standard dared to question her on card check (a handout for unions that she supports) and abortion her campaign called the cops on him, lying about him “screaming” at the candidate.

Seriously. That just happened.

Needless to say it was all bunk and the police found nothing suspicious going on. But think about the optics of this for a moment: A GOP candidate trying to shore up her conservative bona fides calls the police on a reporter from one of the two flagship conservative publications. She has now inflamed both NR’s Corner and the Standard’s editor/Fox News analyst Bill Kristol against her.

But wait! There’s more!

Her campaign then passed off some “damning” emails from McCormack to …. Talking Points Memo. That’s right, the liberal muckraking outfit, Talking Points Memo. (h/t to Mark Hemingway on that one.)  Now, I’m not a fancy big city campaign manager, but I can’t imagine that if you’re trying to fight charges from the base that you’re a “Republican In Name Only” you’d want to leak emails to an outfit that the base despises. This has earned disgust from both TPM and Daily Kos, as well as outlets on the right.

So, you know, full disclosure about McCormack being a good friend of mine and all that, but come on. This is all so obviously stupid it’s hard to understand what the campaign was thinking. What in the hell were they thinking?