Joe Biden is apparently up in New York today campaigning for fellow Democrat Bill Owens in his down-to-the-wire fight against emboldened Conservative Doug Hoffman.
The AP of course does its best to make it simple for us (emphasis mine):
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) – Vice President Joe Biden is campaigning for the Democratic candidate in a special congressional election that has suddenly become a referendum on the Republican Party.
Biden is attending a rally Monday to support Bill Owens, who is facing Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman for the seat in Tuesday’s election.
Republican state Assemblywoman Dierdre Scozzafava (skoh-zuh-FAH’-vuh) dropped out of the race Saturday and threw her support to Owens. That’s raising eyebrows and questions about GOP unity because fellow Republicans had favored Hoffman.
Owens has already drawn unusual attention for a relatively small election in which no political majority is at stake. President Barack Obama attended a fundraiser in New York City for him last month.
Funny, Bill Owens is the Democrat nominee. A few weeks ago, Doug Hoffman was a fringe 3rd party Conservative candidate polling in the low teens. Today, that same fringe candidate has not only forced the Republican candidate Scozzofava out of the race, but is leading Owens in 2 polls released just days before the election.
Referendum on the Republican party? Hardly. What’s happening in NY-23 is a referendum on the Democrat party and the liberal antics of its spender-in-chief, Barack Obama. If Hoffman proves victorious tomorrow, it will be a huge message to the Democrat party that they’ve exceeded their mandate and will be punished in 2010.
To be sure, Hoffman’s rise is a signal to the Republican party to re-calibrate its message around conservative principles, but that signal is itself nothing more than a referendum on how desperate Americans are becoming to unseat their Democrat overlords. Had Obama’s first year been anything other than the disaster it’s turned out to be, then people like Owens, Deeds (VA) and Corzine (NJ) would have had cakewalks tomorrow riding on the President’s coattails.
If there’s anything “unusual” about the attention being paid to Bill Owens these days, it’s that it isn’t being paid by the constituents of NY-23 themselves, who appear to be flocking to the Conservative challenger in droves. Instead, it’s coming solely from the likes of smiling Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrat establishment who can’t believe they’ve got to prop up Democrats like Owens so soon after the watershed of 2008.
