It’s clash of the titans in NY-23

And no, I don’t mean Bill Owens, Dede Scozzafava and Doug Hoffman. Those poor souls are, if anything, turning into the proxies, the front-people, for far bigger and more powerful forces.

Behind them, roiling and writing checks, are some of the biggest players in modern American politics.

Backing Bill Owens are Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The former wrote a letter to funders urging them to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for this race.

The President himself will attend a high-dollar fundraiser for Owens next week in New York City.

Meanwhile, Dede Scozzafava is drawing the backing of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of the grandfathers of the conservative revolution.

She also has the National Rifle Association in her corner. Those are, literally, big guns.

Then there’s Doug Hoffman, who has figures like Mike Huckabee (currently the frontrunner for the GOP’s 2012 presidential nomination) and Bill Kristol (editor of the Weekly Standard) in his corner.

Hoffman will attend an event with Huckabee later this month and Kristol has used his widely-read blog to blast away at Scozzafava.

This is heady stuff. And it will take incredibly astute voters to parse through all the sound and fury of national politics to get at the basic questions:

Who are these candidates? Do they reflect my values? Do they know my issues? Will they represent the district well?

To that end, next week, NCPR will begin a series of profiles of each candidate, followed by stories looking at specific issues, including their stances on health care.

Stay tuned…and chime in below with your comments. Is it exciting to have this much attention on the NY-23 race? Or is this distracting us (voters, journalists) from the important stuff?