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.<\/p>\n
Behind them, roiling and writing checks, are some of the biggest players in modern American politics.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The President himself will attend a high-dollar fundraiser for Owens next week in New York City.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Dede Scozzafava is drawing the backing of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of the grandfathers of the conservative revolution. <\/p>\n
She also has the National Rifle Association in her corner. Those are, literally, big guns.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Hoffman will attend an event with Huckabee later this month and Kristol has used his widely-read blog to blast away at Scozzafava.<\/p>\n
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: <\/p>\n
Who are these candidates? Do they reflect my values? Do they know my issues? Will they represent the district well?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And no, I don’t mean Bill Owens, Dede Scozzafava and Doug Hoffman. Those poor souls […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[874],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}