Back in May, UNYTEA founder and leader Mark Barie from Plattsburgh endorsed Conservative Republican Doug Hoffman from Saranac Lake and he blasted Matt Doheny, the Republican candidate from Watertown, for courting the GOP’s “party bosses.”<\/p>\n
\u201cIf Doug Hoffman loses the primary I think the Tea Party movement in the North Country will be pronounced dead whether it should be or not,” Barie said.\u00a0 “It\u2019s a winner-take-all and UNYTEA\u2019s betting the farm.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But after last night’s debate in Plattsburgh, Barie sounded a very different tone.\u00a0 He first blasted his own candidate, Doug Hoffman, for being poorly prepared.<\/p>\n
“I guess he didn’t have the time to work a little bit more on his delivery,” Barie said.\u00a0 “Style in a campaign is important…if and when Doug wins the primary and he goes up against Bill Owens he needs to be smoother than tonight.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Barie says he doesn’t regret endorsing Hoffman, but he described Doheny as a viable conservative choice.<\/p>\n
“Clearly, we’ve got two fiscal conservatives from which to choose,” he said, while praising Doheny for launching a far more grassroots campaign:<\/p>\n
“He’s gone down to the committee level, he’s talked to the rank-and-file, and he’s made some inroads…that’s changed the dynamic a little bit.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Barie says UNYTEA will meet in the next week to decide what to do if Doug Hoffman decides to stay in the race as a Conservative Party candidate, even if he loses the GOP primary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back in May, UNYTEA founder and leader Mark Barie from Plattsburgh endorsed Conservative Republican Doug […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[886],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2572"}],"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=2572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2572\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}