{"id":6519,"date":"2012-09-06T07:41:53","date_gmt":"2012-09-06T11:41:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=6519"},"modified":"2012-09-06T07:41:53","modified_gmt":"2012-09-06T11:41:53","slug":"100-day-sprint-impressions-from-first-doheny-owens-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2012\/09\/06\/100-day-sprint-impressions-from-first-doheny-owens-debate\/","title":{"rendered":"100 Day Sprint: Impressions from first Doheny-Owens debate"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>To see my straight-up story on the issues tackled last night in Greenwich, go here<\/a>.\u00a0 Now for some more rambly thoughts:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 Bill Owens’ advance teamwork wasn’t great last night.\u00a0 He has a big war chest and Washington County has an active Democratic Party.\u00a0 What’s more, farmers are currently pretty impatient with the GOP’s handling of the farm bill.\u00a0 Yet there was no evidence of Owens support, in the room or outside.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 Matt Doheny had some spirited support last night, but it didn’t look anything like what we saw for Chris Gibson, the newcomer who toppled Democrat Scott Murphy in Washington County two years ago.\u00a0 To win this race, Doheny will need big margins from conservative areas like this.\u00a0 I’m not sure I saw that kind of zeal last night.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0 Neither of these guys are barn-burners.\u00a0 They’re not particularly ideological and neither light up the stage.\u00a0 Again, it’s a big departure from the Gibson-Murphy contest, where we saw some real fireworks, both issue-wise and rhetorically.\u00a0 (Remember Gibson’s call for a new nuclear power industry in the North Country?\u00a0 No big ideas like that this time.)<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0 Both of these guys seem really relaxed less than two months before election day, and I have no idea why.\u00a0 You would think that Bill Owens would be fighting for his political life in a district that leans heavily Republican; and you’d think that Doheny would be hard-charging as the challenger.<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0 Farmers may lean Republican, but they have both parties eating out of their hands.\u00a0 Owens and Doheny basically agree that farmers should get tons of goodies from the government without paying much in the way of taxes or facing significant regulations.\u00a0 In a year when fish kills and toxic algae blooms are making headlines, Gov Cuomo wants to ease farm pollution rules.\u00a0 That, my friends, is real political clout.<\/p>\n

6.\u00a0 I have absolutely no idea where this race stands.\u00a0 I’ve heard rumblings of an independent poll being done in NY21 and I am eager to hear theories from In Boxers.\u00a0 What are you hearing from your neighbors, from political leaders in your area?\u00a0 Is Doheny gaining traction?\u00a0 Is Owens’ Democratic brand hurting him?<\/p>\n

Wild (but civil and intelligent) speculation welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To see my straight-up story on the issues tackled last night in Greenwich, go here.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6550],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6519"}],"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=6519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}