"So This Is What GOP Overreach Produces" [View All]

On paper, this race should not have been particularly close. Even in optimal political climates, Democrats have failed to net more than 48 percent of the vote in New York’s 26th District. John McCain still won the district by six points in 2008, even with the GOP label in disrepute across New York state. Given that the political climate now is far from optimal for Democrats, Corwin should have won this race by ten points – and probably more. And rest assured, if the election had been held last November, she would have.

In several high-profile GOP primaries in 2010, insufficiently pure Republican candidates were rejected by the base. Keeping this base from revolting again in 2012, Speaker John Boehner and his fellow Republicans realized when they took over, would be one of their main challenges –

This is where the plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program came from. Boehner brought it up for a vote last month and nearly every Republican in the House voted for it – while every Democrat opposed it. The idea, it seemed, was to get it out of the way early – to take massive grief from Democrats and senior groups early in the congressional term in an effort to demonstrate purity to the GOP base, then to hope that it would all be a distant memory to swing voters by November 2012.

Hochul made the Medicare plan (which Corwin initially said she’d support) the heart of her campaign message. And the race played out as polls showed that the Tea Party itself was becoming severely unpopular with swing voters. The deeply unpopular Medicare plan was one of the reasons for this. In 2009 and 2010, most swing voters mainly saw the Tea Party as a movement opposed to Barack Obama’s policies. But now, with Republicans running the House (and numerous state houses across the country) and pushing the Tea Party’s agenda, swing voters have come to see it as an extreme ideological movement. And there’s no better representation of that extremism than the Medicare plan.

Here’s another blatant example of moral hypocrisy coming from the GOP, and this time it’s closer to home. Married conservative Republican Congressman Chris Lee from NY-26 was caught sending (partly) nude photos to his dating prospects on Craigslist.

The problem is that Lee, like almost all other Republicans these days, is noted for his opposition to anything related to gay rights. He voted only a few months ago to keep the wholly discredited Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell military regulations on the books. He’s also an opponent of marriage equality.