Squashed

That’s a bit of bad news.

Eric has some thoughts on the NY-23 and has properly chastised the rest of us for attempting to appropriating local struggles to paint our desired national picture.

Here is a copy of an e-mail I sent to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, in response to his big picture view of the NY-23 race:

Subject: What NY-23 Means to me, an actual NY-23 voter

Josh,

I read your post earlier about what NY-23 means on the national level, but let me tell you what it means to me on a local level.

I am 26 and have lived in Clinton County, NY for 21 years. I lived through the closing of Plattsburgh Air Force Base and the turmoil that dealt on the local economy. I lived through the rough redevelopment of the base lands. I lived through the terrible loss of cross border commerce when the Canadian dollar took a dive.

As a lifelong liberal, I might not have agreed with Rep. John McHugh on the national issues, but he always seemed to have a good handle on the pressing local economic conditions. He was a advocate of the base redevelopment, farmers and Fort Drum. These are issues that stretch from the St. Lawrence River to the shores of Lake Champlain (a fairly large swath of land for any congressional district).

As the race heated up, it was very clear that Hoffman knew next to nothing about local issues and was all about the big, national GOP issues. The district might be rural and family centric, but this doesn’t make it solid republican (my home county went for Kerry in 2004 and almost 60% for Obama in 2008). They value their livelihood and that is something that tends to rely on government subsidies and grants.

The proposed “Rooftop highway (an interstate highway running near parallel to Route 11),” which is something I’ve heard about since I’ve been in grade school, is going to need federal money. Most people would get scared if closed border policies were enacted, cutting off cross border trade. On every issues, Hoffman has towed the hardline, national conservative line. He barely even knew what the Rooftop highway was. He doesn’t even live in NY-23, but instead the affluent, tourist centric Lake Placid, which is NY-20.

The real reason Scozzafava endorsed Democrat Bill Owens is because he has an actual grasp on what makes the local economies work (Watertown and Plattsburgh, on opposite ends of NY-23, have very different needs at times) and how to keep them afloat during this recession that has been so hard for everyone here. If Hoffman gets the seat, he might never be unseated, as this area is very good to incumbents. But by then the area might take such a dive that it might take even longer to get back to the equilibrium that last occurred when the PAFB was still open and Fort Drum was much better funded.

Students will leave in droves and never come back, skewing the district even older and more republican. I would hate to see a place where I grew up whither and die just because someone wanted to send a message to the conservative base.

Thanks for your time,

Erik

So this is also happening.