Morning in the 23rd Congressional

It's morning in the north country. It almost feels like we should have a hangover from this acrid, acrimonious political binge we've been more or less forced on. But if you're like me, you feel refreshed and relieved – the campaign is over, the parade of national politicians, pundits and panjandrums has melted away and we return, once again, to the relative obscurity of being a rural region in the far northern reaches of the state.

And not a moment too soon. I am sick to death of hearing about the 23rd Congressional District of New York every time I change from one TV news station to another. In the past 10 days, the attention has become circus-like. And just about every report about the district suggested that its residents were living in some kind of petri dish of modern political experimentation, that our congressional election was, in fact, a referendum on both President Obama's leadership AND on whether the Republican Party should capitulate to the strident demands of its far right fringe.

I'm proud to say the district's voters made a resounding statement with its vote – leave us the hell alone and let us elect our own representatives. Politics, Dick Armey not withstanding, is local. Even if we end up electing an idiot, he's OUR idiot. In the case of yesterday's congressional election, I'm pretty happy to say we didn't elect an idiot – Bill Owens is an intelligent nondemagogue who will do a fine job representing us in Congress. Against all odds, in a large congressional district with a widely varied population, he became the first Democrat in a century and a half to win in Northern New York.

And the incredible, irrefutable irony is this: if the right wing Republicans and the nattering conservative pundits and the self-righteous single-issue religious groups had kept their meddling hands out of the pie, we would be sending yet another Republican to Washington. Without the assault from the right, in a race that contained only our own DeDe Scozzafava and Bill Owens, DeDe would have preserved the seat for the GOP. Last night's results prove that the core northern counties – Jefferson, St. Lawrence and Lewis – are the mortar that holds the district together, and those counties are Scozzafava Country. In an Owens-Scozzafava election, she would have won handily in those three counties and in heavily Republican Oswego and Madison, and a far more gentlemanly race would have ended up DeDe 56 percent, Owens 44 percent.

So the 23rd district election did send a message to the Republican Party, though not the one intended by those who urged Doug Hoffman to buck the local committees and launch a third-party campaign. No, the message is this: let local politics remain local. As Don Rumsfeld would probably tell them, you have to run with the candidate you have, not the candidate you might hope or want to have. Without the outside meddling, the makeup of Congress wouldn't have been changed with this election. But the neocons and the bizarre Palin Wing of the GOP couldn't keep their hands to home, as my grandmother would say, and now the state's congressional Republican caucus is down to just two.

Thank you, voters of the 23rd. And to those who forced this ridiculous situation, I say this: What a bunch of maroons!