A lovely parting gift for the GOP

Outgoing 122nd District Assemblywoman Dierdre K. “DeDe” Scozzafava has left north country Republican officials a nice parting gift, breaking ranks to endorse Rep. William Owens, D-Plattsburgh, and Democratic 122nd district candidate Brian McGrath. If the powers that be in the GOP thought she would meekly depart Albany and the bully pulpit, well, they apparently didn't know DeDe very well.

It's virtually impossible to feel any sympathy for the party big wigs. Last year, after they pushed DeDe's candidacy through without a validating primary (which I believe she could have won), their actions and attitudes set up a three-way race for the 23rd Congressional District that ultimately went to Mr. Owens. And it made Doug Hoffman, who as a politician is an excellent accountant, think he was a far more viable candidate than he ever was. Why? Because the party abandoned DeDe when the going got dicey.

The thing about party politics is, you have to win with the candidate you have, not the candidate you belatedly wished or hoped you had. With DeDe, they had a moderate Republican a lot more in the mold of John McHugh than was Doug Hoffman. John McHugh enjoyed nearly guaranteed re-election with his Republican-lite philosophy; he was not, for example, above working with the state's Democratic U.S. senators to achieve legislative successes for the north country. He was a pragmatist who knew exactly how to straddle a fence when necessary, and DeDe would have followed him comfortably.

But faced with the sound and fury of national right-wing Republicans who for reasons mostly unfathomable to me adopted Doug Hoffman as the poster boy for the New Right, local Republicans folded their tents and left DeDe unprotected in stormy weather. And she got kicked around mercilessly.

So nobody should be too surprised by DeDe's endorsements of Owens and McGrath. On the one hand, she probably is singularly unimpressed by the campaigns of Matthew Doheny and Kenneth Blankenbush. And on the other, she owes the Republican Party nothing after last year's election. She had 12 good years in the Assembly, and now that she's leaving, she can be her own woman. That must be an enormous relief.