So this is actually quite funny: in yesterday's City Section, here [1], is a report on the efforts by republicans to stave off the imminent death of their party.
It looked like an exam room for an S.A.T. A week ago Saturday, in a small conference room in a hotel in Bayside, Queens, rows of tables stood covered with neatly laid-out papers. The type of people filing into the room, however — mostly middle-aged and older — suggested otherwise.
This was, in fact, the first Candidates’ School of the Queens County Republican Party, where Republican hopefuls, in a city and state dominated by Democrats, had gathered for a crash course from campaign experts and party leaders on how to become better candidates.
You can have the best candidates imaginable - virginal Nobel Prize winners cum war heroes cum volunteers at the local homeless shelter - but they will founder on the deeply unpopular message which they must of necessity represent; brand GOP is dead in New York.
Notably, that brand isn't dead just because of the depredations of the national party; in New York, you can add to the miasma of the failed Bush administration the compounded failure of the local party. Two words: Joe Mondello. Four more: Joe Bruno and George Pataki.
The distance that New York republicans have to travel is revealed in this snippet:
The documents placed in front of the participants contained a detailed agenda that ran from the ideological, like “Traditional Values†and “Reforming Government,†to the practical, like “Things You Should Never Do†(never lie, the experts warned) and “Using Blogs†(embrace them, they agreed).
New York has a thriving Progressive blogosphere; the other side has nothing that could compare to that. Compare, for example, this [2] to anything the other side has done; or just look at this [3].
It's not just that New York Democrats have better ideas than Joe Mondello's party; we also have a better infrastructure for propagating them. See you in 2008, fellas.
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