Our friends over at The Albany Project [1] make note of an online offensive by the republicans, and that in turn requires some comment.
Maybe it's a variant of Sun Tzu that I've missed so far, but one doesn't normally pick battles where one is weak. And the simple fact is that in the online world, New York republicans are spectacularly weak.
The state of play is as follows: the republican Senatorial campaign committee has put out a web site, NYinJeopardy.com [2], which takes aim at a raft of Democratic incumbents in the State Senate. What's interesting about the content is that the attacks made on their various targets come mainly from the left - for example, Liz Krueger is painted as being soft on women's health issues. Simple observation: you're not going to beat the Senate Democrats from the left, and that you try says everything that needs to be said about your underlying weakness.
The greater weakness, however, is in the correlation of forces online. Simply put, it's no contest: New York has a thriving, independent, linked and networked Progressive blogosphere - networked not just locally and statewide, but nationally. There is nothing on the other side of the aisle that can even be compared to what we have, independently of the party, built up over the last few years - nothing.
Case in point: the Craig Johnson race. Here's an example of what happened there:
The Progressive blogosphere drives mainstream media coverage (that ad is part of an entire series that got replayed all over the state), defuses and counters attacks, and because of the national tie-in, can raise boatloads of money. There are no republican netroots candidates - we, however, can make them, and will. A strong contender for that designation right now, by the way, is Jimmy Dahroug [3]; pro-labor, Harvard-educated, self-made up-by-the-bootstraps candidates who happen to be sons of bus drivers have intrinsic appeal to the people-powered movement. We have these options, and they're completely independent of what the party may or may not decide to do.
The NYRSCC has nothing to compare to that. Nor are they going to create it in time to save themselves. Bring it, boys.
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