Now That Hoffman Lost...

From Mediamatters:

Right-wing media figures enthusiastically endorsed and boosted the failed Conservative Party candidacy of Doug Hoffman in the race to fill a vacant seat in New York's 23rd Congressional District, with several of them hosting Hoffman on their radio or television shows. Media figures who boosted Hoffman include Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Mike Huckabee, Michelle Malkin, and Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com.

To that heady list we can add a local: Our Very Own Jack Kelly. Here he was just this past Sunday:

Political soothsayers will be studying the returns Tuesday from Virginia and New Jersey for omens that could predict the outcome of the midterm elections next year. But the race with the greatest national implications is for the House seat in upstate New York because of what it portends for the relationship between the Washington GOP establishment and an increasingly restive base.

Republicans have held the seat for 100 years. With public opinion turning against Democrats, it should have been easy to retain it. But local GOP bosses botched that when they selected DeDe Scozzafava as their candidate. Ms. Scozzafava is to the left of the Democrat in the race. She's for abortion and gay marriage, backed the stimulus bill every Republican in the House voted against and supports "card check," which effectively would abolish the secret ballot in union elections.

The Washington GOP establishment quickly lined up behind Ms. Scozzafava. The National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican National Committee have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her behalf.

But the locals haven't been eager to support someone who is clearly a Republican In Name Only. Hence the candidacy of businessman Doug Hoffman, running on the Conservative Party line. [Emphasis added.]

And he ended the column with this:

The Republican Party may be saved from its "leaders" by the woman they love to hate. The Beltway Brahmins can't stand Sarah Palin because she isn't one of them, doesn't aspire to be one of them and isn't afraid of them.

If Mr. Hoffman wins, Sarah Palin will deserve the lion's share of the credit. She made her bones in Alaska politics by taking on a smug, corrupt, complacent GOP establishment and beating it. A larger reform opportunity beckons.

And if Mr. Hoffman loses? That must've never occurred to the folks backing Hoffman.

The GOP, as Jack rightly points out, should have had no trouble keeping the seat. But they chose instead to impose a political purity test and purge the infidel.

And they lost. They lost the seat they held for, as Jack points out, 100 years.

But I'll go with Jack on this one. In an election year where the GOP took the Governor's mansions in VA and NJ, perhaps the election with the greatest national implications is the one where the GOP fed on its own and because of that lost.

Lost a seat they'd held for a long long time.