A TOUGH SPOT

tomllewis's thoughtful post on Jim Tedisco's defeat in NY20 http://www.thenextright.com/tomllewis/ny20-campaign  points to the real diificulty in crafting a winning Republican message in this environment.  Even with the benefit of hindsight it is tough to come up with a strategy that one could say would have strongly improved Tedisco's chances of winning. 

tomllewis suggests that Tedisco would have been better off being against the Obama stimulus the whole way.  I agree, but the popularity of the stimulus was in flux during most of the stimulus debate.  The popularity of the stimulus bill slid in the early stages of the debate  and then went up again after Obama's prime time press conference.  If one can put principle aside (call it "going Arlen"), one can see why Tedisco would have trouble figuring out how to play public opinion.

I'm not sure that opposing the stimulus, absent some plausible alternative that offered people real life benefits, would have helped Tedisco that much anyway.  He could have offered some version of Lawrence Lindsey's payroll tax cut (  http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.29125/pub_detail.asp  )  Offering an alternative that held out tangible benefits for working people would have given Tedisco a base from which to attack the waste in the Obama stimulus without seeming mindlessly negative.  

On one hand I sympathize with Tedisco's decision to temporize on the Obaba stimulus. He was making up his political strategy in real time, with public opinion in flux.  The stakes were high.  It must not have seemed like a good time to go hunting around America's conservative think tanks looking for policies that could shake things up.  But it turns out that a commitment to principle and a mastery of attractive well thought out policies can be more expedient than poll driven oppurtunism.