Excuses

Following up further on the Weprin-Turner race I have been blogging about, there's this from John Podhoretz:

Sorry excuses can’t conceal truth

If and when the news comes tonight that a conservative Republican has won the special congressional election in a Brooklyn-Queens district with three times as many registered Democrats as Republicans, you’ll hear excuses pour forth from liberal blogs, commentators and political experts.

...Objection No. 1: The Democrat, David Weprin, is a lousy candidate. He is. And the quality of a candidate matters...Something more is going on here than Weprin’s inarticulate bumbling.

Objection No. 2: Israel played an outsized role. Yes, President Obama’s behavior toward the Jewish state gave Turner an opening to tell the district’s Zionist voters to send him a message. That makes the race an outlier that offers little in the way of guidance about 2012...but the Jewish voter is another matter...because of his generous political donations...And the Jewish vote can make a difference in two key swing stakes, Florida and Pennsylvania. Obama won both in 2008, but is doing badly in recent polls. If he loses both, he loses the election. Even if he loses just one, he probably goes down to defeat as well...If, say, a third of the Jews who voted for Obama in either state in 2008 decided to vote against him in 2012 -- or not to vote at all -- that could be game, set and match for the president.

Objection No. 3: Special elections don’t mean much nationwide. True...But then there’s that killer detail in polling done over the weekend by the Democratic firm PPP. It found Obama with an approval rating of 31 percent -- in a district he carried with 55 percent in 2008.  That horrific number can’t all be due to Israel. Surely the economy is also playing a large role...In other words, NY-9 is a weird conventionally Democratic semi-swing district. And if PPP’s polling is to be believed, the bottom has fallen out for Obama there.

...even if professional pundits tell you to look away from this car crash because there’s nothing more to see here, Obama is in far worse trouble than even the bad national polls over the last month have suggested.

All true.

But if David does get in, the message will still nevertheless have been sent to Obama and a better Israel supporter, and now, even more beholden to a pro-Israel and even pro-Yesha position, will be in.

^