The Right is whining and wildly swinging over imaginary left wing activities in NY-23 (ACORN, anyone? The damn district is over 90% white). Could be a case of ‘protest too much’?

This is coming down to the wire and as an upstate New Yorker, I’d like to remind readers of a few things that just might swing things out of Hoffman’s favor:

Not to draw too fine a line on it, but New York’s North Country is our own little version of Alaska – the economy for the longest time depended on natural resources and pork. Now, all we’ve got is tourism..and pork.

People in the North Country may be conservative, but they also are very independent-minded and I’m going to make a bet that there is a lot of resentment about a) an outsider being put up, b) huge outside money being thrown, c) "their" Republican nominee being hung out to dry and publicly humiliated by Rush Limbaugh et al.

When you live in a place where 7 feet of snow falling in a god-damn week is a fairly regular occurrence, where you have to depend on your neighbors to plow you out and dig out your second floor windows, and anyone caught with engine trouble in the middle of the night between December and March could freeze to death if they tried to walk home alone…when the major economic engine of the place is either power (up in Gouverneur) or the military (Fort Drum), to have someone as ignorant as Hoffman being inserted into the community conversation sort of..sticks in your craw.

When you live in a place where sheer survival depends on everyone getting along and no one giving anyone a poke in the snoot, hearing that the election people have to call in the police because the Tea baggers are electioneering (which would be interpreted locally as harassment and intimidation, frankly) too close to the polling places – that’s not going to make you feel friendly toward a guy who doesn’t live in the district and whose monetary support came from not only outside the district…but WAY outside the district.

People may not have agreed with every position that Dede Scozzafava took – but she was a fairly popular State representative. She was ‘their own.’ To read that Rush Limbaugh referred to her as being involved in what would be considered even up there in the North Woods as ‘unnatural acts’ (even under blizzard conditions) would be too much for a lot of people to swallow. And of course, we won’t discuss the fact that John “Tanning Salon’ Boehner threw her under the bus today, saying that he resented even supporting her.

So, let’s see how ol’ Doug Hoffman does tonight. If he loses, a large part of it will be a message to the Right that poking their national noses into local politics might not be all that great a thing.