In yesterday's special election for the open seat in Massachusetts's 5th Congressional District, Democrat Niki Tsongas defeated Republican Jim Ogonowski 51 percent to 45 percent. It was a surprisingly close race in a district where Democratic incumbent Marty Meehan ran unopposed in 2006 and crushed his Republican opponent 67 percent to 33 percent in 2004. In the 35 years since the district sent a Republican to Congress, only once, back in 1990, did the Democratic victor garner a smaller percentage of the vote than Tsongas's 51 percent.
The NRCC is all but proclaiming this 6-point loss as a victory, but over at the Corner, David Freddoso contends that the NRCC's spin is "incomplete and misleading." Freddoso writes:
The fact is, Ogonowski, an Air Force veteran whose brother died on 9/11, ran as a dovish pragmatist on Iraq. He said he had opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, and he wanted a sensible way of getting the troops out. Both candidates opposed a precipitous withdrawal, and so the only disagreements over Iraq were nitty-gritty details.
That's not quite the case, however. During the campaign, Tsongas endorsed a bill to withdraw all of the troops from Iraq within 270 days of its passage, while Ogonowski adamantly supported the surge and General Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. It's true that Ogonowski said the Iraq war was a mistake in the first place and favored the eventual drawdown of all of the troops - but not before the U.S. wins a clear victory, which Ogonowski defined as a strong and stable Iraqi government and army.
As a veteran, Ogonowski held the line on the surge and then chipped away at Tsongas's lead by campaigning as a Washington outsider who attacked Tsongas's support for the amnesty of illegal immigrants. The big problem for Republican incumbents in 2008 is that they only can run on an anti-Washington message by taking dramatic and unified steps against Washington's "culture of corruption," perhaps by banning earmarks altogether. But it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon.
