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NY State GOP: John Spencer Can Beat Hillary
The embattled New York State Republican Party has finally endorsed former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer's bid to unseat Sen. Hillary Clinton this fall, with party chairman Stephen Minarik saying that Spencer "has earned my support and the support of the whole party." The New York Times reports: "The turnaround reflects what a messy political season it has been for New York Republicans: Their two major candidates for the Senate quit last year because of gaffes and a lack of political support, and Mr. Minarik is trying to slow the bleeding by embracing Mr. Spencer, who has strong conservative support." Spencer has vowed to make both Bill and Hillary Clinton's record on terrorism the focus of his campaign, saying that the Clintons' soft-on-al Qaida approach had encouaged the 9/11 attacks. "Sept. 11 didn't happen overnight," the Vietnam combat veteran said in December. "There was a build-up to that day throughout the 1990s."
The Yonkers Republican blamed Sen. Clinton for too often siding "with the weak, appeasing side that quite frankly, in my humble opinion, caused us to have the problems we had on Sept. 11." A Quinnipiac University survey taken before the GOP endorsement found that Mrs. Clinton leads Spencer by a full 30 points. But 81 percent of New York State voters told Quinnipiac that they still haven't heard enough about Spencer to form an opinion about him. The wild card in the New York race remains the level of White House partcipation. In January Spencer met inside the White House with a top aide to senior Bush political guru Karl Rove. Within weeks, Rove was quoted as saying that Mrs. Clinton's "brittleness" was her biggest politial liability. Following a similar theme, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman attacked Mrs. Clinton as someone who was too "angry" to have widespead political appeal. Spencer's only remaining competition in the GOP race, Kathleen Troia McFarland, had been floated by the party's liberal wing as someone who supports abortion rights and who refused to say whether she supported the Iraq war. But McFarland's camapign rapidly unraveled amidst reports that she had inflated her resume and her claim that Mrs. Clinton had dispatched helicopters to spy on her. Spencer already has the endorsement of New York State Conservative Party chairman Mike Long.
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