Ho-hum: Another day, another 'Doug Hoffman, far-right extremist' spin

Yesterday at Hot Air, I pushed back against this misrepresentation of the Hoffman campaign. And now we see the same misguided claim being promoted by a writer for the Raleigh (N.C.) newspaper:

The N.C. Republican Party has been channeling its inner Jesse Helms lately, and not just because a portrait of the late conservative icon was unveiled last week.
At a GOP banquet Saturday night in North Raleigh, one of the main speakers was to have been Doug Hoffman, the New York conservative congressional candidate who was the favorite of Glenn Beck & Co . . .

Doug Hoffman's stated political positions place him squarely in the conservative mainstream of the Republican Party. The attempt to depict Hoffman and his supporters as rabid fringe fanatics is either (a) liberal propaganda or (b) faulty analysis by people who've been misled by liberal propaganda.

Hoffman did not lose because he was ideologically outside the mainstream. He lost because (a) he started with zero name recognition outside of his Lake Saranac hometown, (b) his campaign was badly underfunded until mid-October, (c) the national GOP wasted nearly $1 million propping up the doomed campaign of Dede Scozzafava, and (d) Scozzafava dropped out and endorsed the Democrat the weekend before Election Day.

Circumstances (c) and (d) are unlikely to occur again anywhere anytime ever, much less in North Carolina. For so many political "experts" to try to extract from the NY23 campaign the lesson that Hoffman was too right-wing, and that conservative Republicans are therefore generally doomed to defeat, is a case of wishful-thinking theory without adequate factual support.