She's right. VA and NJ were down to the weakness of the candidates more than any referendum on Obama (as the exit polls showed), but the Teabaggers (along with Palin, Beck and Pawlenty) went full-wingnut in NY23, and lost big.

The GOP is fighting a civil war against itself. If the right-wingers had stayed out of it, the Rep. candidate would have won, as usual. Bill Owens should publicly thank Palin, Pawlenty and such for squeezing out Scozzafava and importing a Conservative who neither knew nor cared about the local issues and who was running for purely doctrinal reaasons. I hope the true conservatives keep up the war against imperfectly conservative Republicans.

I thought that it showed us that, in a local election that everyone knew would turn on the candidates' ability to inspire confidence among the electorate that they could handle those issues, the endorsement of a moderate republican who knows local issues carries more weight than the endorsements of a crowd of wingnuts who don't know (or care) about the area. And also what qmlevitis said.

But I'd be careful not to overstate the effect of the conservative ideological witchhunts. It didn't play in upstate NY, but it may very well play in other places. Upstate NY Repubs are not like national repubs. Their interests are generally guns, abortion, and keeping NYC from dominating the rest of the state. But the nutty tax policy stuff, hard-core libertarian-except-where-a-Conservative-president-tramples-over-individual-rights-because-then-it's-ok policies, and other hallmarks of ideologically pure conservatism generally don't float their boats.