DAVID MALPASS: THE GOP CHALLENGER IN NEW YORK

Malpass for the GOP

June 4, 2010

http://www.nysun.com/national/david-malpass-for-the-gop/86987/

The good news out of the New York State Republican Party convention is that there is going to be a primary to make the final choice for a nominee to oppose Senator Gillibrand in November — and our endorsement is David Malpass. He came within a whisker of getting the most votes in the state convention. The candidate who edged him was Bruce Blakeman, who, when he was a county legislator, oversaw the disastrous tax hike that delivered Nassau County to the Democrats for a decade. The two will face one another in a primary in September. The reason this is, by our lights, good news is that the Republican Party in New York State needs an airing of the issues.

This was evident after the convention, when Mr. Blakeman characterized Mr. Malpass, a former official in the Reagan administration and one of the most articulate free-market economists in the world, as the “champagne- and-caviar candidate,” in sharp contradistinction to his own description of himself as the “beer and pizza” candidate. To which we say that if New Yorkers want to go in for the sport of nursing class grudges, they might as well stick with the Democrats, who have made that a specialty while delivering New York State to its current governmental crisis.

It’s not that we have any kind of personal disregard for Mr. Blakeman or the other potential Republican primary contender, Joseph DioGuardi, who, at the moment, is the Conservative Party’s nominee and who hopes to get on the GOP primary ballot via a petition process. What this election really represents is a chance to find for the GOP a candidate who is skilled not in the old class warfare but in the policy debate. That is where we are going to find the way out of the current crisis. And in that line of work — which is, after all, the business of the Senate — Mr. Malpass is without peer in this race.

To set down Mr. Malpass as the “champagne-and-caviar” candidate is not only inaccurate (the meals we had with him at his home included hot dogs, hamburgers, beer and pizza) but a libel to Reaganite, big-tent conservatism for which he stands. He knows the health care debate cold. He’s a stalwart on Israel and the struggle for democracies abroad (he once worked at the State Department). All this was evident in his speech to the Convention. Most of all Mr. Malpass knows the principles via which Reagan set the stage for the economic expansion that lasted, with only brief pauses, from the early 1980s until the accession of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats to the leadership of the Congress. Mr. Malpass is the candidate in this race who understands how the policy errors of President Obama, Mrs. Pelosi and Senator Reid threaten to give us a double dip recession — or worse.

There are those who belittle the race against Senator Gillibrand on the grounds that the “term,” such as it is, is going to be only two years, enough to fill out the remainder of Senator Clinton’s term. But then Republican Party in New York has been waiting for a long time for such a candidate as Mr. Malpass, and never has it needed one more. We have, in Albany, a catastrophe of historic proportions and, in Washington, a contest among the Democrats to see who can best drive Wall Street out of business. It’s enough, in our view, for the Conservative Party to re-think whether it really wants to stick by the candidate who came in a distant third for this nomination. If Conservative means what Ronald Reagan taught us it can mean, the best candidate in this race is Mr. Malpass.

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