NP: Chivas USA vs. Los Angeles Galaxy

If you're like me, and love a good internecine political battle, particularly when it's from the side of the spectrum you tend not to agree with, you've been watching this special Congressional election in New York that I mentioned a week ago.

Well, it's just gotten more interesting. Yesterday, the nominal Republican in the contest, Dede Scozzafava, dropped out of the race, and today, she endorsed Democrat Bill Owens over Conservative Party candidate and right-wing flavor of the month Doug Hoffman.

If I watched right-wing news sources, I'm almost positive that the conclusion they will draw from this is that it proves Scozzafava wasn't truly liberal, ignoring the text of her endorsement where she goes hard at the fact that Hoffman doesn't know a damn thing about the district he would represent.

This gives the right exactly the sort of "win" they want, because it's about a certain ideological purity that's mind-numbingly important to them right now. Except that it also gives the left exactly what they want, because it will start driving the moderate right towards the political center and the political center to the left well in advance of the 2010 midterms.

Of course, there's still the small matter of who actually wins the race on Tuesday, as there are a bunch of additional election day variables that could tilt this one way or the other, but I don't expect anyone else to wait until there's enough data to make a sound reading of what's going here, so I might as well jump in.

UPDATE: The exception to that rule of going off half-cocked continues to be Nate Silver, who includes a lot of very appropriate disclaimers to his analysis. But the bit at the end on who the Dems should be rooting for is very good.