The Og Makes Hay

He doesn't make the cut though. Jim Ogonowski admitted last night that he and his mini-team had blown the easy effort to get on November's ballot against U.S. Sen. John Kerry.

You wouldn't know it from his website, where news is noise, static. His News section leads with See You in November, his supporter reassurance. He stated he had over 22,000 signatures, more than double the 10,000 required.

Honk. Wrong. Thank you for playing.

Instead, the Puffy White Hope of the Massachusetts Republicans, also supported and touted nationally, ran out of jive.

He emailed his list thus:

I have made my decision regarding the future of this US Senate race. Clearly, we had some issues this week regarding signatures. Mistakes were made along the way. But, any good military officer knows that when you are in command, the responsibilities are yours alone. The buck stops with me and I take that responsibility. There has been and will continue to be a lot of Monday morning quarter-backing and people trying to figure out what happened. But, the truth is, it doesn't matter. We could play that game all day long. But, the facts are the facts. For a variety of reasons, we did not meet the signature requirements. And at this time, I have decided not to pursue this endeavor.

I provide a sincere thank you to those that stood by me. I am sorry that we did not succeed. I ask for patience as my family and I move forward.

We all could have done with the Republican cliché of "mistakes were made." However, after about two weeks of coverage in MSM and blogs calling on this, we did finally peel off the scales.

So, this is as good a time as any for commonwealth GOP sorts to consider:

1. Do we play Don Quixote by pretending the wee minority of Republican candidates (Jeff Beatty in this particular case) will win this time or next or next, and then slowly expand and rebuild the party?
2. Do we work within the cold reality that most conservative pols are registered Dems, and vote on ideology?
3. Do we accept that this is largely a wishy-washy liberal state with some high-profile pinko types up top?

The Og was supposed to be a great example of the first option. Having come close to beating high-name-recognition Dem Niki Tsongas, he was the next great thing. That's definitely past tense.

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Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, Senate, John Kerry, Republicans, Ogonowski