A tragedy of errors

The Republican Party this year is feeling some stresses and strains: of course it has lost some special mid-term elections in safe seats, which must make its members feel rather miserable, and it has had some relatively safe congressmen decide to retire at the end of the session.
And it has Representative Vito Fossella of Staten Island: he was pulled, tested, and caught driving well over the legal limit (several points higher, as it were). And then it turned out that he was going to visit the mother of his child (said mother not being his wife) and things got ultra-embarrassing for him, and he decided not to run for re-election after all.
Now, if you are not a poli-junkie living in the US, you might not know this, but there are almost no Republicans left in the North East any more: so this was not good news for the GOP. And then there were attempts to find just the right person to run in his place. After much searching for a soul, any soul, they settled on Francis H. Powers. This looked for a brief period to have been a mistake: his estranged son, Francis M. Powers, was all set to run against him on the Libertarian ticket, but much to the GOP's relief, didn't manage to make it onto the ticket.

So much for the errors. And much comedy too.

And now, the tragedy. Francis H. Powers died today of natural causes. Quite young at 67.


Yours, never having seen a race like it,
N.