Hall Endorsed By New York Times, Times Herald-Record

(UPDATING TO INCLUDE TIMES HERALD-RECORD ENDORSEMENT)

Democrat John Hall has received the endorsement of The New York Times and the Times Herald-Record in his bid to unseat Republican Rep. Sue Kelly in New York's 19th Congressional District.

The Times said Hall would bring much-needed new energy to the job:

His platform is ambitious and coherent, with calls for universal health coverage, a return to fiscal discipline and a full-bore national effort to achieve energy independence. He blends a deep-blue idealism with a crisp command of details.

The paper said Kelly has, for the most part, been a rubber-stamp for the Bush administration:

The incumbent, Sue Kelly, entered Congress in the "Contract With America" class of 1994. She has nurtured a reputation as a moderate, occasionally annoying conservatives and straying from the party line on environmental votes. But she has mostly been a go-along-to-get-along party member, supporting the Bush administration'ss tax cuts, stoutly defending its handling of the Iraq war and voting this month for President Bush's dangerous bill on military commissions, a measure that affirms the administration's ad-hoc subversion of cherished principles of justice and decency. She is a rank-and-file loyalist in a party that is tired and fiscally reckless.

The Times Herald-Record's editorial is a much sharper rebuke of Kelly:

There comes a time in our personal and professional lives when we must be held accountable for what we do, or don't do. When we explain who we really are, what we really stand for. This is Sue Kelly's time and she has failed miserably. With her steadfast allegiance to the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq and blind loyalty to a House Republican leadership that has condoned, covered up or contributed directly to corrupt politics while ignoring the needs of hard-pressed middle-class Americans, she has forfeited her right to re-election to Congress.

It only gets sharper from there. Read the entire piece here.

Kelly is running a new ad on cable TV. It paints a different picture of Hall than do the newspaper editorials, as you might imagine. See it here.

Tom Staudter, a spokesman for the Hall campaign, says Kelly's latest ad smacks of desperation and is full of "slurs and distortions" and "twisted accusations." In particular he took issue with the welfare-for-politicians bit in the ad.

"She wants to talk about `welfare for politicians,' and yet Kelly has unhesitatingly scooped up tens of thousands of dollars from the oil industry and even more from the pharmaceutical companies, and then shamelessly accepted a big taxpayer-funded pay raise for herself," Staudter said.

ONE WE MISSED: SPITZER ENDORSED BY NEW YORK TIMES

Attorney General Eliot Spitzer was endorsed by The New York Times yesterday in his race for governor. Our server was down most of the day, so we couldn't post. But it's back up and running this morning.