Things That Should Go Without Saying

Let’s begin with the fact that’s obvious to all paying attention: Lovely Warren is a disaster as a politician. Beholden to the corrupt Gantt machine, she not only followed in her mentor’s dirty footsteps by hiring her uncle as the head of her security detail, she also made matters worse by getting in a stupid fight with the queen of Twitter in Rochester, Rachel Barnhart, when it was revealed that her uncle tends to drive too fast on the Thruway.

After a disastrous start in 2014, even someone with the deadened political instincts of Ms. Warren wouldn’t take a shot at Louise Slaughter this cycle, no matter what some gullible reporter at Channel 10 thinks. And if she did run for the seat in any other cycle, she might win the primary, but she’d lose to any Republican with a pulse and regular respiration.

That said, let me pick an important nit: the fact that Lovely raised $400K, as was reported breathlessly by Channel 10, is irrelevant to any present or future run for the House. As every reporter in Rochester should have learned from studying the Brooks campaign, you can’t transfer funds from your local campaign treasury to your House race. So Lovely can raise a million dollars for her next mayoral run (and Lord knows she’ll need it), but that won’t do her any good if she ever decides to run for Congress.