"Everything's all aces now.We've just got to keep it that way."

A guest-post by Jimmie Bise of The Sundries Shack.

The post title is a quote from a source inside the Doug Hoffman campaign, which has managed in the space of one week to turn a barely-noticed special election in upstate New York into a national media event. All the savvy media outlets are converging on New York's 23rd Congressional District, including this blog's very own Stacy McCain.

And what, you may ask, has turned the tide?

The grassroots. A week ago, Hoffman held a conference call during which he practically begged for national traction. According to Stacy, Hoffman had two messages: "We have her on the run" and "We need to raise money to get the message out." Since then, Hoffman's star has been steadily rising, the endorsements have come rolling in, the media outlets have been spinning like they're reporting from a Tilt-A-Whirl, and his Republican opponent Dede Scozzafava has committed gaffe after asinine gaffe. It's gotten so bad that National Review's Jim Geraghty has called for the GOP to demand its money back and pull back completely from Scozzafava (via memeorandum). Indeed, the conservative flagship magazine has gone "all Hoffman, all the time", according to a campaign source.

This morning, the Wall Street Journal published the hardest-hitting editorial against the establishment's hand-picked candidate I've seen yet. Here is the editors' bill of particulars against Ms. Scozzafava:

Democrats want to portray this race as a familiar moderate-conservative GOP split, but the real issue is why Ms. Scozzafava is a Republican at all. She has voted for so many tax increases that the Democrat is attacking her as a tax raiser. She supported the Obama stimulus, and she favors "card check" to make union organizing easier, or at least she did until a recent flip-flop.She has run more than once on the line of the Working Families Party, which is aligned with Acorn. Her voting record in Albany puts her to the left of nearly half of the Democrats in the assembly. She also favors gay marriage, which is to the left of Mr. Obama.

A mark? Oh yes, that'll leave one.

Let us not forget that it was the Working Families Party that attempted to assail employees of AIG in their own homes for the scurrilous crime of accepting bonus payments. After the protest fizzled worse than a sparkler at the bottom of Lake Placid, we learned that the bonuses has been granted with the full knowledge and approval of the very same Obama administration that had demonized the workers so vociferously and that the President himself was a recipient of AIG money. Oops.

There is a chance that the WFP or ACORN will try to get into the game on the side of Scozzofava or the Democratic candidate Bill Owens. Hoffman is concerned about the potential for fraud and has asked the Obama administration to send election observers to make sure things remain on the up-and-up. That's not a vain concern as authorities in nearby Troy, NY have launched a voter fraud investigation involving both the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party. If they worked the election in Troy, they can just as easily work it in NY23.

Hoffman has a series of events planned for tomorrow and Stacy will be there to report on them. In the meantime, Left Coast Rebel has the latest from Stacy as he careens his way north and Da Tech Guy is terribly unimpressed with how the GOP had dug in its heels for Dede.

Me, I say Dump Dede!

There is a lot more coming on this story so, stay tuned and buy the man some new shoe leather, please.

UPDATE: Not even an endorsement from Newt Gingrich has been enough to sway the grassroots toward Scozzafava. Michelle Malkin and Da Tech Guy has rounded their blunderbusses of snark on Newt and given him a snoot full.

Meanwhile, those poll numbers? Oh, they look better by the day.

UPDATE 2: If you want to get the measure of Doug Hoffman for yourself, you'll have a couple chances. He was on Glenn Beck's radio show today and garnered some good words from Rush Limbaugh as well. He'll be on Mark Levin's show tonight at about 8:30 and on Glenn Beck's television show tomorrow night.

I'd say the big grassroots push is working, but there's no time for cheering. We have a conservative to get into Congress.