Senate Race Heating Up in Alaska

In today's print edition of The New York Times there's a story entitled "Dark Horse Emerges in Alaska: The Incumbent." The article is about Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska who, after being defeated in the primary by Tea Party-backed candidate Joe Miller, is mounting a write-in campaign for re-election. This is not easy. As the article states: "The only person ever elected to the United States Senate as a write-in candidate was Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, in 1954."

The article is very well written (as to be expected in The New York Times).  The headline is very creative. When thinking of a dark horse emerging in an election one would be inclined to assume an unknown candidate had usurped the establishment candidate.  Instead, it's the incumbent who is making problems for the anti-establishment candidate who won the primary, turning the whole idea on its head.

The article's lede is well thought out. It describes how at a rally Sen. Murkowski told supporters that there's no word in the Aleutian language for "impossible." Right after this the reporter has a quote from Gary Holton, the director of the Alaska Native Language Archive who said: "It's very clear that you can say 'impossible.' Clearly she wasn't checking her facts." After the quote is the information about Strom Thurmond.  This all flows well in setting up the narrative that what Sen. Murkowski is doing is nigh impossible but she actually has a chance of pulling it off.

Alas, no article is perfect, not even in The New York Times. In this one, the editor missed this sentence: "Now Mr. Murkowski is trying to claim his legacy while relying on a disparate group of supporters to help her wage essentially two campaigns." If Sen. Murkowski can change gender in the span of a sentence, perhaps she can win her write-in campaign.