In the too-rushed, too-politicized special election for New York's 20th Congressional District, we gently suggest that you vote for James Tedisco. We think he is the more suitable of two relatively unsuitable candidates.

Overall, we see him as more real, more independent, more experienced and more involved a lawmaker than Scott Murphy, whom we cannot help but see as a plastic pawn of the national Democratic Party whose abundant money and good looks aren't backed up by a whole lot of substance.

We even asked Mr. Murphy for his response to being called a pawn rather than a player. His answer: "We've been running an independent, grassroots campaign from the beginning." That's ridiculous; his idea of "grassroots" must be the grass of Manhattan's Central Park. Elaborating, he said, "I went out and earned the support of the 10 Democratic chairs when I got picked; I didn't know any of them." Maybe he didn't know the county chairs, but he didn't need to if his connections in the national party leaned on those chairs hard enough. Redefining "grassroots" like that is offensive.

Likewise, we take offense at his camp's hypocrisy in negatively branding Mr. Tedisco as a "career politician"; Mr. Murphy, when we asked him, said he would probably serve in Congress as long as he kept getting re-elected. At the young age of 39, having made his millions already, he seems to be ready to settle into a long political career himself.

Promising jobs is, if not the oldest trick in the campaign book, then certainly one of the lamest because there's almost never any substance to back it up. Both candidates are promising to create jobs - Mr. Murphy even nicknamed himself "Mr. Jobs" - but neither has any real edge on the other. Each, when asked how he would create jobs, offered nothing more concrete than the infrastructure projects funded by the federal stimulus bill, plus the classic obligatory Lake Placid campaign promise - quite stale from their mouths -that he would work to bring back the Winter Olympics.

The fact that Mr. Murphy is a multimillionaire businessman is a liability rather than an asset to us. In our view, one of the nation's most fundamental problems over the last three decades is the rise of the super-rich by skewing government's focus away from welfare -the idea that the society as a whole should help boost those who cannot help themselves - to "wealth-fare," in which the job of government becomes taking care of those on top so the economy will keep growing and the wealth will supposedly trickle down to the rest of us. Both directions have their pros and cons, but it was the irresponsible exploitation of the system by the super-rich, in order to enrich themselves far beyond logical need, that led our economy to collapse recently. The correction we need now is away from that world and its values, and that means Mr. Murphy, just like Sandy Treadwell in the fall, isn't really the man for the job.

We probably would not choose Mr. Tedisco if we had a better selection of candidates. He comes across as combative in his ads, in his press releases, in his prepared statements and in his frequent bragging about his adversarial relationship with former governor Eliot Spitzer. It's really pretty annoying.

But when you sit down with him and ask him questions, he is reasonable and decent - the kind of guy you can work with. That was our experience when we interviewed him, and that is the impression we have from others who know him better.

He was also much more open than most Republicans to a national health insurance plan, which we see as a top national priority. Talk about a way to remove "toxic assets" from companies' shoulders; how about the burden of employee health insurance? We believe in public health insurance for the same reasons we believe in public education. We say, do that instead of bailing out banks.

Mr. Murphy and most Democrats support this goal, too, but with Republicans like Mr. Tedisco on board, it might actually happen.

Mr. Murphy has made much of Mr. Tedisco's month-long delay in making up his mind on whether he would have supported the stimulus bill, but Mr. Tedisco always said, and we agree with him, that federal investment in infrastructure and public schools is a good way to create jobs. We also agree with him that the whole plan could have been leaner if it hadn't been rushed, with most federal lawmakers not having time to read it.

But the main reason we support Mr. Tedisco is that we think he will work harder at digging into the committees and the other work of forging public policy. Mr. Murphy, to his credit, is a gentleman, but he seems more likely to just vote the party line. If that's what you want, then by all means vote for him. But Mr. Tedisco, we think, brings more to the table.