In Defense of Christine O’Donnell
Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreAmericans love to watch public figures eviscerated publicly. Progressives love to bash conservatives. And the media will go out of their way to cripple conservative candidates (even if it means missing wildly and making an ass out of themselves, i.e., Wolf Blitzer and Marco Rubio’s water bottle). But progressives, the media and the American public will eventually cease their assault, if for no other reason than the story gets old and the appetite for schadenfreude eventually wanes.
For over two years now, center-right political professionals — from Charles Krauthammer and Karl Rove down to local GOP pols — have trashed Christine O’Donnell without relent. They’ve made her name synonymous with embarrassing failure. The declamations are tossed off casually by TV’s alleged conservatives, usually as a cautionary tale. Among the right’s talking heads, Christine O’Donnell is invoked as a two-word epithet utilized to dismiss unfit and extreme Republican candidates, most often Tea Party upstarts. I object. Partly to correct the historical record, partly to defend Christine, partly to stymie a lingering and erroneous bit of conventional wisdom on the right, but mostly to tell Karl Rove that he can go sit on a volcano, I offer a sadly rare defense of Christine O’Donnell.
First of all, if you like Rand Paul and Marco Rubio and the scores of other conservatives who won competitive races in the 2010 tea party wave, you should thank your lucky stars for Christine O’Donnell. Whatever you think of the candidate herself, she took an unseemly barrage of media arrows that would have otherwise landed on other candidates. With every old clip Bill Maher released of Christine’s antics on “Politically Incorrect,” the legacy media spent hours ridiculing her. Across the networks, on October day after October day, liberal media elites relished, reveled in and replayed every O’Donnell gaffe and misstep. It was probably good for their ratings. And they may have thought that they were damaging the Republican brand. What they were actually doing was wasting hour upon hour of airtime ridiculing one candidate while ignoring political races across the country. Christine O’Donnell’s media flogging was a national shield for conservatives in close races. Witting or not, her sacrifice deserves recognition, if not gratitude.
In reality, moderates like Mike Castle are guarantors of conservative defeat. Political debate always ends in compromise. If Castle is “moderate,” then why should anyone entertain proposals from the far right? In every debate, the question is not whether conservatives win, but how much we lose. If America wants to vote itself socialist, that’s fine, but, at the moment, we’re not giving it a choice. With either party, we’re just taking baby steps toward statism and ruin.
And that’s my final point, and the only one that really matters: A Republican loss is not necessarily a loss for conservatism, nor is a win a win. And anyone who wanted to elect Mike Castle is not fighting for the conservative cause.
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