Mr. Obama, Meet Ms. Everywoman

On Tuesday, September 14, representative government was reaffirmed in the State of Delaware.  After forty-five years feeding at the public trough, all the while masquerading as a Republican, career politician Mike Castle was defeated in his bid to move up another notch from the House of Representatives to the U.S. Senate.  He was defeated in the state’s Republican primary by a relative newcomer to elective office, Christine O’Donnell.

Castle, the son of a socially prominent Wilmington family, a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin and a graduate of Georgetown University Law School, entered the world of politics in 1965 as a Deputy Attorney General.  Shortly thereafter, in 1966, he was elected to the Delaware House of Representatives and moved up to the State Senate two years later, serving as Senate Minority Leader in 1975-76.  In 1980, after engaging in the private practice of law for four years, he was elected Lieutenant Governor, serving in that office from 1981-85.  He then served two terms as Governor from 1985-92, before being elected to the first of nine terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

From his years in the Delaware legislature, when I first sought his support in winning the first-ever variance from the impossibly restrictive Delaware Coastal Zoning Act, he was known to be an unreliable vote for conservative or pro-business issues.  As a measure of his unreliability, he came to be known in the 111^th Congress as an “Obama Republican.”  But the masquerade is now over; Christine O’Donnell has done us all the favor of retiring Castle back to Delaware where he can live out his years as a bitter old liberal.

So just who is Christine O’Donnell?  From what we know of her she may very well be the distaff version of the Gary Cooper character in the 1941 movie classic, “Meet John Doe.”  And if, as the literary term has come to be defined, “everyman” is the ordinary individual with whom readers are able to identify easily, and who is often placed in extraordinary circumstances, then Christine O’Donnell is destined to be the “everywoman” of modern day elective politics.

According to a biographical sketch in Wikipedia, O’Donnell has worked as a marketing consultant, as a freelance public relations consultant, as an advocate for sexual abstinence, and as a political commentator.  She ran for the Republican nomination for Senate in 2006, finishing third in the primary and then winning four percent of the vote as a write-in candidate in the General Election.  She was the Republican nominee in the  U.S. Senate election against Joe Biden in 2008, losing by a wide margin. 

After graduating from Moorestown (New Jersey) High School in 1987, she attended Fairleigh Dickinson University, majoring in Theater Arts before beginning course work toward a B.A. in English and Communications.  By her own admission, she experienced an epiphany during her college years when she found herself drinking excessively and engaging in relationships with men with whom she lacked a strong emotional connection.  (She would later say of this period of her life, “I know what it’s like to live a life without principle.”) 

She became increasingly interested in both politics and religion, becoming an evangelical Christian, preaching sexual abstinence and joining the College Republicans.

According to Wikipedia, she attended Fairleigh Dickinson’s commencement exercises in 1993 but did not receive a degree because of an outstanding tuition payment.  The university sued her for $4,823 in 1994, winning a judgment in New Jersey courts for the entire amount.  The debt was retired in 2003, and after completing a final general electives course in 2010, Fairleigh Dickinson awarded her a B.A. in English literature with a concentration in Communications.

After college, O’Donnell worked for the Republican National Committee and for a number of conservative-oriented issue advocacy groups, including Enough is Enough, a DC-based anti-pornography group; and for Concerned Women for America, a Conservative Christian political action group.  In 1996 she founded the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT) and served as its president.  In her role as SALT president she made several high profile appearances on programs such as MTV‘s Sex In The 90’s, and on Bill Maher‘s Politically Incorrect, arguing that since America “took the Bible and prayer out of public schools” we were now “having weekly (school) shootings,” and that the 1960s “sexual revolution” led to the AIDS epidemic.  She was awarded a Lincoln Fellowship by the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank in 2002.

In 2003, O’Donnell moved to Delaware to work for the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) and bought a house in Wilmington.  She later registered a gender discrimination complaint against ISI with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), after which she was terminated by ISI in 2004.  She sued the Institute in federal court for $6.9 million for wrongful termination but dropped her claim in 2008 because she could no longer afford the legal fees. 

In 2008, she was unable to pay the mortgage on her Wilmington house and the mortgage company obtained a judgment against her for $90,000.  In addition, the IRS has claimed that she owes $11,000 in back taxes, although O’Donnell insists that the dispute is a matter of “computer error.” 

Clearly, O’Donnell is a woman who has struggled to educate herself, to own her own home in difficult economic times, and to make her way in the business world.  However, unlike Barack Obama, she had no mystery benefactor to finance her education in a private prep school and, unlike Obama, she had no mystery “sugar daddy” to finance her education in pricey Ivy League schools such as Columbia and Harvard.

Whereas Barack Obama had everything handed to him on a silver platter, O’Donnell had to struggle for everything she has.  Whereas Obama is an advocate of income redistribution, taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots, O’Donnell is a woman who takes responsibility for her own affairs.  And whereas Obama is a man about whom we know almost nothing, O’Donnell is a woman about whom we know much, both good and bad.

So what is the choice that Delawarians will have on November 2?  The choice is not so much between O’Donnell and her Democratic opponent, New Castle County Executive Chris Coons, who once referred to himself as a “bearded Marxist,” the choice Delaware voters will face is between what Barack Obama stands for and what Christine O’Donnell stands for. 

While Obama refuses to enforce federal immigration laws, choosing instead to hold border control hostage to comprehensive immigration reform (amnesty for illegal aliens), Christine O’Donnell agrees with the American people that the first obligation of the federal government is to control our borders against foreign incursion.

While Obama passes himself off as a former constitutional law professor… which he is not… O’Donnell is smart enough to know that the United States is comprised of 50 states, not 57, and that the phrase “all men are created equal” is a part of the Declaration of Independence, not the U.S. Constitution.  

While Obama insists that the Bush tax cuts be extended only for the most voter-rich segments of our society, O’Donnell makes a strong case that the last thing we should do in the midst of a major recession is to raise taxes on those who provided the investment capital for economic expansion and job creation.

While Obama believes that there is no harm in banning deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for six months, O’Donnell knows instinctively that a six month moratorium on drilling will mean the loss of tens of thousands of good-paying jobs and do irreparable harm to the economies of the Gulf Coast states.

And while Obama insists that he can insure 30 million additional people, citizens and non-citizens alike, while improving the overall quality of care, reducing healthcare costs, and doing it all with the same number of doctors, nurses, and hospitals, Christine O’Donnell knows that no one but a board certified fool would make such a claim.

In his commentary on Thursday evening, September 16^th, Bill O’Reilly opined that, because of who and what she is, O’Donnell will be forced to campaign on ideology alone, rather than on lifetime accomplishments.  One wonders whether O’Reilly might have been reminded of another major figure in American politics who is the poster-boy for a complete lack of accomplishment.  To paraphrase the late Flip Wilson, “Do de name Barack Obama ring a bell?”

We should not forget that Illinois Democrats elected Obama to the United States Senate with no more credentials than Ms. O’Donnell possesses.  What the people of Delaware have belatedly concluded is that Obama and Castle are both snake oil salesmen who thought that they were not subject to Abraham Lincoln’s rule… they thought that they could, in fact, fool all of the people all of the time.  The people of Delaware have finally gotten wise to both of them.  Welcome to the United States Senate, Ms. Everywoman… or is it Joann Doe?