Let’s take a look at two brand new Republican winners: Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Carl Paladino in New York.
O’Donnell is a 40-year-old woman who ran for the Senate in Delaware in 2006, again in 2008 and won the Republican nomination Tuesday with 57,000 votes. Delaware is a heavily Democratic state that gave President Barack Obama a 62-37 percent victory in 2008. This year’s general election should bring more than 320,000 voters to the polls.
O’Donnell ran against Sen. Joe Biden in 2008 while Sen. Biden was also running for vice president with Obama. She was defeated by nearly 2-to-1. In 2006, she was third in the primary election with about 17 percent of the vote.
She claimed to have carried two counties in 2008. She did not. Biden won them all.
She also claimed to have a college degree, but it was not until this summer that she completed the work required to earn it.
O’Donnell has a job-hopping history with most of the positions she held associated with political advocacy. Most recently she was employed as an abstinence-only counselor to instructors in sex education classes. She has no record of public or private accomplishment that recommends her for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
Her 2008 campaign wound up $23,000 in the red. As of this year, she still owes payments to staffers, consultants and volunteers who worked for her in that campaign. She was forced to sell a house she owned in Washington, D.C. to avoid foreclosure. Between 2007 and 2009, she was cited eight times by the Federal Election Commission for failure to supply contribution reports on time.
This is the checkered history she brings to the Delaware Republican Party as it hopes to play a key role in capturing control of the Senate in November.
She is an ideological extremist, who has trouble keeping her facts straight, who refuses to comply with Federal Election Commission rules, who was unable to establish herself in a career and was failing in elective politics until the Tea Party Express gave her $250,000 and took over her candidacy.
Even Karl Rove, Republican consultant, forecasts her defeat in November by her Democrat opponent, Chris Coons. The latest poll shows Coons 26 points ahead.
CARL PALADINO is an entirely different story that is likely to come to a similar end.
Paladino is a flamboyant multimillionaire who ran a belligerent, blustery campaign that gave him the constant opportunity to say how mad he was at Albany and to promise to “take a ball bat” to the state capital, bash the evil-doers and start over. Those who voted for him said they were mad, too.
His claim to represent ordinary New Yorkers was backed by a reputation of sending e-mails full of racist jokes, adorned with pornographic images.
Among his platform pledges was a proposal to turn New York prisons into dormitories where welfare recipients could be given classes on hygiene. He also defended a supporter who compared the speaker of the New York Assembly, Sheldon Silver, who is Jewish, to “an Antichrist or a Hitler.”
Paladino, who has the all-out support of the tea party, spent $3 million of his fortune on his campaign.
He will face New York Attorney General An-drew A. Cuomo, a Democrat, in the November general election. Cuomo is the son of former New York Governor Mario Cuomo. He is a spellbinding orator and has built up a $24 million war chest for the campaign.
One hesitates to say that Cuomo will win the overwhelming victory he deserves. There were, after all, enough “mad” New York Republicans to nominate Paladino. Who can safely predict that the madness epidemic in the state won’t run out of control by Nov. 2 and send Carl and his ball bat to Albany?
Well, I take it back. It really is not a joking matter.
The Republicans who voted for that rich oaf in New York and a second-rate, sleazy woman in Delaware — and rejected well-qualified candidates in both contests — treated their party, their state and their country shabbily. They should be ashamed of themselves.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
