On Tuesday, September 14, representative government was reaffirmed in the State of Delaware.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He was defeated in the state\u2019s Republican primary by a relative newcomer to elective office, Christine O\u2019Donnell.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In 1980, after engaging in the private practice of law for four years, he was elected Lieutenant Governor, <\/a>serving in that office from 1981-85.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 As a measure of his unreliability, he came to be known in the 111th<\/sup> Congress as an \u201cObama Republican.\u201d\u00a0 But the masquerade is now over; Christine O\u2019Donnell has done us all the favor of retiring Castle back to Delaware where he can live out his years as a bitter old liberal.<\/p>\n So just who is Christine O\u2019Donnell?\u00a0 From what we know of her she may very well be the distaff version of the Gary Cooper character in the 1941 movie classic, \u201cMeet John Doe.\u201d\u00a0 And if, as the literary term has come to be defined, \u201ceveryman\u201d is the ordinary individual with whom readers are able to identify easily, and who is often placed in extraordinary circumstances, then Christine O\u2019Donnell is destined to be the \u201ceverywoman\u201d of modern day elective politics.<\/p>\n According to a biographical sketch in Wikipedia, O\u2019Donnell has worked as a marketing consultant<\/a>, as a freelance public relations<\/a> consultant, as an advocate for sexual abstinence<\/a>, and as a political commentator<\/a>.\u00a0 She ran for the Republican nomination for Senate in 2006<\/a>, finishing third in the primary and then winning four percent of the vote as a write-in candidate in the General Election. \u00a0She was the Republican nominee in the \u00a0U.S. Senate election<\/a> against Joe Biden in 2008, losing by a wide margin.\u00a0<\/p>\n After graduating from Moorestown (New Jersey) High School<\/a> in 1987, she attended Fairleigh Dickinson University<\/a>, majoring in Theater Arts before beginning course work toward a B.A.<\/a> in English and Communications.\u00a0 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. \u00a0(She would later say of this period of her life, \u201cI know what it\u2019s like to live a life without principle.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n She became increasingly interested in both politics and religion, becoming an evangelical<\/a> Christian, preaching sexual abstinence and joining the College Republicans<\/a>.<\/p>\n According to Wikipedia, she attended Fairleigh Dickinson\u2019s commencement exercises in 1993 but did not receive a degree because of an outstanding tuition<\/a> payment.\u00a0 The university sued her for $4,823 in 1994, winning a judgment in New Jersey courts for the entire amount.\u00a0 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<\/a> with a concentration in Communication<\/a>s.<\/p>\n 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>, a DC-based anti-pornography<\/a> group; and for Concerned Women for America<\/a>, a Conservative Christian<\/a> political action group. \u00a0In 1996 she founded the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT) and served as its president.\u00a0 In her role as SALT president she made several high profile appearances on programs such as MTV<\/a>‘s Sex In The 90’s<\/em>, and on Bill Maher<\/a>‘s Politically Incorrect<\/a><\/em>, arguing that since America \u201ctook the Bible and prayer out of public schools\u201d we were now \u201chaving weekly (school) shootings,\u201d and that the 1960s \u201csexual revolution<\/a>\u201d led to the AIDS<\/a> epidemic.\u00a0 She was awarded a Lincoln Fellowship by the Claremont Institute<\/a>, a conservative think tank in 2002.<\/p>\n In 2003, O’Donnell moved to Delaware to work for the conservative<\/a> Intercollegiate Studies Institute<\/a> (ISI) and bought a house in Wilmington<\/a>.\u00a0 She later registered a gender discrimination<\/a> complaint against ISI with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission<\/a> (EEOC), after which she was terminated by ISI in 2004.\u00a0 She sued the Institute in federal court<\/a> for $6.9\u00a0million for wrongful termination<\/a> but dropped her claim in 2008 because she could no longer afford the legal fees.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2008, she was unable to pay<\/a> the mortgage<\/a> on her Wilmington house and the mortgage company obtained a judgment against her for $90,000.\u00a0 In addition, the IRS has claimed that she owes $11,000 in back taxes, although O\u2019Donnell insists that the dispute is a matter of \u201ccomputer error.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Clearly, O\u2019Donnell 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.\u00a0 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 \u201csugar daddy\u201d to finance her education in pricey Ivy League schools such as Columbia and Harvard.<\/p>\n Whereas Barack Obama had everything handed to him on a silver platter, O\u2019Donnell had to struggle for everything she has.\u00a0 Whereas Obama is an advocate of income redistribution, taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots, O\u2019Donnell is a woman who takes responsibility for her own affairs.\u00a0 And whereas Obama is a man about whom we know almost nothing, O\u2019Donnell is a woman about whom we know much, both good and bad.<\/p>\n So what is the choice that Delawarians will have on November 2?\u00a0 The choice is not so much between O\u2019Donnell and her Democratic opponent, New Castle County Executive Chris Coons, who once referred to himself as a \u201cbearded Marxist,\u201d the choice Delaware voters will face is between what Barack Obama stands for and what Christine O\u2019Donnell stands for.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019Donnell agrees with the American people that the first obligation of the federal government is to control our borders against foreign incursion.<\/p>\n While Obama passes himself off as a former constitutional law professor\u2026 which he is not\u2026 O\u2019Donnell is smart enough to know that the United States is comprised of 50 states, not 57, and that the phrase \u201call men are created equal\u201d is a part of the Declaration of Independence, not the U.S. Constitution. \u00a0<\/p>\n While Obama insists that the Bush tax cuts be extended only for the most voter-rich segments of our society, O\u2019Donnell 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.<\/p>\n While Obama believes that there is no harm in banning deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for six months, O\u2019Donnell 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019Donnell knows that no one but a board certified fool would make such a claim.<\/p>\n In his commentary on Thursday evening, September 16th<\/sup>, Bill O\u2019Reilly opined that, because of who and what she is, O\u2019Donnell will be forced to campaign on ideology alone, rather than on lifetime accomplishments.\u00a0 One wonders whether O\u2019Reilly might have been reminded of another major figure in American politics who is the poster-boy for a complete lack of accomplishment.\u00a0 To paraphrase the late Flip Wilson, \u201cDo de name Barack Obama ring a bell?\u201d<\/p>\n We should not forget that Illinois Democrats elected Obama to the United States Senate with no more credentials than Ms. O\u2019Donnell possesses.\u00a0 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\u2019s rule\u2026 they thought that they could, in fact, fool all of the people all of the time.\u00a0 The people of Delaware have finally gotten wise to both of them.\u00a0 Welcome to the United States Senate, Ms. Everywoman… or is it Joann Doe?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Tuesday, September 14, representative government was reaffirmed in the State of Delaware.\u00a0 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 … Continue reading