What can we make of the Christine O’Donnell phenomenon, the tea party movement’s candidate who won an upset primary victory over moderate Mike Castle to become the Republican nominee for the Senate from Delaware?
She is young, pretty and articulate, but beyond that, she has lost three Senate campaigns in five years, her finances are a mess, she has defaulted on her mortgage, fudged on her education record, often misstates simple facts in television appearances, and has dabbled in witchcraft, advocated gay conversion therapy and equated masturbation with adultery. When the witchcraft connection came to light, she dropped out of two major Sunday television shows, saying she had forgotten about prior commitments to go to church and a picnic.
In short, she is an extreme case of the fringe of the tea party movement, far beyond Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, and Sharron Angle, the tea party and Republican nominee who is campaigning for the seat held by the Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid, and wants to phase out Social Security and abolish the U.S. Department of Education.
When Ms. O’Donnell unexpectedly defeated Rep. Castle for the Senate nomination last week, some prominent Republicans quickly assumed that she had no chance of beating the Democratic nominee, Chris Coons. Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s political strategist, promptly called her unelectable. But he quickly reversed course and endorsed her.
Beyond her questionable qualifications and positions, there is genuine concern for the future of the Republican Party, especially its shrinking moderate wing, which includes Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe.
“We can’t be a majority party if we can’t appeal across the spectrum, if we have an exclusionary approach in general,” Sen. Snowe said in a recent interview with The New York Times. She and Sen. Collins had been looking forward to Mr. Castle, a longtime member of the U.S. House of Repre-sentatives and former governor, joining their ranks of moderate Republicans in the Senate. Now that branch appears to be shrinking, which is bad for the country as a whole.
Ms. O’Donnell, as well as other tea party candidates and the movement itself, present a test for Republican leaders and for the electorate as a whole. If they go along with this new insurgency, with its vaguely defined principles and its disdain for traditional politics, they can find their party taken over temporarily by a populist movement much like the old Know Nothings, which eventually will be rejected by the American people.
In the Times, Sen. Collins rightly points out that voter discontent is a reaction to “fear and worry about the economy” and what she termed the “overreaching of the Obama administration.”
But going too far to the right is not a winning strategy in the long term.
The Palin-O’Donnell-Angle group could conceivably win in November, but a level-headed majority should be able to reassert itself and restore the normal politics that, with its ups and downs, has served us well.