Ok, I don’t know much about Christine O’Donnell. What is it that makes the Republican establishment so concerned about her honesty and character?
What is it that makes the Republican establishment so concerned about her honesty and character?
Your presuppositions may be wrong here. Sanity check: Is Castle the paragon of honesty and character?
The only explanation I can find is "the good ol' boy network" rationalized by "after thoroughly trashing her in public we don't find her polling well."
It may also have to do with reality here. Because Castle can be bought and sold and O'Donnell hasn't given clear signals regarding her ability to be bought, this gives Establishment types one less option when pushing through their pet legislation and regulations. The culture of the East Coast is largely corrupt and self-absorbed because they have embraced fully post-modernism; this means to extract campaign loot one needs quid pro quos rather than love of country, freedom, liberty and old fashioned altruism.
Castle, as a classic seedy politician doesn't have any convictions and so third parties interested in advancing their own agenda were able to use him as they would any other tool to advance their cause.
Rove, being at the top of this game, must by necessity be one of these sorts of players too. There is no character in government, it is a bad presupposition that those with character will make it. Look at Palin, she had to drop out of formal politics to work in guerrilla or irregular politics in order to succeed.
Because Palin and the Tea Party are working in asymmetrical politics, the graduating class of the Kennedy School of Government can't process it and thus they resort to primitive behaviors typified by playground bullies. Since O'Donnell is perceived as Tea Party, the template is "destroy her now" since power structures usually "get rid of that which they don't understand".
This is the beauty of the Tea Party, it trashes the paradigm by being truly grassroots, without formal leaders, official platform nor discernible power base. Rove, not having a strategy against something so novel, is acting out on his basic broad-sword political instincts.