You must not remember very well. I made it clear that I didn’t like Castle, I just didn’t like O’Donnell either. I didn’t think she had a chance at winning (and I was proven correct), and I thought she had a huge lack of integrity and lied about things she had no reason to lie about. That being the case, I didn’t think she deserved any trust in her purported conservative positions. I also had a huge problem with her prior lawsuits that were initiated on femi-nazi grounds against a Conservative organization.
+1
It’s not the purported conservative stances that did O’Donnell in, it’s the fact she was a terrible candidate. You can get a conservative candidate to win in DE, but they absolutely must be able to articulate that message across the voting spectrum. It was clear before the primary that she wasn’t going to be able to do that. Because some people pointed this out, they got attacked and became a scapegoat for her inevitable defeat.
I’m going to probably say something controversial here, but the Tea Party in Delaware did themselves no favors here in jumping on her bandwagon early. You can’t convince me out of the many active political conservatives in DE that this was the best they could come up with. The desire to take Castle down was rightfully strong, but there was absolutely no general election strategy in place to win the Seat.
This is what Karl Rove was trying to relay. He’s a numbers cruncher and knew what O’Donnell was going to be up against and what the likely result was going to be. He was lambasted from the TP leadership with “how dare you come into our back-yard and try to tell us how to handle our politics”. They don’t want to admit it, but Rove made some sense. They tried to make it like Rove was anti-conservative, when that wasn’t the case. If the Tea Party of Delaware had had their “Marco Rubio”-style conservative candidate, Rove would have been behind them 110% because a Marco Rubio style conservative had the patience, charisma, and character to educate and articulate to the differing voting masses that would actually make them competitive. Christine O’Donnell was clearly not that kind of candidate and her track record showed it to be true. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out. Yet, if you pointed this out, you got attacked as a RINO or some kind of Castle-sympathizer.