Wow, now it looks like the ‘Rat Party didn’t do such a hot job of vetting.
Did anyone watch him on Hardball tonight? I “heard” he was impressive.
Coons was set up by the DE Dems as desultory opposition for Castle as a backroom deal, he was never a “serious” candidate (it was as I said, Castle would switch to the Dems at an appropriate time, the only reason that occurred in the first place). The Dems only fielded a “serious” candidate for the House seat.
I think that the evidence that Coons “admitted” to being a “bearded Marxist” is overblown. As the Politico article indicates, when Coons arrived at Amherst College as an undergrad he was a clean-shaven Republican who was fresh from having campaigned for President Reagan in 1980, and he worked for GOP Sen. William Roth and became one of the founders of the Amherst Republican Club. Coons started becoming more liberal while at the school, and by the time he returned to Amherst for his senior year after a semester in Kenya he had grown a beard, become a full-blown liberal and joined the Democrats. His friends joked that he had returned as a “bearded Marxist,” and when he wrote an article in the Amherst Student about his experiences and transformation into a liberal Democrat he titled it “Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist” (one of the lines in the article was “My friends now joke that something about Kenya, maybe the strange diet, or the tropical sun, changed my personality; Africa to them seems a catalytic converter that takes in clean-shaven, clear-thinking Americans and sends back bearded Marxists.”).
I don’t think that Coons was admitting to being a Marxist, he was merely using the characterization that others had jokingly made about him. Now, a smart person would have placed “Bearded Marxist” in quotes to make clear that it is not a self-appellation, but, given that Coons went from a supporter of President Reagan to a liberal Democrat in four short years, we already knew that intelligence isn’t his strong suit.
This will get a bit of attention in the MSM and lot of press in conservative circles, but I think that his spokesman’s explanation, and the quotes from the article, will defuse whatever potential this had of becoming a major issue. I mean, if it convinced me that there’s not really anything there, I don’t think that moderates will find his 1985 article to be a big deal.
So O’Donnell won’t be able to ride Coons’s “bearded Marxist” remark to victory. But on more hopeful news for O’Donnell, she has raised over $900,000 since she won the primary, and Rasmussen just released a poll showing her down by only 53%-42% among likely voters, which isn’t as bad as I thought she would be. O’Donnell has 47 days to redefine herself as a competent, honest conservative who will work for the people and define Coons as a dangerous liberal beholden to special interests. It won’t be easy, but all of that money that she has raised will help (so long as she uses it for TV ads).