The strategy was to cast Angle as a wild-eyed crazy berserker. But you just can’t have two of those in the same election cycle. When the media shifted it’s attention to O’Donnell they let Angle escape to recast herself and shift the conversation back to Dingy Harry’s record.
That's a great point. Democrats and their media allies have only two templates for any conservative - evil (Cheney, Gingrich, Rove) or stupid (Palin, Quayle, O'Donnell). When you reach the level of Bush or Reagan, they denounce you as both.
Angle was supposed to be the nutter this election cycle until O'Donnell won in Delaware and the media (and Rove) decided O'Donnell was the nutter which left Angle room to be "sensible".
So, even if O'Donnell loses, she has in a sense defeated both Mike Castle and Harry Reid - a two-fer.