The Delaware Disaster

If there is one thing Republicans excel at, it’s losing elections they should win. In fact, they’ve made it into an art form. Last night’s selection of Christine O’Donnell in Delaware’s Republican primary is virtually a case study in this. They did everything wrong in this primary, and there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Let’s start with the obvious. Many of you won’t want to admit this, but O’Donnell has no chance of winning. Every election tracking specialist from Michael Barone to Karl Rove agrees with this, and the polls confirm it. Most polls (including Rasmussen) show her around 11% behind the Democratic nominee and falling as moderate Republicans abandon her.

And in her loss, we are all but guaranteed that we will not retake the Senate. More importantly, we are going to lose an historic opportunity to take a seat that hasn’t swung Republican since 1972 and which could have easily gone Republican this time. This will haunt us in 2012 and beyond.

So who is to blame? Everyone involved.

The Conservatives. Too many conservatives underestimate the importance of winning. Indeed, the importance of having a Republican in a seat cannot be over-stated, and it goes way beyond how they will vote on individual pieces of legislation. The House and Senate are set up to give disproportionate power to the party in the majority. The majority party controls the schedule, controls what can and will be debated, and under what terms these bills will be debated. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have single-handedly decided the fate of this country through this power; nothing they did not like ever made it to the floor.

Yet, many Republican favor pointless stands on purity that achieve nothing except defeat. They don't understand that it is better to get half of what you want (or more in this case because control of the leadership is worth much more than half) than nothing except smug satisfaction. That is how the Democrats have pushed this country to the left and how Ronald Reagan pushed us back to the right. . . a little at a time, taking what they could get from any allies they could get it from. They understood that politics is about convincing people to come around to your way of thinking and is ill-suited for the all or nothing approach. . . the public always selects nothing. They also understood that not every state was going to cooperate and that it was better to take what you could get in some states than spite yourself to hold out for the perfect.

Now, this is not to say that conservatives should always vote for the most electable candidate. I don’t believe that. But there must be a blending of the issues of how electable a candidate is in a particular state with how they are likely to perform in Washington. Thus, tossing out Lisa Murkowski in Alaska makes sense, as does the selection of Paul Rand in Kentucky and Ken Buck in Colorado. But in a state like Delaware, where conservatives are a rare breed, and where one candidate would be a clear winner in the general election (and has a proven track record of being elected repeatedly), while the other is so far behind in the polls as to be a sure loser (and has a record of repeatedly losing elections), it is simply stupid to go with the loser.

But I'm not saying that I think Castle should be the nominee in Delaware. What I'm really saying is that the voters never should have been put in a position where voting for Mike Castle was the smart choice. Indeed, the real problem with conservatives in this instance was not in thinking that someone more conservative than Castle could win in Delaware, it was in accepting O’Donnell as that someone. Consider this. O’Donnell ran in the Republican primary in 2006. When she lost, she tried to run independently as a write-in candidate (disloyalty). She ran again and lost in 2008, this time by 30% (unelectability). In 2008, her mortgage went into foreclosure and her house was scheduled to be sold off at a sheriff’s auction until her campaign counsel stepped in to buy the house (corruption). In 2009, she began paying her rent with campaign contributions. She never paid her staff from the 2008 campaign. In 2010, the IRS put a lien on her property for taxes she owed from 2005. In 2004, she sued the Inter-Collegiate Studies Institute for gender discrimination (seeking $7 million, mostly in pain and suffering and punitive damages). And she made a series of false statements about her college degrees and on her FEC financial disclosures. None of this is consistent with her conservative rhetoric.

Conservatives bear the blame for not fielding a better candidate, i.e. one who was both conservative and electable. To have selected O’Donnell and chosen her over Castle was an act of political suicide that basically ensured the Democrats could keep a seat they would have lost. We are likely to pay for this for years to come as we try to repeal what the Democrats have done.

The Establishment. An even greater share of the blame for this debacle falls on the Republican establishment. Mike Castle is a RINO. He has held elective office since 1966 and is considered one of the most liberal Republicans in Congress. He voted for the TARP, cap and trade, and the DISCLOSE Act which limits freedom of speech. He also favors gun control and earned a 100% score from pro-abortion groups like NARAL. This is not a man who should ever have been fielded as a Republican candidate, and he should never have received any support from the establishment in a primary.

Since it’s naive to argue that the establishment should sit out primaries (and I don’t believe this anyway), I say very firmly that the establishment should have scoured the countryside for someone more electable. By failing to do that, the establishment surrendered the chance of fielding a candidate who was both conservative and capable of winning election, and left the voters with a choice of the lesser of two evil lesser. This is where most of the blame lies, and it’s the same blame they earned in allowing Dede Scozzafava to be the nominee in New York. It’s time that the establishment stopped looking for cozy insiders and careerists and began looking for talented conservatives.

All of Them. Finally, it is time that Republicans and conservatives learned to stop spitting venom at each other in the primaries. Ronald Reagan said the Eleventh Commandment was to never speak ill of another Republican, and he was right. This election cycle in particular has seen Republican after Republican savage each other in some of the sleaziest, nastiest campaigning I’ve ever seen in my life. What good does that do for the party? Primaries should not be bloodbaths, they should be about ideas and goals.

Once again, Delaware provides the perfect example of this. Castle and his allies in the establishment have spent the last week calling O’Donnell everything but a crazed child molester. They have made it virtually impossible to work with her following her win, and (more importantly) have raised the level of hate so much among moderate Republicans that she can expect none of them to vote for her, i.e. they guaranteed that she would lose. This was called scorched earth when Hitler did it, and it was no more successful then than it will be now. But the establishment wasn’t alone in this. O’Donnell accused Castle supporters of breaking into her home (though oddly, she filed no police report). Her supporters also put out an ad suggesting that Castle (who is married) engaged in a homosexual affair.

This sh~t must stop.