One of the small consolations of getting ringside seats to the Teabagger/Confederate Party implosion is that Charles P. Pierce will be doing a weekly series for Esquire’s Politics blog:
There is a real danger in overthinking what happened in Delaware on Tuesday night, which is not something of which the winner of the state’s GOP senatorial primary ever has been accused…
__
… Christine O’Donnell is a sideshow freak.
__
Seriously now, she was a crackpot when she rose on primary morning, and she’s a crackpot now, and she will be a crackpot whether she wins or loses in November. She no more belongs in the Senate of the United States today than she did the day she was born. That 30,000-odd primates in Delaware thinks she belongs there is their problem. If enough people in Delaware come to think so, then she becomes our problem.
__
O’Donnell is a creature of an age in which politics have no meaning beyond performance art. She is the Creature From The Green Room, with no apparent public career beyond being available whenever some teenage booker from the cable shows needed someone to say something reliably stupid… Her resume is so thin as to be opaque, and a lot of it seems to be a lie. She seems to be something of a deadbeat, and “U.S. Senator” seems to be her idea of an entry-level position. This morning, she stands one step away from the job…
__
She is what politics produces when you turn them into a game show and the coverage of them over to a generation of high-technology racetrack touts. She is what you get when political journalism reduces politics to numbers on a scoreboard, divorcing them from the real world consequences of what are increasingly seen as cute little eccentric decisions.
__
She is what politics produces when we abandon self-government for self-gratification. And that’s the real obvious irony in her victory on Tuesday night, and the only thing about it that truly matters. Christine O’Donnell’s campaign is a successful exercise in angry, misfit masturbation, with as little to do with the deadly problems this country faces as some guy wanking in the balcony of a grindhouse has to do with Romeo and Juliet.
Dave Weigel has a “Requiem for Mike Castle“:
I’m from Delaware, born in 1981, and can not remember a time when Mike Castle wasn’t being elected to something…There are two parties here: the party that does what the banks and DuPont wants, and the party that loses. Castle was the undisputed leader of the first party.
__
… There are tens of thousands of Delawareans who were expecting to vote for Mike Castle who are now given a choice between their workmanlike county executive, Chris Coons, and a woman who spent two weeks on the cover of the News Journal for stories about her trouble paying college fees, her lawsuit against her former employer ISI, her appearance in a MTV special about abstinence, etc, and etc, and etc. She got such rough treatment from the paper that she stopped talking to it…
__
[O’Donnell’s] victory was only possible because, for the first time, political donors and activists from outside our little state picked a target, froze it, and polarized it. But the message I am getting tonight is clear — neither the state GOP nor the NRSC will spend any resources on O’Donnell. Mike Castle could win in Delaware, and she can’t. I’d amend that slightly: No one like O’Donnell, a pure ideological candidate, has won a statewide race in Delaware in modern times. Maybe she’ll be the first! But the most likely scenario is that a shocked Delaware electorate elevates Coons to the U.S. Senate while waiting to see if it can give Castle another crack at statewide office in 2012. It’s what we’re used to.
And just so we don’t become too fixated on the latest shiny political object, Alex Pareene at Salon reminds us about August’s Flavor-of-the-Month Repub Nutball: “Rand Paul doesn’t understand how budgets, the Senate, math work.”
jibeaux
Is that the same guy (“Charlie Pierce”) who’s on Wait Wait?
R-Jud
“Her resume is so thin as to be opaque”
Shouldn’t that be “transparent”? Oh well.
geg6
I saw what he did there.
Tattoosydney
@R-Jud:
I quite liked it as a clever turn of phrase.
chopper
i just gotta say, i love all of this.
Stefan
… There are tens of thousands of Delawareans
It’s “Delawareans”? Really? Shouldn’t it be something cooler like, oh, Delawargs?
cleek
don’t get cocky.
Chyron HR
Cue the usual tweet from the usual suspect: “niggerbongo got NO res-you-me or experimance how DAT work OUT 4 U????????????? (PS it worked out BAD in case U dont NOTICE)”
(I’m just kidding. I spelled way too many words correctly.)
The Moar You Know
That Mr. Pierce has quite a way with words. I’d hate to be the target of one of his diatribes. Good show, man.
Oh, and thanks, teatards, for handing us Castle’s seat. Good going, guys.
jwb
@R-Jud: Yes, interesting that Pierce made that metaphorical mistake, however. It’s like for all his protesting, O’Donnell and the teabaggers remain opaque to him; or that thin resume is hiding some deeper reality, but it’s certainly not the freak show, which Pierce admits is clearly visible to any who would look. Curious.
Redshift
@jibeaux: Yes, it is.
Redshift
@jwb: It wasn’t a mistake. Charlie Pierce is an excellent writer; it was a deliberate twist, not an accidental substitution.
eemom
I don’t want to learn any more about this twat than I already know. Last night my husband was watching the video of her online and he was all like, come here, you gotta see this, she’s NUTS…….but I couldn’t bring myself to look.
I just want her and all of her insane ilk to implode together in a great big teatardic mushroom cloud on Nov. 2. That is all.
Zifnab
I’m sorry, but you know whose fault this really is? It’s the fucking Delware GOP’s problem. Deleware has a population in the millions. But come primary season, the Deleware GOP thought it could anoint its candidate with the barest fraction of that number. If Mike Castle can’t get more than 30,000 people to vote for him on primary day, maybe Mike Castle shouldn’t be in the US Senate.
Christine O’Donnell spent the money. Christine O’Donnell ran the ads and drummed up the support. Christine O’Donnell got people into the voting booths pulling the lever. Mike Castle wanted to take the seat in the general election via name recognition. If he’s feeling shitty now, he can drive up to Massachusetts and cry it out with Martha Coakley.
Welcome to fucking Democracy, people.
water balloon
Watching Hannity last night was hilarious. Karl Rove unloaded on O’Donnell like crazy. Hannity didn’t seem to be expecting it, he got very frustrated during the interview. Apparently she had accused Castle of gay relationships with his aides and sneding people to hide in her bushes and all kinds of other crazy stuff. When you’re too out there for even Karl Rove to spin for you, you’re toast.
Violet
Food for thought and a little scary, from the Christian Science Monitor:
44 percent see the Tea Party in a favorable light? Sheesh.
Omnes Omnibus
@Violet: I have trouble seeing a poll of less than 1000 people providing a real insight in the zeitgeist.
cleek
i saw her on CNN’s morning show thingy and she sounded exactly like Palin used to: the same anti-establishment golly-gee-isms, the vacant manic grin, the utter lack of confidence masquerading as folksy common sense.
El Cid
@Omnes Omnibus: In statistics, that’s plenty to establish a 95% confidence interval. Certainly the result could be very different if you could survey every single member of whatever population you’re measuring, but above 1,000 you’re getting close to a 97% confidence interval.
On the other hand, it would be very interesting to see a regional / state / local breakdown of such results, and that would probably need a much larger sample size given that the target population would then be the geographic region on which you were focusing. Mainly I think the right wing South and many of the Western states are heavily weighting the overall results.
Violet
@El Cid:
I don’t know enough about polling to know what to think, but it was kind of interesting.
I thought the same thing about regional breakdowns. I’d imagine they’d be pretty stark.
D. Mason
It’s fun watching rats fuck themselves.
Stefan
Man, Beau Biden must be having a bad day. This is the race for his dad’s old seat, and Beau was going to run until Mike Castle entered. Beau didn’t want to face Castle, so he decided to hang back until next time and let Coons be the sacrificial lamb. But now Coons is a shoo-in and Beau Biden won’t have any shot at taking his dad’s place.
Xenos
@El Cid: A 95% confidence interval of people who answer land-line phones during the dinner hour, maybe.
El Cid
@Xenos: Not necessarily — more and more polls are incorporating cellphone numbers. Tests have indicated they’re fairly reliable.
This is not to suggest that survey questions capture the correct things you need to know.
Corner Stone
I hate to argue with the Charles P. Pierce, but has anyone here heard of Jim Bunning or James Inhofe?
Both of them are equally as bugfuck crazy as this candidate.
Lolis
@Violet:
I doubt 44% of America has a strong understanding of what the Tea Party movement it. I think these kinds of polls are pretty worthless. Plus, 44% isn’t enough to win any national or statewide elections outside the South.
Still, if you are worried O’Donnell could win, give some money to Coons. I gave him some last night.
Nate W.
@Zifnab:
“Delaware has a population in the millions”
Umm, no. 885,122 (2009 est.) Google is your friend.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware
El Cid
@Nate W.: We ain’t gonna be oppressed by your fancy big-head “maff”.
gnomedad
Two O’Donnell ads! I guess the Google superbrain is not ready to rule the world just yet.
cmorenc
@Violet:
Actually, I like the idea of a “Tea Party” rebellion against politics and government as usual IN THE ABSTRACT, and I’ll bet so do most of you progressives. It’s only when one gets into the particulars of exactly who it is that’s seized that label for themselves and the particular notions of government and society they want to institute that the “tea party” notion begins to look repulsive instead of attractive.
What progressives thought the country needed (and thought they were on the verge of pulling off over the 2006 and 2008 election cycles) was what amounted to a progressive grass-roots “Tea Party” rebellion, only we didn’t think of calling ourselves by that catchy, familiar historical title, unfortunately leaving the potential trademark open for reactionary forces to seize for themselves. Instead, we called ourselves…um, to the extent we had a title…”NETROOTS”. Nice, modern, tech-savvy sound to that. However, the one thing we have to give credit to the reactionaries is that they figured out that “Tea Party” is an even catchier name that EVERYONE who went through school in the US is instantly familiar with, perhaps one of the handful of history class factoids they forever remember, the “Tea Party”. They may be toxic and insane, but they did pick a clever, infectious trademark for their movement.
Nate W.
@Zifnab:
Further, there are about 183,000 voters qualified to vote in the closed republican primary in Delaware:
delawareonline.com/article/20100914/NEWS02/9140351/1006/NEWS
Last night’s turnout of 57,500 people was a 31% turnout on a primary–much bigger than historical turnout of 15-20%. See id.
Making your point is so much easier when you aren’t pulling numbers out of your ass…
cckids
@Zifnab:
Reminds me of the Bush administration pushing for elections in Palestine & being gobsmacked that they elected Hamas. “Oh the horror!!!”
someofparts
Actually she is opposed to masturbation.
celticdragonchick
There is no parallel for this that I can think of in the last one hundred years. Probably not even the last two hundred, although the fire breathers from the South just before the Civil War comes close.
What the fuck are we doing to our republic?
Remember this year, everybody. We will point to it one day to our kids or grandkids as the year when we chose the consequences that will be haunting us for the next century.
celticdragonchick
@cleek:
There ya go.
SiubhanDuinne
@Nate W.: That’s kind of astonishing. The county I live in has nearly as many people as the entire state of Delaware.
NonyNony
@Nate W.:
But that really only serves to underscore Zifnab’s point. 183,000 voters eligible to vote in the primary and 57K turned out to vote. Castle had the money, he basically had the incumbency advantage, and he either couldn’t or didn’t bother to work the GOTV with his people to overwhelm the out-of-staters who were working to GOTV for O’Donnell. So I can see where he’s coming from.
But he’s wrong on one point – this isn’t about Castle and O’Donnell at all. This is about two factions of the GOP fighting amongst each other for who will control the party. The Chamber/Establishment faction backed Castle because strategically he’s the best choice. The Tea Party/Bircher faction backed O’Donnell – not because they have any desire to see her in the Senate but because they wanted to exert muscle and show the Establishment faction that they can set the agenda.
This is all about internal faction warfare. They don’t necessarily have to win that seat to exert more power of the GOP either – making sure an Establishment GOP Senator is almost as good as taking that seat for themselves. Because at its core this is about a takeover attempt of the GOP, and this is not a typical election year battle that’s been going on.
(To a large degree, though, I think Castle suffered because the Delaware primary was scheduled for after the traditional August media shitstorm. But that also indicates that the Tea Partiers know how to pick their battles.)
Zifnab
@Nate W.: :-p Ok, my numbers are off. But when you’ve got 180k registered Republicans and the vote goes down 27k to 30k, it seems like Castle left a lot on the table.
@Nate W.:
You can’t deny the hotly contested Senate Primary fight swung those numbers. O’Donnell motivated a bunch of stay-at-homers and won the night. Castle expected to waltz in on the regular crowd. If O’Donnell is a crazy little nutter (and it appears she is) then Castle should have been able to either a) swing more base voters his way or b) get more eligible voters into the polls. Castle’s failure last night was the result of an insulated minority voter group getting crashed by a demagogue.
As was pointed out in the “First Cut is the Deepest” thread, NY Gubernatorial race saw a 30% higher turnout for Democrats in a rather sleepy race than for Republicans in a hotly contested one.
I see it here in Texas and I’m sure it happens in other states. Many of these primaries are run very under the table, with the expectation that lower turnout will give the party officials greater control. Castle got rolled because Delaware Republicans neglected the greater pool of qualified voters. Coons would have lost in November against Castle because Coons wouldn’t be able to field the same GOTV operation as his rival. And now O’Donnell is going to lose in the general because the Republicans in general aren’t going to GOTV like the Democrats.
O’Donnell didn’t win by trickery or magic. She won by playing the game straight up. Whatever may be said of her policies, she was the better politician.
SteveinSC
@someofparts: I also am opposed to masturbation, I just can’t stop. Maybe the younger generation will be able to respond to her noble call and succeed where I have not. (Big snark.)
Shalimar
@Corner Stone: Nor should anyone ever forget that Tom “lesbians are rampant in high school bathrooms” Coburn is insane. It’s a sign of the times that a loon like Coburn is able to seem respectable.
catclub
@celticdragonchick:
“Remember this year, everybody. We will point to it one day to our kids or grandkids as the year when we chose the consequences that will be haunting us for the next century. ”
I don’t see it. Simply because we are blinded by the present.
There are continual complaints all through history that NOW things are worse than they ever were before. That NOW kids are worse than ever before and NOW the younger generation has terrible taste in music. Only very few of those occasions are actually correct.
1964: GOP goes crazy and gets clobbered, 1968 the US elects tricky Dick (by a whisker).
2000: electorate was bored but the election ends up being hugely important – nobody knew what was in store ( in specific – general clusterfuck was probably predicted by Molly Ivins).
TaMara (BHF)
Thank Anne Laurie, this post made my morning. The title alone was smile worthy.
Nate W.
@Zifnab:
I don’t disagree with your point at all–O’Donnell won because she had the most votes. I just disagree with the comment that the GOP expected to anoint Castle. It wasn’t like Castle’s showing was anemic; he got more people to vote for him than usually show up in a regular GOP primary in Delaware. 31% is a pretty high turnout for a primary.
Second, I get very annoyed when people pull numbers out of their ass to support their argument. Either leave the facts alone or spend 30 seconds on google to make sure you aren’t spewing complete BS.
[eta: Mods, this is me. I’m at work and so am at a different IP address.]
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Violet:
When I was growing up “most” meant more than half, by a fair margin. 44 percent is not “most”. Mr Mayur is engaging in some rhetorical sleight of hand here. In a country where you can get about 40 percent of the population to say that the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east if the GOP and Fox News tell them it is so, and on the other hand where it is common wisdom to think that as a democracy we should go ahead and pursue whatever policy it is that “most” people support, conflating “most” with 44 percent is a dangerous thing to do. These things are not the same, and confusing them has consequences.
This is a favorite rhetorical tactic of the GOP. Mich McConnell uses it all the time – he will take something that only GOPers and a few Indy’s support, adding up to somewhere between 28 percent and 45 percent of the electorate, and stand up in front of a microphone to claim that this is what “most of the American people want”. We need to call bullshit on this tactic more often.
PaminBB
“O’Donnell didn’t win by trickery or magic. She won by playing the game straight up. Whatever may be said of her policies, she was the better politician. ”
Well, it sounds as though she had a lot of help from out of state, blitzing in at the last minute. It is definitely fair to say that Castle underestimated her, and it’c come back to bite him in the ass.
OTOH, part of me would love to see Christine and Alvin Green “debating” on the floor of the Senate…
Barbara
As much as I like Nate Silver, I do think that, forgive the pun, Charles Pierce has his number, along with all the other numbers enthusiasts who seem to have turned their attention from baseball and horse racing to politics.
Chris
@cmorenc: The problem here is that “tea party” brings up the thought of “boston tea party” in the mind of the low-information-voter.
Most people make most of their decisions based on emotion. “Boston tea party” brings up patriotic emotions. The trick is to swap it out for another memory with a different emotion attached. Since the idea is to do this with the low-information-voter, I suspect a series of TV ads in which “tea party” is associated with an upper-crust British family having their afternoon high tea while dissing stupid Americans would do the trick. Then the phrase “tea party” would reference “snooty Brits who hate America” and trigger a bad emotional reaction, and suddenly 44% would automatically dislike the Tea Party, instead of automatically liking it.
(This is of course a very Rovian tactic: magically turn your enemy’s strength into a weakness. Which means the Dems won’t do it. Alas.)
Stefan
I suspect a series of TV ads in which “tea party” is associated with an upper-crust British family having their afternoon high tea
Aarrggh! This hits on a pet annoyance of mine — “high tea” does not mean afternoon tea of crumpets and finger sandwiches. “High tea” is actually what the working-class ate for an early supper right after they got home from work in the late afternoon/early evening, and was generally cold meat sandwiches, fish, cakes, soup, etc. There’s nothing at all fancy about high tea — it’s a farmer’s, miner’s and factory worker’s meal.
At some point Americans heard the phrase “high tea” and, perhaps confused by associations with High Church Anglicanism, transposed that phrase onto afternoon tea. But it’s not the same thing at all.
pseudonymous in nc
There are regional variations, but what British people call their meals has long been a class indicator:
Working class: breakfast, dinner and tea.
Middle class: breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Upper class: breakfast, lunch and supper.