At least one media outlet, CNN, has noticed there’s actually 2 major party candidates in the U.S. Senate race and the one who is not a crazy-sounding trainwreck is actually winning. Of course, then Chris Coons had to reply to the rightwing’s ridiculous claims about him. No matter what, the right always controls the conversation.
Chuck Todd read back an excerpt from the article, in which Coons talked about his trip to Kenya: “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 them back bearded Marxists.”
“Well Chuck, just form the sentence you just read, it’s clearly a joke,” said Coons. “I am a clean-shaven capitalist. That was a tongue-in-cheek term that my former roommates, who were the heads of the Young Republicans on campus — my former roommates had taken to using as just a monicker, a joking name for me. I was the commencement speaker at Amherst college, and that profile was meant to give a brief explanation to my classmates about my transformation from a Young Republican to a Democrat.”
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“I’m no one’s pet, and I intend to be an independent voice in the United States Senate. That was a very unfortunate choice of words by Senator Reid,” Coons responded. “When the president came out with a proposal for offshore drilling, I opposed it the next day. it was a wrong idea for Delaware, and it’s wrong for the United States. I strongly disagree with how the banking bailouts were handled. I think the TARP bill, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, was passed in a hurry without any accountability, and hasn’t been administered properly. So there’s two examples that I would disagree.”
You can see from this video how much the fact that Chris Coons is not an incumbent helps him. He’s not tainted with bad decisions of previous Congresses and can define where he is different. In other words, he can support popular items and oppose unpopular ones. Hopefully at some point Chris Coons can talk about his ideas instead of the wingnut obsession of the week. Yes, I’m a hopeless optimist.