David Sessions read the Christine O’Donnell book so, for the love of God, we don’t have to. But you do have to read his whole Daily Beast column.
O’Donnell lost her insurgent Delaware Senate race to Chris Coons by a large margin. And as her new memoir, Troublemaker: Let’s Do What It Takes to Make America Great Again, proves, she thinks the witch video had a lot to do with it, even as she reveals layer upon layer of evidence that shows she was never likely to win in the first place.
Troublemaker is a shorter book than its large print has manipulated it to appear. But even with its modest running time, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to sit through the sometimes excruciatingly dull childhood anecdotes and endless political shoptalk.
From reading the column, it appears to be that the whole book is an exercise in denial.
As O’Donnell tells it, she never wanted to record the witch ad. When her campaign manager pitched it to her, he said, “You’re going to hate this, Christine, but hear me out.” She did hate it, and kept hating it even as he all but tricked her into recording a few takes. They had written another ad she preferred, that featured her supporters’ stories of economic hardship. But even as she intoned, “I’m not a witch,” ostensibly to see how it sounded on camera, she says she was violating her better judgment. She “cringed” when the line showed up on the teleprompter, but she actually “wanted to scream.” She felt in her bones that something would go wrong, and later that night, she met with a group of pastors and asked them to pray. “I think I just made a terrible mistake,” she told them.
I take back my earlier suggestion that she did not pass the buck on this when I posted her quote to that affect yesterday. She is blaming everyone but herself here. Her denial is not just limited to herself. She believes Karl Rove is a liberal, and she believes Karl Rove is solely responsible for the failure of the Bush Administration through the implementation of Karl Rove’s liberal policies. She spends so much time on this the Witch ad because she thinks this one ad destroyed her campaign. And if it wasn’t the ad, it was her Republican campaign handlers who created that ad and others. If it wasn’t them, it was Mike Castle and Joe Biden, hiding, in the bushes and tapping her phones.
And after all this, abortion is still the end all be all to her politics.
O’Donnell’s mother was a lifelong Democrat who seriously disappointed the 7-year-old Christine by voting for Jimmy Carter. (O’Donnell had decided she wanted to marry Gerald Ford.) But her politics followed her mom’s. In college, she says, she “thought of myself as a liberal person—leaning to the left on the issues of the day.” But she tangled with a friend over abortion, and soon found herself reading technical medical books in the library. “It was appalling to me, the way they described the procedure,” she writes. Realizing abortion was wrong “shattered my worldview, to the point where I came away thinking, If I’ve been wrong about abortion, what else am I wrong about?” In no time at all, she had become her campus’s lone anti-abortion activist, receiving boxes of plastic fetuses in the mail from pro-life groups. In her telling, it was that issue alone—and a conversation with a cute College Republican volunteer—that opened her up to joining her efforts with the Republican Party, and before long she was swept up in the excitement of the Bush/Quayle campaign.
That was the first and last time the Bush-Quayle campaign was described as exciting. But it shows, contrary to her assertions in 2010, that abortion is her single issue. She was, and is, a superficial person with not much intellectual and philosophical depth. She thought of herself as a liberal for years, from childhood to college, only because that was her family’s heritage. And one confrontation on abortion in college changes her, not only on that issue, but on everything. That shows you she never explored her politics, her ideology, or her philosophy until then. And given her wholesale adoption of the GOP platform just because the GOP was anti-abortion, it shows she has not explored it since either.
Christine O’Donnell is who we thought she was.