Everybody's Doing It!

Gee, thanks, Cubachi, for roping me into writing again. I guess it's time to put those thousands of dollars of education to work.

Well, the Delaware Senate primary is tomorrow. Everyone and their cat is weighing in. Right now Hex, our male cat, is unsuccessfully stalking our female cat, Bel, so does that mean Christine O'Donnell will escape the clutches of Mike Castle? Or will the stray cat that taunts them through the window (Chris Coons) come by and win yet again? There's a mental image for you: Congress run by cats. Would it really be all that worse than the hooligans we have now?

Here's my take: O'Donnell isn't as much a nut as she's made out to be, Castle is an idiot, and states need to stop having primaries so late.

Seriously? Mid-September? A primary is held so that a party can put up a candidate, that candidate competes against the other party cadidates (normally, I wouldn't be talking in plurals here, but thanks to power-hungry Lisa Murkowski, anything is possible), and voters have time to decide between all of them. But this year, states are having primaries so late that military servicemen cannot get ballots in time. That's a violation of the MOVE Act, and it's disenfranchisement of a group that just so happens to vote conservatively, which is why the DOJ is choosing to ignore it. Also, it is a disservice to voters to know who each parties' candidates are less than two months before the general election. With such a short time to introduce themselves to the general voting public, candidates are forced to flood the airwaves with advertisements, relying on bigger organizations like the DNC and RNC to fund their last push. The McCain-Feingold Act was supposed to take the money out of politics, but as in so many other instances, it makes things worse as candidates are forced to navigate through absurd laws while third-party organizations throw up accusatory ads.

In O'Donnell's case, time is not in her favor if she wins. The RNC shockingly does not have a lot of cash to go around, and she does not have time to make amends with the Republican Party of Delaware, who just filed a formal complaint with the FEC accusing her of recieving illegal contributions from the Tea Party Express. The state parties should not be arms of one candidate or another before a primary, but this whole race is a study in the misapplication of ethics. She's got to get a positive message out, and she has to do it fast.

Time is not in favor of Castle, either. Should he win, he has to don the conservative mantle that RINOs haul out every election cycle and convince riled-up Delaware Republicans that he's better than sending a Democrat into the seat. The fact that there is honest debate about that last point makes me wonder what sort of chance he has against Coons. I really do not care what PPP is threatening, polls have a hard time predicting a crazy race like this one.

Fortunately for O'Donnell, I've heard her interviewed more than once, and she does it well enough that my husband happened to hear her once and asked me who she was because he was so impressed. He's quite the cynic, so that should tell you something. I groaned, then tried to compress the whole race into five minutes. A few days later, Sarah Palin endorsed O'Donnell, leading to this exchange:

Pooky: "So, let me get this straight: They [some commenters at Hot Air] are complaining because Palin endorsed someone they don't think is electable?"

Me: "Yes."

Pooky: "I thought that the point of Palin's endorsements were for her to designate who she thought was the true conservative in the race, not who would win."

Me: "I know that, you know that, Palin knows that, but apparently they don't know that!"

What a mess! I hope (vainly, I know), that the media doesn't paint this as some sort of Palin loss, because her endorsements cannot win every single time. If they did, I'd start believing the Kos Kids' theories about Diebold voting machines. Well, maybe not. But I would buy stock in tinfoil and market tinfoil hat patterns on Etsy! :P