Self-fulfilling prophesies.

A response to Paul at Powerline ...

I am not a resident of Delaware nor do I have inside knowledge of its Republican political establishment. However, those who blame the Tea Party – which is not a party – for putting up a candidate who could not win, may want to amend their conclusions about the inevitability of Christine O’Donnell’s loss.

I base my dissent on several factors. First, despite being the focus of a really vicious national campaign to denigrate her personally; a campaign that included both Democrats AND Republicans, O’Donnell’s loss was not the blowout that was widely predicted. She received 40% of the vote in a state everyone said was a deep blue state. She was even with Coons for the Independent vote. According to exit polls, she received 51% of the white vote and 50% of the vote in small communities. She lost massively among blacks (by about the same margin as Republicans often get) but only got 81% of the Conservative vote.  In fact, O'Donnell got about the same percentage of the vote as Joe Biden's opponents received despite the national campaign to make her the poster child of the "Loony Right."

There was second factor that may give us some insight into her loss. She had to build a political machine from the ground up in the space of 45 days. Appearing on Bill O’Reilly’s show last week she said that the Republican Party in Delaware denied her their machinery to help her during the election. For all the good the Republican label gave her in blue-state Delaware, she actually ran an Independent campaign.

The bottom line is this: her loss was not foreordained. The Republican establishment – from Karl Rove on down – would rather lose an election than have people that they can’t control into that “big tent” they always say they want. When somebody as high profile as Rove denigrated O’Donnell after she beat the one the establishment anointed, Mike Castle, he was in the process of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Not saying that O’Donnell would have won the election in any case, just saying that running against both the Democrats and the Republicans made it just that much harder. The lesson for the Tea Party and Conservatives in general is that you have to be careful about choosing your friends because they may be the ones who are close enough to you to stab you in the back.

HISTORICAL SIDE NOTE: 

As I was writing these comments I was reminded of another event, long ago, during England’s War of the Roses. It ended in the death of the last British king killed in battle: Richard III. Most people have heard of Richard III from the play of the same name by William Shakespeare. He made Richard out to be a bloody villain. With the benefit of hindsight, Shakespeare knew that it was much safer in the England of his day to be on the side of the winner, Henry Tudor who after the battle was crowned Henry VII.

Richard III was killed at the battle of Bosworth Field because one of his key military leaders, Henry Percy – Earl of Northumberland – decided to sit out the battle, and another, William Stanley, waiting to see how the battle developed before deciding to come on Tudor’s side; in the end helped to kill Richard.

Politics hasn’t changed much in the intervening 525 years.