We Didn't Evict Harry, But At Least We Didn't Get Sharron

Now that we're on the other side of Tuesday's Democrat bloodbath, I'm happy to say that two key Republican candidates did not win their battles: Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle. Am I glad that Harry Reid retained his post in the face of Angle’s challenge? No, I am not. But I firmly believe that many of the Tea Party favored candidates are absolutely the wrong choice for the offices they sought, and the wrong direction for the Republican Party to be going in.

Angle is simply too extreme, and while she probably would never have accrued the power to carry out some of her more “out-there” ideas like eliminating the Department of Education, she’s the kind of candidate that would reveal herself to be woefully out of touch with her own constituency. Her campaign seemed to say little about correcting Nevada’s crippling unemployment rate, but seemed to spend most of its energy on attacking Reid. And when not doing that, she positioned herself among the paranoid fringes of her supporters. But don’t take my word for it; check out this reporting on Angle from the Christian Science Monitor:

Citing Thomas Jefferson’s notion about the periodic need for revolution, Angle told conservative talk radio host Lars Larson: “If this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.” She’s said essentially the same thing in other venues.

Whether or not Angle is actually suggesting armed opposition to political opponents, she’s also associated herself with some of the tenets of the “Oath Keepers,” a controversial group that claims a membership of law enforcement officers and active duty military personnel ready to disobey any “orders to disarm the American people.”

Hey, everyone’s entitled to their opinions, but at a time when the economy is at a real crisis point in the state you hope to represent, I don’t think the first thing on your mind ought to be black helicopters. And frankly, for a candidate running for office to come very close to advocating violence, that should have been a huge warning sign for voters. Apparently it was.

And then we have Christine O’Donnell, another Tea Party favored candidate who lost her bid in Delaware. My first issue with her was her insistence on taking interviews only from “friendly outlets,” and sometimes ducking the press completely (Angle also did this, to the point of using decoys). Her campaign was full of broad platitudes and idealistic notions, but little strategy. She was a walking collection of talking points, continually hitting all the keywords which those in the Tea Party seem to respond to like Pavlov’s Dog.

But apart from that, she has some pretty wild quotes to enjoy. Now I’m not going to stoop to going all the way back to the 1998 anti-masturbation, anti-evolution statements, some of which she has retracted. Why? Because I don’t have to. Check this doozy out:

"American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains." - Fox News's The O'Reilly Factor, 2007

Do I really need to explain what an overflowing basket of crazy that is? I’ve watched many a 1950’s science fiction movie, and never encountered a mad scientist plotline that wacky.

This is not the kind of gibberish the Republicans ought to be engaging in. What the party needs now is to locate the real core of what made the Reagan-Bush era so successful, and convince, not browbeat, the nation that they have a direction and a solid plan. It’s going to take stepping away from the “cut taxes, smaller government” mantra that they have continually failed to deliver on, and making some radical choices geared toward getting the country back to work, and encourage the growth of business at the street level. In this political environment, heroes could emerge out of the party. Neither O’Donnell nor Angle was up to that challenge.

Mike Grefski