Tea Party backed conservative candidate Christine O’Donnell has pulled off an improbable win against RINO Mike Castle in Delaware’s Republican Senatorial primary, beating the reliably liberal so-called Republican by a 53%-47% margin.

Is O’Donnell a great candidate?  No.  Is she even a good candidate?  Time will tell, but I seriously doubt it.

I’ve watched the battle raging between establishment Republicans who backed Castle for pragmatic reasons and the conservative faithful who backed O’Donnell for ideological reasons.

I’ve vacillated between the two, but ultimately sat back and rooted for O’Donnell tonight if only to teach establishment Republicans like those in Bucks County a lesson about taking the conservative block for granted, anointing candidates diametrically opposed to our values, and assuming we were all going to line up to man the phone banks and pull the levers come November.

It’s not that way any more.

For a while, I bought into the argument that a conservative couldn’t win in DE, and having a guy like Castle who would vote with us 50% of the time would be better than having a guy like Coons who will vote with us 0% of the time.  Having a guy like Castle, with an (R) behind his name even if he didn’t vote with us, got us one step closer to Chairmanships of Senate committees.  The absolute vitriol being spewed at anyone who disagreed, most notably by Mark Levin, of whom I am normally a big fan, was a huge turn-off.

Then I thought about Arlen Specter. And I thought about Olympia Snowe.  And I thought about Susan Collins.  We don’t need another Republican to pull the football away just when we’re ready to kick it.  If there are going to be 51 Democrats in the Senate, let there be 51 Democrats in the Senate.  To me, that’s better than 48 Democrats in the Senate with 3 Republicans who always vote with them.  At least we can draw clear distinctions.

The Republican establishment, true to form, says they’re not funding O’Donnell’s campaign in any way.  That’s verified.  The Republican party is not funding the campaign of the candidate chosen by Republican voters.  The Tea Party Express fought hard for their candidate.  They’re going to have to keep on fighting…alone.

Either way, good luck to O’Donnell and bad luck to Coons.

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Tagged

2010 Election, Christine O'Donnell, Delaware, US Senate