Matthews further maintained that it might be dangerous for Democrats to treat O’Donnell with the scorn and derision her campaign so richly deserves because he remembered that they did that to Ronald Reagan, too, and look how that turned out.
Well, that’s bullshit, and Chris Matthews knows it. By the time Reagan won in 1980, he was a giant figure in the Republican Party, and an even bigger one in the conservative movement that had risen to energize it after the Goldwater debacle in 1964. He had delivered thousands of speeches, all over the country, to anyone who’d stand in one place for five minutes and listen, the kind of party-building woodshedding that hardly any candidate does any more. In 1976, he’d run a close campaign against Gerald Ford, an unelected incumbent president, but an incumbent nonetheless. For all his carefully stage-managed anti-politics, Reagan paid more real political dues than any candidate of in the past 60 years — including, God knows, both John and Robert Kennedy.
And Christine O’Donnell is a sideshow freak.
Seriously now, she was a crackpot when she rose on primary morning, and she’s a crackpot now, and she will be a crackpot whether she wins or loses in November. She no more belongs in the Senate of the United States today than she did the day she was born. That 30,000-odd primates in Delaware thinks she belongs there is their problem. If enough people in Delaware come to think so, then she becomes our problem.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/christine-o-donnell-delaware-091510#ixzz0zdMurlHQ