Book Review: Troublemaker by Christine O’Donell

Christine O’Donell is…she’s weird. If you’re not familiar with her she’s that senate candidate from Delaware that did the weird ad where she denied being a witch- meaning literally that she did not practice witchcraft. Her book is not as bad as I would have thought, but she’s a terrible face for the right.
She’ll never get over that stupid witch commercial. Her book explains at great length what actually happened there, but it doesn’t come off as any less strange after she goes through explaining it. There was something about her going on a date with a goth boy in high school which came up on a Bill Maher show years ago and re-surfaced during her 2010 campaign. Apparently, her advisors came up with it thinking it was a great idea, but in fact, it looks to have killed a campaign that was otherwise going well. It killed her.
Her new book, Troublemaker, is an autobiographical account of that same campaign written in a very inspirational speaker/self-help sort of tone. It has some political tidbits I wasn’t aware of, including the feud between O’Donell and Karl Rove, in which O’Donnell calls Karl Rove a RINO (Republican in Name Only). She calls Rove a liberal in the book. That’s great. Somebody has to bring her to a Manhattan art gallery opening or a Judith Butler lecture to say things like that. That would be amazing! They wouldn’t think she was a witch, they’d think she was Satan himself! That I would pay to see!
Christine O’Donell, that whole bit about her being a witch- that is extremely bad politics that those older statements came up and the ad responding to the old statement from the Bill Maher show were laugh out loud funny. Then by writing a book that goes into the backstory behind the TV ad at great length, she’s dug herself even further in the ditch. People don’t want their leaders to be kooks that make strange comments about witchcraft in public. They want leaders that appear stable. A little bit earlier, the New York City Councilmen Dan Halloran admitted to practicing the Neo-Norse religion of Theodism during his campaign for office. In fact, what this demonstrates I think is that if Christine O’Donell had actually practiced witchcraft and freely admitted it, she might have done just fine. Instead she just made some very odd statement about dabbling in the occult years and years ago, it resurfaced, and she made a hilariously funny video denying she was a witch. If your running for public office, if you’re someone like Sarah Palin, you’ve got to know that anything you say is going to be subject to the usages of the liberal media and by comedians, talk show hosts and the like. She faltered completely.
She’s weird. She could do very well for herself and I think has done very well for herself on the conservative speaking circuit. I think she was dead in the water for public office with the witch thing.