The Tribune

With Charlie Harper

Mike Castle will celebrate his 81st birthday today. Who is he and why does his example offer a significant message for members of the political party that opposed him for almost 50 years?

Castle is one of the most successful Republican politicians ever from the state of Delaware. But when he ran for the US Senate in 2010, he suffered one of the most unexpected political defeats in that state’s history.

The story of Castle’s defeat serves as a stark warning for the major US political parties in this consequential but topsy-turvy election year. To understand why, we need to look at Castle and his state.

The tiny state of Delaware has long enjoyed its reputation as a corporate tax haven. It is sometimes called the “State of DuPont” due to the large influence in its affairs of the locally based DuPont Corporation, until recently the world’s largest chemical company.

While Wilmington, the state’s biggest city by far, enjoys some regional importance, it remains true that many of Delaware’s most ambitious young professionals migrate to the north to find their destiny in nearby Philadelphia.

The state’s gorgeous Atlantic coastline attracts many of the wealthy and influential residents of Washington DC and Baltimore to its beaches when the weather is warm. But this curious combined exodus of young professional talent and the annual seasonal arrival of older professional visitors leaves the state without a distinct identity. And its small size makes it susceptible to fringe political movements.

Delaware currently ranks 49th in land mass and 46th in population among US states. It is one of several states whose constitutional allotment of US senators (two) exceeds its House delegation (one), because the latter is apportioned by population. Delaware normally enjoys little national political significance.

But as we know, Delaware has given us the Democratic nominee for President in 2020. And as he shelters at home from the COVID-19 pandemic, Joe Biden has reintroduced his state to millions of voters.

Let’s turn to Mike Castle, whose political destiny was poised to take a major positive turn in 2008 when presidential candidate Barack Obama chose erstwhile rival Biden as his running mate.

Castle had by then defied the political odds to build an impressive political career as a Republican in mostly Democratic Delaware, starting in the state general assembly in 1967 and rising through the ranks until he was elected governor in 1985. He was chosen as the state’s only congressman in 1993 and still occupied that position when Obama picked Biden and created a US Senate vacancy 16 years later.

What happened next provides an illustrative lesson for Democrats today. Castle, a GOP stalwart and hugely popular politician in a blue state, was poised to win a Senate seat in a 2010 special election to succeed Biden. But it never happened.

Instead, Christine O’Donnell happened. O’Donnell is the cautionary tale for both major political parties, but especially for today’s Democratic Party.

The Democrats look poised to build on their 2018 success by winning back the White House and perhaps even strengthening their House majority and recapturing control of the US Senate.

But danger lurks on their left flank, just as it did from the right flank for the Republicans a decade ago. In an America now yearning for centrist normalcy, the Democratic left continues to endanger overall party prospects by pushing candidates whose views take them out of the safe political midstream, and who may founder in the general election coming in four months.

Back in 2010, O’Donnell emerged from political obscurity to challenge Castle in the Delaware GOP senate primary. Her effort was strongly and loudly endorsed by the Tea Party movement, as well as by some organisations who reflexively support female candidates. O’Donnell raised a lot of money in a short time.

Castle and his Republican establishment backers were stunned and rose to the challenge a bit late. Everything was going so well for them - and then it wasn’t. The Tea Party had showed its strength with candidates around the US a dozen years ago, but none was as notorious as O’Donnell.

She had actually admitted that “I dabbled into witchcraft - I never joined a coven, but I did dabble into witchcraft.

“One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it,” she said. “We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.”

O’Donnell even expressed support for sexual premarital abstinence and opposition to the use of condoms and masturbation.

O’Donnell won the primary. She then promptly suffered a smashing 17-point defeat in the general election.

The lesson for this year’s Democrats is to watch out for their left flank. The election season has already seen long-time staunchly liberal New York area congressman Eliot Engel unhorsed in a Democratic primary vote by a black school administrator who was endorsed by Alexandra Octavio-Cortez and other Green New Deal advocates.

The Democrats will hold their seat with AOC and they’ll also almost certainly retain Engel’s old seat in November’s election. But in other races, for instance in Kentucky, the Democrats were worried.

Their establishment candidate was heavily challenged in the Kentucky Senate primary by an AOC - Bernie Sanders - and Elizabeth Warren-endorsed candidate from the left. The Democratic Party establishment felt that Charles Booker, an African American who campaigned on radical police reform, Green New Deal and universal free health care, could not possibly unseat incumbent Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, which gave Donald Trump a 30-point victory margin four years ago.

The Democratic Party preferred Amy McGrath, a retired Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel and the first woman to fly the F-18 fighter jet in combat. (The F-18 has been used by the Navy’s Blue Angels since 1986 in their celebrated flight exhibitions.) She is also an accomplished fundraiser and a moderate centrist seemingly more in tune than Booker with deep red Kentucky. The Democrats believed McGrath would give them at least a puncher’s chance against the ageing McConnell.

In the current era of mail-in voting, this week-old primary race was just called on Tuesday. McGrath was declared the winner, by a slim two-percentage point margin from over a half million votes cast. The national Democratic Party breathed a sigh of relief. But there will be other challenges from the left, and the central party will not always prevail.

As Mike Castle tries to blow out the 81 candles on his birthday cake today, his example is a reminder to both national parties to hope that fringe candidates don’t win their party’s nomination in highly contested districts. It can often end very badly for them if they do.

Nyet, it’s fake news again says the President

For most of his presidency, Donald Trump’s allies and critics alike have wondered whether his next outrage would finally weaken some of the solid support he has continued to receive from the Republican Party and from the 35-40 percent of overall voters who are consistently described as his base of support.

Would it be the sheer rudeness, callousness and prejudice that suffuses so many of his outrageous tweets? Perhaps his grossly insensitive response to the race riot in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 – “There are fine people on both sides?” How about the nearly 20,000 public lies that have been chronicled by respected, responsible news media?

Would it be his flagrant indifference to the rule of law, or to the most basic tenets of the national interest he has taken an oath to uphold, or to the public health of the nation as it suffers through an unprecedented pandemic?

The list goes on. And the reprehensible political hypocrites who continue to publicly defend the President have shown clearly they are interested solely in their own re-election prospects and that everything else is secondary. In this, they behave just like their president does.

Now we have the latest outrage. It seems Trump may have known for months of a Russian-financed bounty programme to incentivise the killing by the Taliban of US troops serving in Afghanistan, and that the US President has done nothing in response to sanction Russia or its President Vladimir Putin.

We are now hearing the customary loud sanctimony from elected Republicans. Trump is crying “fake news!” It’s fair to wonder if there will be anything more this time than the customary sanctimonious blather from the President’s allies and apologists.