'I'm You'

It's unfortunate that this will be Christine O'Donnell's first ad buy. But it could be a smart move. She looks a little too vulnerable, but maybe that will play well with the voters. Doug Mataconis lays it plain out: "Will it work?" There's a good chance it will, but there's not much time. And if leftists keep digging up new oddities about her background, well, at some point it's hard to rebound. And rest assured, the left will keep digging until they can destroy her. Mark Leibovich reports that he confirmed, back in 2006, that O'Donnell's father once worked as Philadelphia's Bozo the Clown. But some crazed Democrat refused to believe it and demanded "proof":

The Bozo bombshell was first reported by The News Journal of Wilmington in November 2006, during one of Ms. O’Donnell’s previous Senate campaigns. The detail was included in a profile of Ms. O’Donnell that I wrote for Saturday’s Times. Ms. O’Donnell’s older brother, Daniel, confirmed in a phone call that indeed his father had played Bozo.

“Bozo the Clown is a franchise, and back then, every major city had their own Bozo,” said Daniel O’Donnell, the brother, who is a business manager at a car dealership in Trenton. “He was Philly’s Bozo for a time.” Daniel O’Donnell, the father, declined to comment for that article.

On Saturday morning, I received e-mail from a reader questioning whether this claim was true based on the absence of any “Daniel O’Donnell” listed on the ultimate authority on all things, Wikipedia. The reader demanded proof about Mr. O’Donnell’s Bozo bona fides and a level of specificity and documentation that I was not prepared to provide. My answer – that I had verified the Bozo fact with the O’Donnell family – was woefully unacceptable to her, a position that she laid out in a way that soon convinced me that devoting more time on the subject was not how I wanted to spend my Saturday.

There are much stranger things in life than for one's father to have worked as a circus-style entertainer. But for the left, the tiniest eccentricity is fuel for the "oddities" campaign they're waging in the absence of any credible public policy record to run on. This is what's become of American politics under the Democrats. It's pretty sad. But at least we know that yes, no matter what happens, Christine O'Donnell is me. She's you. She's a regular American.