The Delaware Senate Debate

In Delaware, a face off between the always fascinating -- in a clinical sort of way -- Christine O'Donnell, and Chris Coons, a man so wonkish he thinks "Ms. O'Donnell is not familiar with how bond ratings work" is a cutting insult. Ah, America.

O'Donnell is getting a lot of traction from her "I'm an ordinary person just like you" routine. In the debate she emphasized this over and over:

I don’t have a trust fund, I didn’t come from a privileged background. I paid my own college education. I have worked hard to get to the position that I am in.

I do understand the appeal of this, especially after a decade in which foreign policy "experts" dragged us into two pointless wars and financial "experts" nearly destroyed global capitalism. But I prefer my outsiders to have some idea what it is about the system that they don't like. Last night O'Donnell was not able to name a recent Supreme Court verdict that she disagreed with, and her response to a question about Afghanistan was "when we withdraw from Iraq, we need to make sure that there are benchmarks in place." Clueless people can't fight the system, they simply become the tools of manipulative insiders.