Three Cheers For The Place-Holder

And one of them is really big:

Wow, Castle is a funny-looking SOB.  He resembles how Berke Breathed used to draw old people in Bloom County.  If his first name was Jake, you know what nickname I'd come up with for the two of them.

Unfortunately I don't know how much of his 52.49 ACU rating comes from fiscal policy votes, so I'm unable to access how accurate Governor Christie's putting over of Castle as a "small government" guy actually is.  I do know that most 52.49 ACU guys don't generally fit that description.  On the other hand, Congressman Castle did vote against Hogzilla I in the House last year.  Whether he'd have done so in the Senate when then-RINO Snarlin' Arlen Specter, along with the Maine Wonder Twins didn't is, of course, a whole other question.

But as I sighingly said yesterday, fair-to-middlin' on the ideological scale is the tippy-top apex for conservatives in a top-ten lib bastion such as Delaware.

I'd make a nose-holding crack, except that "true conservative" Christine O'Donnell keeps trying to grab my contextual attention:

Not that I can't sympathize, but, honestly, being followed around by opposition researchers with camcorders and camera phones and the like is part of the game anymore, certainly ever since ex-Senator George Allen's "macaca moment" and the Washington Post's insatiable hyping of it destroyed his re-election bid in 2006.  Every campaign is looking for that golden gaffe.  You just have to be cognizant of it and watch what you say.  Suffocating scrutiny is part of running for political office - especially for conservative campaigns.  Parts of it suck, but that's the way it is.  If you don't want to put up with it, don't run.

Thing is, after her surrogates attempted to rumormonger Mike Castle into a queer affair, it's kinda difficult to sympathize TOO much.  You KNOW she'd be doing the same thing to Castle, if she had the resources to shadow him.  But as Jazz Shaw opined this week:

The congressman has been vetted by the opposition from hell to breakfast, and if there’s any dirt to be found on him, it will likely require a significant meteor impact to unearth it. 

Which is why O'Donnell's dime-store dirt-diggers aren't bothering with shovels and are skipping right to MSU mode.

And that brings us back to the same place: Mike Castle ain't conservatives' cup 'o tea, [heh] but even if Christine O'Donnell was a credit to her professed philosphical pedigree, she suffers from one fatal flaw: She can't win.  And "Mr. Limekiller" can.

Let us count the ways of why that matters.  Gabe Malor:

I'm genuinely puzzled at folks who say they'd rather the seat be Democrat than in the hands of a RINO. Given the number of Senate seats now in play, this is tantamount to declaring that they'd rather have a Democratic Senate than a Republican one.

I'm saying, it might be different if Republicans were going to have control of the Senate anyway. Then, heh, no real harm to letting our "problem Senators" know what we expect in the future. Same thing on the flipside. If the Democrats were going to have insurmountable control of the Senate...again, it doesn't matter so much whether the Democrat or the RINO wins.

But we're talking about taking control of the Senate, something that only now is turning into a real possibility. And that's going to take putting up with folks like Collins and Snowe and Castle. As infuriating as they are, I'd rather put up with them than watch the Democrats run the country into the ground under another two years of Majority Leader Reid (or his successor)....

Why do we want a Republican Senate? Aside from totally crushing the Democrats' spirit, control of the Senate means that our guys will be the chairmen for each committee and subcommittee. This means that they will have control of the calendar. It means that if Obama wants something, he'll have to negotiate with Republicans, rather than his own sycophantic party members. 

More from Eeyore:

The flaw in this reasoning, of course, is that some things are bound to go right for Democrats despite their dumbest efforts to prevent that from happening....You’re simply not going to get a map that’s completely red, any more than the idiot liberals who were high on Hopenchange two years ago were ever going to get a map that’s completely blue.

J-Ger vis-a-vie CD's "oddness":

I hear a few “who cares?” responses. Fine, you don’t care. But I do, and I suspect more than a few Delaware voters will care, too. In the end, the primary election will turn on what Delaware Republicans care about.

This isn’t even getting into her former employees beginning a project whose first act is to accuse Mike Castle of being gay; this is what caused Erick Erickson of RedState to head for the exits. Is Erick a bad conservative, too? Do true conservatives shrug their shoulders and avert their eyes when a candidate’s associates pull stunts like this?

The Ultimate Tighty-Righty actually chips in sensible suggestion for a change:

Politicians as experienced as Castle know the importance of honoring their word to other political actors. (Sort of like "honor among thieves," except that most politicians really are NOT thieves.) Conservative leaders can go to him, perfectly legally, and say, look, you saw what happened to Lisa Murkowski in Alaska and to Bob Bennett in Utah. You see the polls that have you just five points up on O'Donnell. You know you are at least at some risk of failing to win the nomination. But we can call off the dogs of war. We can stop ginning up the organizational fervor that could propel O'Donnell to victory. What we ask from you is that you keep your door open to us once you are in the Senate; that you sign at least a two-year version of Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge; that you agree in writing that you will not switch parties if elected and that you would resign rather than do so..... that sort of thing. The pledges don't even need to be public. They can't mention any specific legislation, and they can't be couched in terms of a quid pro quo. But they still can be binding on an honorable man, and Castle is an honorable man.

Hey, if Castle-man has the Quinn F'ing Hillyer super-duper seal of approval PLUS Double-C's right-wing rock star gold-standard endorsement, are we REALLY going to do any better than this?  Geraghty throws down the bottom line:

A guy who checks all the boxes and holds all the right positions but who can’t win is good for some debate entertainment and not much else. That kind of a candidate is Alan Keyes. That kind of a candidate lets the other side not even have to sweat winning the election. It’s odd; the people who talk the most about how they want to stand for principle, and how they oppose conceding any ideological positions find themselves conceding many winnable House and Senate seats.

If you want to influence policy, you need the votes in the legislature to do it. If you want that, 99 times out of 100 you’re going to need a coalition, and that means having some folks who aren’t with you 100% of the time on every issue. If we get big Republican majorities in the House and Senate, we’ll find ways to get conservative ideas enacted into law. If we have big Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, our ideas are effectively dead.

Or, to quote Otto Von Bismarck, "Politics is....the art of the possible".

Parting thought to O'Donnellites: Mike Castle is seventy-one years old.  I would suspect that serving a term in the U.S. Senate would be his career swansong.  He won't be there for decades.  The seat'll probably be open again in 2016.  Try to find a credible "true conservative" (William Roth was from Delaware, after all, unless he's been posthumously excommunicated) and maybe your herculean efforts for The Cause won't be so risibly wasted.