Karen Heller: O'Donnell's primary win was no major voter shift

Network newscasters and pundits guffawed last week over uttering, possibly for the first time though certainly not the last, the state Delaware, our sweet little neighbor to the south.

Until Tuesday night, Delaware was a place famous as a haven for corporations, chickens - outnumbering their consumers 261-1 - and Joe Biden.

When you drive into Delaware, the First State does not welcome you as the "home of the vice president of the United States," failing to take advantage of perhaps a once-in-a-220-year opportunity. Instead it's the "home of tax-free shopping."

But now, after Tuesday's primary, Delaware is famous for Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell. Which means even fewer folks will show interest in Pennsylvania's two races, including, I'm afraid, Pennsylvanians.

Prior to the primary, state GOP chair Tom Ross called O'Donnell "delusional" and said she "could not be elected dogcatcher."

Possibly, but O'Donnell won almost 30,000 votes for her self-professed "big win," topping U.S. Rep. Mike Castle by 3,681 votes - a slow night for the Wilmington Blue Rocks.

The turnout says as much about the aptly named Castle. At 71, he's an institution in Delaware politics, having served in elected office since Johnson was in the White House. And he supported the bank bailouts, the federal stimulus package, and energy reform.

A vote for O'Donnell can be viewed as a Howard Beale moment, a grab by the far right, but not a decisive shift among a sizable electorate.

Whatever you want to say about O'Donnell, she's not boring. Like her political fairy godmother, Sarah Palin - and this is vital to their success feeding the 24-hour news cycle - she's extremely photogenic. She was on MTV as a teenager and later on Bill Maher. Would anyone be listening to O'Donnell, with the same wan resume and pitiable financial history, if she looked like Democratic opponent Chris Coons?

There's also her outspokenness on virtually every issue, economic, literary (she wrote a paper on "The Women of Middle Earth"), and moral. Of her position against onanism, CNN's Paul Begala quipped: "If she doesn't like masturbation, she will hate the U.S. Senate."

At this point, it's worth answering the question many voters have wondered (OK, me): If elected, would the unmarried, pro-abstinence O'Donnell become possibly the U.S. Senate's first 41-year-old virgin? (Talk about an interest group woefully underserved in a warren of harlots.)

It appears no. "It was in college at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey that O'Donnell did things she regrets - drinking too much and having sex with guys with whom there wasn't a strong emotional connection," Wilmington's News Journal once reported. "But it was also during college that she found her faith again and chose to live a life of chastity."

O'Donnell says her big morality crusade is behind her. "When I go to Washington, D.C.," she has said, "it will be the Constitution on which I base all of my decisions, not my personal beliefs."

But going to Washington remains a very big if when you win a primary by fewer than 4,000 votes.

Many Americans are fed up. Not merely with President Obama and the congressional Democrats but also with the Republicans, who have an even lower approval rating, according to the latest New York Times/ABC poll. (Nearly half of all voters surveyed have no opinion about the tea party.)

The Democrats also hold the advantage of a strong bench. Obama is scheduled to fund-raise for Senate candidate Joe Sestak in Philadelphia on Monday, while Biden went to Wilmington on Friday to help Coons, the New Castle County executive, keep his old seat Democratic. Who can Republicans import to jolt an angry yet indolent electorate? Mitch McConnell?

O'Donnell offers the allure of the new, which voters and the press adore. "This is going to be fun," I heard a reporter say on the radio. Fun isn't enough. Nor is different. After a while, Palin doesn't seem new, either. It's easy to be against, but what is she for? Being "more of a cause than a campaign, and the cause is America," as O'Donnell declared primary night, isn't much of a platform.

Delaware is having its moment. The state's voters will have to decide whether O'Donnell's a blip, a bewildering footnote and YouTube reel, or six years of regret after craving the opposite of what you had.

Rep. Mike Castle's defeat underscores changing demographics and politics

in the Republican Party in Delaware. B1.