By Victor Greto
WILMINGTON – “You’d think I had just moved in, huh?” asks U.S Senatorial write-in candidate Christine O’Donnell, dressed in a form-fitting blue pin-striped suit on a cold morning inside her row home in Little Italy.
She’s curled up – with black pumps clamped tight on her feet – in an easy chair with a cup of coffee cuddled close to her chest. Her newly installed fireplace is crackling beneath exposed drywall, while framed pictures are scattered along a wall by the foot of the stairs.
Although she moved into the unkempt house nearly two years ago, she has a great excuse: she’s been keeping herself busy.
Several cell phones ring periodically on her coffee table, mostly text messages that she reads with a quick glance.
“They’ve been going off ever since the signs went up,” she says, referring to the 8-foot-by-8-foot campaign signs that appeared on Delaware highways and intersections a few weeks before Election Day.
Those signs – mostly taken up by the long black hair and eager smile of the 37-year-old public relations consultant – dwarf those of her opponents, eventual winner Democratic Sen. Tom Carper and his Republican challenger Jan Ting.
“The day the signs went up, I intentionally avoided seeing them,” O’Donnell says. They cost her campaign $8,000 of the more than $30,000 she had raised. “They’re huge, but we only had two weeks, and we had to make a statement. We’re serious.”
Christine O’Donnell is serious in the way a person who knows her destiny is serious.
Serious in the way a person who spends much of her time praying and becomes convinced that God speaks to her both audibly and internally is serious.
So serious, she fasted 40 days before the election, interrupted only with an occasional protein drink.
“I only lost six pounds,” she says with a sigh, but she ate with relish several blue-claw crabs and pizza slices in Rehoboth Beach at midnight to celebrate her candidacy late on Election Night.
“I know she won’t win,” says political blogger Mike Matthews, who was waiting to greet O’Donnell on Election Day after voting for her at the their polling place at Bayard School in Wilmington.
“I just like supporting her,” he says, despite the avowed cynicism expressed on his blog, downwithabsolutes.com. “I think she has every right to run. She doesn’t compromise and has a strong character, and her convictions are there – a little crazy, but there. She’s determined. And I like that she’s hot.”
“Hot,” as in pretty.
Determined, as in not only because she believes she’s right, but also that she’s certain her future lies in Delaware.
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“I’m a Republican, but not a Delaware Republican,” says the single, chaste devout Catholic, referring to the Delaware Republican penchant to be middle of the road. “I’m a Lincoln Republican. We started the party because the other parties wouldn’t take a stand on slavery. All human life is precious.”
That, of course, is a reference to abortion, but also to embryonic stem cell research.
During her campaign, O’Donnell promised never to vote to raise taxes, to limit herself to two terms, to never vote for pork barrel spending, and to always vote “in favor of life and families.”
Above all those promises and ideas arches O’Donnell’s conviction that the first state, Delaware, will bear the “first fruits” of a Christian renewal that will lead the United States “back toward its Christian beginnings.”
This “first state, first fruit” principle is supported by some pastors in Delaware, Colorado and Texas.
Dale Mast, pastor at Destiny Christian Fellowship in Dover, sees O’Donnell as key to fulfilling Delaware’s destiny.
“We helped bring the nation into creation,” Mast says of Delaware. “We have the ability to make certain issues go forward. That’s our birthright. I see her as helping this along.”
Despite her defeat on Nov. 7, no one believes this more than O’Donnell herself.
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Her mother called her “Chrissy the Pooh,” because she was so cuddly.
She was the fifth of six children in a Roman Catholic family. Her family moved from the Roxbury section of Philadelphia to nearby Moorestown, N.J., shortly after her birth in 1969.
Growing up in the Jersey suburbs was fun, Christine says – staying out until the sun went down while playing kick the can, jailbreak or hide and seek.
They’d even play “church,” she says. She’d flatten out little pieces of bread and give her younger sister Eileen Holy Communion.
Early in her life, says her father, Daniel O’Donnell, Christine showed a penchant for diving headlong into something, dealing with the consequences, and then moving on.
“I remember both her and her younger sister Eileen had a cookie,” Daniel says. “Eileen said, ‘Let’s see how fast we can eat the cookie,’ and Christine ate it fast, but Eileen didn’t, and Eileen then said, ‘I still have mine.’”
The moral to that story?
“Christine will run into things and the consequences are what they are,” Daniel says.
Like many of her siblings, she wanted to follow in her dad’s footsteps and be an entertainer.
Daniel O’Donnell had played Bozo the Clown and had a talk show on local TV. He was even part of a comedy team for a while.
In high school and college, Christine seemed a natural actress. Her older brother Danny credits their father’s influence for his sister’s comfort level in the spotlight.
“That’s part of why Christine gets attention and is a natural in front of the camera,” Danny says.
Christine majored in Theater at Fairleigh Dickinson University in northern New Jersey. While preparing for a Broadway audition during her junior year, however, she had a change of heart.
“My friend asked me if I knew how an abortion was performed,” O’Donnell says. “She showed me the medical journals and it was frightening.”
She told her teacher she was no longer interested in acting as a career.
“There’s only truth and not truth,” she says she realized during that time. “You’re either very good or evil. I went back to my dorm and asked myself what I was.”
She became an evangelical Christian, believing she had grasped a truth. “If your principles aren’t grounded in absolute truth, you don’t know what to think.”
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A week later, O’Donnell meets her parents at the door of her home on the morning of the election, and realizes she doesn’t have her driver’s license.
“I left my bag in Rehoboth last night,” she says, making a face at her mother. “Can I even vote?”
Her parents join two volunteers in a borrowed RV – plastered with a huge picture of Christine’s smiling face – to take her to polling places throughout the state and thank her supporters. They will end the day in Sussex County, home to their strongest support. They have bags and boxes of snacks, from oatmeal pies to peanut bars to Rice Krispie treats.
Her first stop is at Bayard Intermediate School in Wilmington, her polling place.
Outside of Bayard stand two young supporters, Jessica Robinson, 18, of Georgetown, and Megan Rieley, 16, of Millsboro, who drove up together that morning.
This was Jessica’s first time voting.
“She’s the only candidate strong on morals and doesn’t back down,” says Jessica, who voted the day before in Georgetown.
Christine lucks out at the poll – Rose, a neighbor from across the street, identifies her, and the rest of the clerks OK her to vote.
At Forest Oak Elementary School polling place near Newark, O’Donnell meets up with supporter Eileen Siter, who has a hard time stopping herself from continually hugging Christine.
“We need a solution,” Siter says, “and she is the solution that God gave us.”
Turning to O’Donnell’s mother, Carole, Siter says, “We are honored to do this for your daughter.”
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After her conversion at Fairleigh Dickinson, Christine dived into politics at school and joined the college Republicans and the American Collegians for Life. She became a Bush-Quayle presidential campaign youth leader in 1992, and attended the Republican convention the summer before she graduated.
It was her first taste of being in front of a camera. “People interviewed me because I was so young and dedicated to the issues,” she says.
After she graduated with a degree in English and Communications in 1993, she joined for three months “Enough is Enough,” a Washington-based anti-pornography group. She segued into becoming the marketing manager for the communications department of the Republican National Committee through the 1994 mid-term elections.
The job was an eye-opener. It gave her a great deal of media experience, as she began appearing on cable news shows as an example of a young conservative.
But she says she also realized that the party was more about winning than sticking with principles.
“Once the (1994) mid-terms were over,” which resulted in a strong Republican victory in Congress, “they weren’t all that interested in the abortion issue,” she says.
She found a job as press secretary for Concerned Women for America after she left the RNC in the summer of 1995. CWA, an organization founded in 1979 by Beverly LaHaye, professes to “restore the family to its traditional purpose” and to “protect and promote Biblical values among all citizens.”
O’Donnell helped prepare the organization for the 1996 elections, and became an advocate for the organization on TV, appearing on “Nightline,” CNN, C-SPAN and MSNBC.
“For a young person, talking on TV is not a challenge once you’ve been acting,” says her father, Daniel. “Once the party asked her to do things, that’s what her challenge was, what ignited her.”
When O’Donnell was invited to appear on Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” show, however, a supervisor at the organization told her that “a good Christian woman” would never do it.
Before this, however, she had been thinking of moving on for another, more visceral reason.
“You couldn’t wear pants there,” O’Donnell says of the women at CWA. “I remember sitting in the office and thinking, maybe Christians can believe in different things.”
She quit her job to attend the 1996 Republican convention, and founded the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth, or SALT, a college student-based, grass-roots organization whose purpose was to mobilize Christian students on issues of abortion, chastity and pornography.
“I wanted a youth rally at the ‘96 convention that didn’t compromise on the issues,” she says. She ran it for seven years, and appeared all over cable TV.
“It was a ministry that attacked the myth of the separation of church and state,” she says. “Speaking against abortion is not a political issue, it’s a moral one.”
She appeared several times on “Politically Incorrect,” sparring with the likes of Maher, Ben Affleck and Al Franken.
She converted back to Catholicism during her tenure at SALT, drawn to the theological positions of Pope John Paul II and his stance on women in the church, especially as it was stated in his 1988 Apostolic Letter, “On the Dignity and Vocation of Women.”
Those writings expressed a theology of family and established roles for men and women that O’Donnell passionately embraces, including practicing chastity.
She considers homosexuality an identity disorder, and sees pornography and the lust it engenders as selfish gratification.
“Sex is a covenant between a man and a woman and God,” she says. “Your job is to satisfy the other, the giving of oneself to another. Porn turns that around.”
She practices what she preaches, she says. She’s had boyfriends, but they don’t last long when they realize her seriousness concerning chastity before marriage.
By 2003, she had outgrown the evangelical SALT. Now in her 30s, and a Catholic, she felt out of touch with the evangelical youth group, and decided to accept a position as the chief communications officer for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative think tank and publisher based in Greenville.
It became another turning point in her life.
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“I felt strongly about coming to Delaware,” Christine says. “I felt like God was calling me away.”
But the job at ISI was a disaster.
She was hired to help plan the non-profit’s 50th anniversary gala, which she did.
But, she says, the organization consistently prevented her from appearing on TV to promote ISI, or anything else Christine was working on, including promoting Mel Gibson’s film, “The Passion of the Christ.”
After ISI decided to promote a less experienced man whom she had trained over her as head of communications, Christine went to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to figure whether she had a case for discrimination.
The day she told ISI she had gone to the EEOC, she claims, ISI fired her. It was Feb. 26, 2004, less than a year after she took the job.
She filed a sex discrimination lawsuit with the EEOC after she was fired. Her lawsuit is ongoing. Doug Schneider, director of marketing at ISI, said the organization had no comment on the lawsuit.
Despite the incident, she says she decided to stay in Delaware, and survived by freelancing public relations work.
In May, several pro-life supporters, unhappy with Ting and Mike Protack as the potential Republican Senate candidates, approached her to run in the Republican primary.
“Originally I said no,” she says. “I never wanted to run for office. I was an outspoken advocate, and if you run you have to water it down. But as someone who prays about every decision I make, I felt like God was leading me in the other direction.”
But it was even more than that.
“During the primary, I heard the audible voice of God,” she says. “He said, ‘Credibility.’ It wasn’t a thought in my head. I thought it meant I was going to win. But after the primary, I got credibility.”
Although she hasn’t heard that voice since, she has felt “peace and joy” while praying, interpreting this to mean that God wanted her to continue to run.
Her embrace of the “First State, First Fruits” principle, she says, overarches her determination to stay in the state.
She got the support of the 3-year-old Rightmarch.com, a political action committee which sends out e-mails to a million conservatives nationwide, according to William Greene, executive director.
“One of the things we’re all about is we’re much more on principle than on party,” Greene says.
She did not get the support of the Wilmington diocese, says spokesman Bob Krebs.
“We never come out for specific candidates,” Krebs says. “There’s a whole series of issues that the church is interested in, from the pro-life issues to the poor, and health care for those who are not as fortunate as the rest, and they cut across the spectrum of parties.”
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The American political tradition has had plenty of room for write-in candidates, says Robert Speel, an associate professor of political science at Penn State. “But it is rare to have write-in candidates with significant support.”
There is precedence for a win with a Senate write-in candidate, Speel says. In 1954, Strom Thurmond won a write-in campaign in South Carolina by 60,000 votes to fill the unexpired term of a Senator who died and to whom he had lost four years earlier.
There also is precedence for candidates who run on strictly religious platforms, Speel said, most prominently abolitionist candidates who ran before the 1861-1865 Civil War.
O’Donnell’s platform has been all about moral issues. She says she is horrified by Republican Rep. Mike Castle’s sponsoring of a bill to allow federal funding of stem cell research.
“This is why I’m in the race,” Christine says. “Castle and (Gov. Ruth Ann) Minner want to make this the biotech embryonic stem cell hub. It’s horrible. This transcends abortion to DNA and cloning.”
Part of God’s plan for her, Christine insists, is that any future match be as devout a Catholic as herself.
“I want my children to see Christ in him,” she says of her ideal man.
Carole O’Donnell says her daughter will get over that.
“I’m not going to change my mind,” Christine responds. “It took me so long to get where I am today.”
As she sits next to Daniel, her husband of 47 years, in the election-day RV, Carole looks sweetly at her daughter
“She doesn’t realize that if you marry someone who believes exactly as you do, it will be a dull marriage,” she says.
Later, Christine shakes her head at any doubts about what she believes and how tenaciously she will hold on to those beliefs.
Even without a driver’s license to prove it, she knows exactly who she is.