By Victor Greto
Dover, Del. – Before this past eventful September, the incident I often told people about my experience with Christine O’Donnell took place in her home four years ago. I was interviewing her for a profile, and after she told me about her diehard commitment to only marry a man who believed exactly as she did, I leaned into her space and asked glibly: “So, you mean to tell me that if we saw each other across a room and became instantly attracted and fell in love, you wouldn’t even consider marrying me because I didn’t believe exactly what you believed?”
She did not blink. In fact, as I remember, she rarely blinked at all. “No,” she said, without skipping a beat, her charming smile fixed on her face.
I admit it’s not much of an anecdote, but it was that moment, that question, my silly attitude toward her profound determination, and her own fixed gaze upon me, that always stuck with me.
She’s back in my life as only an American political celebrity can be, tangentially, perhaps even nostalgically. I’m no longer a full-time journalist who interviews people every day for a living. I’m a college professor who talks to children most of the day, and my brush with Christine O’Donnell four years ago, a lifetime ago, proved to be blip in an onslaught of national coverage, and a fine teaching lesson for the small core of my students who are serious about what they’re learning.
Each week I talk to my political science and journalism students at Wesley College, a small liberal arts school located in the capital of Delaware, about decisions made every day by professional journalists. No matter what’s going on in the news, the issue never fails to come up, especially around election time.
It’s hard for most people, let alone teenagers, to see that being a professional in any trade or craft requires perspective and a love of the doing – in this case, a love for the reporting and the writing, which, I will argue with anyone, at its best transcends personal and political agendas.
So, when Washington Post reporter and blogger Greg Sargent contacted me about an article I wrote four years ago for the Delaware News Journal about surprise Republican Senate primary winner Christine O’Donnell, I no longer felt encased in an ivory tower with kids talking about abstract ideas.
I had left the News Journal in the summer of 2008 to accept a split appointment as professor of media arts and political science at Wesley because I always wanted to teach college – almost as much as I had always wanted to be a writer. This semester, while also teaching Writing for Media and the History of U.S. Mass Media, I taught both American Politics and Congress – perfect vehicles for discussion of all things election-year.
It’s interesting to teach politics in Delaware. Politics here seems more or less a family affair, and it only takes a reporter or acute observer a handful of weeks to get to know most of the players. In the case of the 2010 Delaware Senate race, it had been shaping up as a battle between middle-of-the-road Republican stalwart Mike Castle, who had been governor for two terms and the state’s only representative for 18 years, and relative newcomer, Democrat Chris Coons, a county executive.
It was assumed by just about everyone that these men would be the two challengers to take over what had become the permanent seat of Joe Biden, who had reigned as Delaware’s big-name senator for three decades before he joined the Obama administration as vice president. There had been talk that Biden’s son, Beau, would run, and that Delaware might echo the Massachusetts-Kennedy dynasty, but that ended when Beau dropped out.
It also became doctrine that Castle would run away with the election; the polls indicated as much. So much so, that the News Journal’s slick niche magazine, Brandywine Signature, hired me to write profiles of the “wives behind the candidates.” I wrote two profiles, one of Annie Coons, the other of Jane Castle, to run the month before the election.
All that came to an end with O’Donnell’s Tea Party-fueled victory on Sept. 14.
Suddenly, she became a national story, and it was fun, for me, to look back on the profile I had written about her. It seemed alien at first – the things she said in the story – and I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic for the time I was a full-time reporter meeting, talking and writing about people who fascinated both me and the public.
After I re-read my old story, I ran off copies for my Congress class, so we could discuss what had happened the week of the primaries, and who O’Donnell was. I found the discussions interesting and fun, if only because when I had talked to O’Donnell she struck me as both an extremist and a fascinating character obsessed with her own point of view.
Back in 2006, O’Donnell ran as a write-in candidate for the Senate against Republican nominee Jan Ting, and the eventual winner, Democrat Tom Carper. She had no chance, and the thing that caught my eye as a Lifestyle reporter for the News Journal were the size of the signs her small band of supporters had put up a few weeks before the election – huge signs, with her youthful face beaming at passing cars on Route 1 and on those suburban six-lane highways that surround and choke Wilmington.
She was happy to talk to me, if only because few bothered talking to her or took her seriously. I neither took her seriously nor considered her a joke: I thought it might make for an interesting profile. I had talked to her before when she did publicity for a right-wing think tank and publisher, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Greenville, outside of Wilmington, a ritzy suburb.
Because a big part of my job was writing profiles for the newspaper, I thought she’d be perfect for a week-after-election story. (Basic ethics would have required I do this for each Senate candidate if the newspaper had chosen to publish her profile before the election).
I was more interested in the personality of the candidate. I knew she had appeared on TV as an evangelical Christian pundit. I sold the idea to my editor, and went out to meet her in a disheveled house where she lived in Wilmington’s Little Italy section.
I spent a few hours with her in the home before the election, and then, with photographer Jennifer Corbett, spent election day riding to polling places in an RV with her, her parents, and two volunteers (one of whom owned and drove the RV), to see her in action, talking to her family and observing her interact with voters.
I wrote two versions of my story, one intolerably long, the other more polished, and then edited. I didn’t think much of her after that, except that I saw O’Donnell one more time, perhaps a year later, at a Delaware Press Association function, when she came up to me beaming like her big signs to ask how I was.
I began thinking of her again a couple of months before the 2010 mid-term election Senate primaries, and then even more so when the Tea Party began to support her race against Castle with lots of cash. After Sarah Palin endorsed her, she became part of my classroom conversations.
Then, it happened. She won the primary, and Mike Castle, looking drawn, if not quartered, at his Wilmington “victory party,” conceded next to a very sad Jane, whom I had gotten to know fairly well because of the profile I had recently finished about her.
When I heard from the Post’s Sargent, I was at first perplexed. He asked to talk to me because he had a “quick question.” The question pivoted on two paragraphs I had written in my profile in 2006, about O’Donnell’s views on homosexuality.
She considers homosexuality an identity disorder, and sees pornography and the lust it engenders as selfish gratification, I had written. “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.”
Sargent’s question revolved around my paraphrase, especially where I wrote, “considers homosexuality an identity disorder….”
He wanted to know if I could give him the actual quote and provide context for it. It was a big deal, he told me over the phone, because she was telling reporters that those extreme views she had spouted long ago – including one on prohibiting masturbation – were said 10 or more years ago, and she had matured since. My profile, of course, was written four years ago, and this belied what she evidently was saying now.
I told Sargent that I wasn’t sure I still had my notes. But after I snapped shut the cell phone, I wondered why I did paraphrase that belief and not quote it, if it was a quote. That bothered me, to say the least.
For every profile I do, I have at least two sets of notes: one, in a computer file, when I talk to relatives or associates, observers or enemies; the other, handwritten, in which I scribble when I meet and interview the subject in person, or watch them in action.
In O’Donnell’s case, I still had the computer file that contained my interview notes after I talked to her, her parents and her brother over the phone; the other notes, if they were still around, were in a notebook, which I had with me when I interviewed her for a couple of hours at her house (and where I must have gotten the quote), and while RVing around Wilmington’s polling places on election day.
After I left the News Journal for Wesley, I saved the written notes of only what I considered my most interesting and fun stories, and shoved them into a desk drawer in an upstairs bedroom that I had converted into a den. After hearing from Sargent and questioning myself, I rooted through the drawer, and toward the bottom, plain as day, was a thick notebook with “Christine O’Donnell” scrawled on the cover.
Reading old notes is a blast from the past, and the more you report and write, the better you get at it. That is, as I read my notes, I relived the experience, of talking to O’Donnell, of talking to voters at the polling places, and talking to her parents.
What struck me rereading my notes was her anger at Mike Castle for his support of federal stem cell research that she considered akin to abortion, which she considered akin to murder. She had told me America was in another Civil War, between Christianity and persistent secular attacks upon it via legal abortion, stem cell research and gay marriage.
What also struck me was a curious religious belief of hers, which I wrote about in my 2006 story. She labeled it “The First Fruits doctrine.” It referred to a theological tie between St. Paul’s belief that Jesus was the “first fruits” of the resurrection, and the fact that Delaware was the first state in the union to ratify the Constitution.
“During her campaign,” I had written in the profile, “O’Donnell also 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.’ Nearly weightless above all those promises and ideas floats O’Donnell’s conviction that the first state, Delaware, will be the ‘first fruits’ of a Christian renewal that will lead the United States ‘back toward its Christian beginnings.’”
That was different, I remember thinking at the time, and she had told me about this out of the blue. I interviewed pastors who believed in the same idea, who hailed from Delaware, Colorado and Texas, and some of them saw in O’Donnell’s candidacy a profound feeling of legitimacy.
I wasn’t sure why reporters in 2010 had ignored that aspect of her belief system, but I put that aside; I was on a mission to look for her thoughts on homosexuality.
I paged through my notes and there it was, as clear as my steady scrawl could manage:
“People are created in God’s image,” O’Donnell had told me. “Homosexuality is an identity adopted through societal factors. It’s an identity disorder.”
Evidently I paraphrased the quote for style reasons: I and other journalists avoid quotes that are too long. It’s basic stuff. Fine. There were many other intriguing things in my notes, but I stopped suddenly, thinking: What should I do? Was it ethical to give someone the notes to an interview I did four years ago?
And why was Sargent asking me anyway? Did he not trust what I wrote?
Being away from the newsroom for two years has done something to me, I think. It’s added a weird perspective on top of the professional perspective I’d earned from nearly two decades of reporting and writing. The “weird” perspective comes from working with professors who, instead of interacting in a bustling large room with eccentric and ambitious reporters and editors, sit sequestered in offices unselfconsciously beaming while their egos inflate because they deal with young adults who barely know a quarter of what they do.
I felt nervous. I didn’t want to be part of the Christine O’Donnell saga just because I had written a profile of her four years ago when no one cared. If I became part of the story, I knew from experience it could go anywhere.
I called up an old friend and colleague, Marisa Porto, the former assistant managing editor at the News Journal, and now the managing editor of digital operations at the Newport News Daily Press.
Marisa told me all I owed anyone was to say that the story was accurate. No quotes necessary. If I didn’t want to be part of the story, if I didn’t want to turn into a possible political football, that’s all I should say, and then everyone would go away.
I followed her advice. I sent Sargent a single line e-mail message stating that everything in my story was accurate. Sargent called me the next morning, a Sunday, and said he must have misunderstood what we had agreed to do – that I would provide both the quote and context.
He said this in a message. I was visiting my mother at a nearby nursing home at the time and did not pick up. When I listened to his message as I drove home, I stopped and felt awful. I knew as soon as I got home I’d send him the quote. Because I knew after hearing him that this is exactly what I would have done if I were him. I wrote back to him and told him, on the record, “This is my direct quote, which I paraphrased in the article: “People are created in God’s image,” O’Donnell said. “Homosexuality is an identity adopted through societal factors. It’s an identity disorder.”
I felt better about it all. I did the equivalent of closing my eyes to what would happen next, and I spent the rest of that Sunday preparing for the coming week’s classes.
The next morning, Monday, Sept. 20, Sargent posted my quote on his blog, “The Plum Line.”
Christine O’Donnell said gays suffer from `identity disorder,’ reporter says
Christine O’Donnell claimed in a 2006 interview that homosexuals are psychologically defective, arguing that they suffer from “identity disorder,” the reporter who conducted the interview tells me.
On Friday I noted here that the Wilmington News Journal ran a 2006 profile of O’Donnell which paraphrased her views, claiming she “considers homosexuality an identity disorder.” But the paper didn’t include any direct quote supporting that.
Now the reporter on the story, Victor Greto, who’s now a professor at Wesley College in Delaware, emails over her full quote from his notes on the interview. Here’s what she said:
“People are created in God’s image. Homosexuality is an identity adopted through societal factors. It’s an identity disorder.”
O’Donnell’s suggestion that gays suffer from a psychological disorder is far worse than other comments about gays that have already gotten media attention, such as her claim that the government spent too much on AIDS and her insistence that “gays get away with so much.”
Also: Last week O’Donnell insisted that her rigid moralistic views represent long-ago youthful excesses. But as late as 2006, she was apparently still suggesting that gays are suffering from some sort of mental illness that has caused them to stray from God’s “image.”
Indeed, this would appear to put O’Donnell squarely in the camp of those who liken homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality.
Five minutes later, the phone rang: the phone told me it was ABC News. I didn’t pick it up. I sat back in the chair of my sequestered office and sighed.
But it ended quickly, at least the phantom “political football” portion of it all. ABC News Digital simply wanted me to confirm the quote; later, the same ABC reporter e-mailed to ask if I had audio. Nope. An Associated Press reporter e-mailed me in the afternoon, asking about more quotes, and I told her that, frankly, I’d only done it for Sargent because he specifically wanted a quote for the paraphrase. She kindly told me it was the most comprehensive profile to date of O’Donnell, and that AP would be using it for their own profile. The next day, nearly a dozen other news sites and blogs picked up the quote. Then it stopped.
As importantly, I presented what had happened to my Congress class the next day, and we enjoyed an intimate sliver of real-time media politics – a class I had taught in the spring.
They were excited when I held up my notebook, as if it were a relic. “You got gold there,” one told me, after someone in the class had asked me if I was paid to give the quote to Sargent.
It’s a curious thing, the public’s understanding – or misunderstanding – of journalism. I explained to them that journalists don’t sell their quotes for money; that I did this, really, to back up the paraphrase I had written of a nationally public figure who, I have read, was denying what she plainly told me.
What I didn’t tell them, but what I remembered suddenly, after my students trickled out the door, was the last time I saw Christine O’Donnell’s face, when she came up to me at that Delaware Press Association function a year after my article ran.
She liked my story, she said. So did her parents. That’s good and bad for a journalist to hear, and I thanked her. I asked her what she was going to do next. She wasn’t sure.
That unblinking smile of hers never left her face, although its persistence made it almost seem pained, forced, even lonely.
With nothing left to say, I leaned into her space and told her it was great to see her again.