Why Did Bureaucrat Mike Castle Lose?

Reported in the Weekly Standard:

Mike Castle might have been a wonderful general election candidate in the Delaware Senate race.  But he ran a terrible campaign in the Republican primary, which is why he lost to Christine O’Donnell, a Tea Party favorite.

Castle, Delaware’s lone congressman, came up short in four separate ways.   He acted like a candidate who hasn’t paid an iota of attention to what’s been going in the primaries across the country this year.

One, he didn’t run as a conservative or at least as someone who’d taken a conservative stand on important issues.  He’d voted against ObamaCare and is a co-sponsor of repeal legislation.  He voted against the stimulus.  He’s for extending all the Bush tax cuts.  But in Delaware, who knew?

It drove Castle’s supporters in Washington crazy that he wouldn’t emphasize these positions.  He was urged to do so by the folks at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, but he ignored their advice.

Two, he stressed something that rarely works in primaries:  vote for me because I can win the general election and my opponent can’t.  This is called strategic voting.  But primary voters tend not to be strategic.  They usually vote for the candidate they like the best and agree with the most.  That turned out to be O’Donnell.

Three, Castle didn’t respect a Tea Party-backed rival.  Rather, he felt “insulted,” I’m told, that he had to face O’Donnell, backed by both Sarah Palin and Republican Senator Jim Demint, in the primary.

The article continues at TWS.

The announcement by Chris Christy the new “adored one” of the Conservative movement prompted me to ask this question.  The other side is of course: Why did Christine O’Donnell lose? — but let’s look at one side at a time.

I spent some time at Rep. Castle’s website.  I see a man who is concerned about the availability of healthcare, energy dependence, veterans affairs and ethics, but he takes the modern at-whatever-cost, outcomes-are-the-imperative path, which results in mostly governmental solutions or solutions at the public trough.  He  has also bought into the environmentalist (wind energy) and utilitarian (stem cell research) approaches to finding answers which the conservative voter find repugnant.

Frankly, Mr Castle doesn’t champion the issues that I, as a values voter, see as the marks of someone who will represent me rather than “lean on his own understanding” of what’s best for me.  Those issues are the sanctity of life, the preeminence of the family, the limitation of government, and the availability of opportunity (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness).  These are the unalienable rights that my Constitution should guarantee and which I expect my representative to protect at all costs.

Mr Castle neither championed, promoted nor even respected those rights; he promised to take care of my needs.  I can do that for myself thank you, but I do need government to get out of the way and take it’s hand out of my pocket.

Note to future candidates: respect me as a Citizen, treat me as an adult, or you, like Mr Castle, will also be rejected.