‘Troublemaker’ Christine O’Donnell to start book tour on her Delaware experience

The Tea Party favorite talks about the “lowest moment of the 2010 campaign” when she told voters in a commercial: “I’m not a witch.”

The Delaware Republican who grabbed the national spotlight in last fall’s U.S. Senate campaign is back with a book that’s part-autobiography, part-policy paper, and part-recap of her primary win against Congressman Castle and the campaign against now Senator Chris Coons (D- Delaware).  

In the book, O’Donnell backs away from the infamous “I’m not a witch” advertisement, that was designed to play off of the comments she’d made years before on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect show about “dabbling in witchcraft.”  She writes that she regretted agreeing to sign on with media consultant Fred Davis, the man behind that commercial, but she takes blame for not speaking her mind, “It was a wrong-headed move, made for all the wrong reasons, but it was mine.”

O’Donnell didn’t get much support from the Delaware Republican Party after beating Castle in the primary, and much of O’Donnell’s 2010 campaign was spent fighting “the establishment”, a fight she details at length in the book.  “Certain party leaders rolled up their sleeves, gnashed their teeth and came looking for me.  I’d already set off our state party leadership with my 2006 and 2008 campaigns, but  here, it looked like I was read to ruffle even bigger feathers on an even bigger stage.”

As the book’s title implies, O’Donnell seems to thrive in the face of adversity.  She writes, “I once heard a priest, ‘If you’re going to love your enemies, you first must have the courage to make some.’  Let’s face it: I was making enemies left and right—and here the phrase had particular meaning for the way I seemed to anger folks on both sides of the aisle, on the left and on the ostensible right.  It was beginning to feel like nobody from the Delaware political establishment, Republican or Democrat, wanted to see me run.”

O’Donnell will promote the book with a tour that starts in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.  She’ll be at the Barnes and Noble store in Exton on Friday, and then she’ll sign copies of her book in Delaware at the Barnes and Noble on Concord Pike on Saturday.  The book officially goes on sale on August 16.  This report was compiled from excerpts, WHYY has not seen the book in its entirety.