O’Donnell lost her insurgent Delaware Senate race to Chris Coons by a large margin. And as her new memoir, Troublemaker: Let’s Do What It Takes to Make America Great Again, proves, she thinks the witch video had a lot to do with it, even as she reveals layer upon layer of evidence that shows she was never likely to win in the first place.
Troublemaker is a shorter book than its large print has manipulated it to appear. But even with its modest running time, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to sit through the sometimes excruciatingly dull childhood anecdotes and endless political shoptalk. We’ve picked out the tastiest quotes, revelations, and themes so you don’t won’t have to.
She never wanted to tell you she’s not a witch.
O’Donnell loses no time in recounting the backstory of the “not a witch” ad, telling it in little snippets spliced between the opening chapters. Maybe a concerned editor suggested this gimmick as an intervention for the crawling pace and superficial narrative of the chapters about O’Donnell’s early life.
As O’Donnell tells it, she never wanted to record the witch ad. When her campaign manager pitched it to her, he said, “You’re going to hate this, Christine, but hear me out.” She did hate it, and kept hating it even as he all but tricked her into recording a few takes. They had written another ad she preferred, that featured her supporters’ stories of economic hardship. But even as she intoned, “I’m not a witch,” ostensibly to see how it sounded on camera, she says she was violating her better judgment. She “cringed” when the line showed up on the teleprompter, but she actually “wanted to scream.” She felt in her bones that something would go wrong, and later that night, she met with a group of pastors and asked them to pray. “I think I just made a terrible mistake,” she told them.
A conservative activist best known for advocating abstinence, O'Donnell stunned the Republican establishment by beating former Delaware governor Michael Castle in the GOP primary.
O'Donnell wrote she was blindsided when comedian Bill Maher aired an old clip of her admitting "I dabbled into witchcraft."
She claims media consultant Fred Davis pushed her to film the "I am not a witch" commercial. She said the ad was leaked and posted on the Internet before she could put her foot down.
As a result, O'Donnell was skewered by "Saturday Night Live" and subjected to so much ridicule that it sank her already troubled campaign.
Reached by the AP, Davis said only: "I wish her well with her book, and her future. That was a very unusual campaign."
Also, the AP obtained emails that suggest the O'Donnell campaign actually approved the witch commercial and planned to post it on YouTube the same day it hit TV.
O'Donnell, 41, also rips some of her fellow Republicans in the book. She accused Castle of pressuring people to not donate to her campaign - a charge he denies. And she claimed Karl Rove, who was President Bush's political guru, undermined her.
Rove was one of the leaders of the "liberal influences" that "severely tarnished Bush's legacy among true Constitutionalists," she wrote. "It was Karl Rove's style of Machiavellian, unprincipled realpolitik that destroyed the Republican brand."
During the campaign, Rove called her a kooky candidate who had a track record of saying "nutty things.
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