Department of Childish Errors

By GAIL COLLINS
NYT

How far back in a candidate’s history do we want to travel?

It’s pretty clear that kindergarten behavior is off-limits, although there are several people running for important offices this year who remind me of a preschooler I once knew who hated sharing so much that whenever other children came to play he’d pile everything he could get his hands on, down to large pieces of lint, in one huge mound and sit on it all afternoon.

College years are more problematic. In Delaware, Chris Coons, the Democratic candidate for Senate, has been haunted by an essay he wrote for the Amherst College student newspaper, in which he light-heartedly referred to himself as a “bearded Marxist.” During a debate this week, Coons and his opponent, Christine O’Donnell, tangled over whether the line, which he wrote in 1985, was more damning than the multitude of strange things O’Donnell “said on a comedy show 10 years ago.”

It was arguments like this that made the Delaware debate by far the most interesting encounter between Senate candidates so far this year. When it was over, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer named O’Donnell the narrow winner because “she didn’t come across as just a weirdo or anything like that.” The bar for debate victory this year has become unacceptably low.

Also, I’m not sure that O’Donnell won by any standard. She went absolutely blank when she was asked to name a recent Supreme Court decision with which she disagrees — even though she was prepped by some advisers to Sarah Palin, and that was a question that brought Palin to grief in 2008.

(More here.)