Who is Christine O'Donnell?

RUSH: An amazing thing is happening in Delaware. Christine O'Donnell is three points ahead of Mike Castle.

From Wikipedia:
Christine O'Donnell (born August 27, 1969) is an American marketing consultant and political commentator. She ran for the Republican Party nomination for the United States Senate election in Delaware in 2006, and was the party's nominee in the state's 2008 United States Senate election, losing to Joe Biden. She is running again for the same seat in Delaware's 2010 Senate special election. The state primary election is September 14, 2010.

Early life, education and career
Christine O'Donnell was born to a mother of Italian-American descent and a father of Irish-American descent. One of six children (five of them girls), she remembers "sharing a bedroom with my four sisters" and that "my father worked three jobs to take care of our large family."

O'Donnell attended Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she completed, or nearly completed, requirements for a B.A. in English and Communications. She attended the commencement ceremony in 1993 but did not receive a degree, at least partly due to owing unpaid expenses and student loans; the debt was satisfied in 2003 or 2005. After O'Donnell completed a final general electives course, or paid her final tuition bills, Fairleigh Dickinson awarded her a bachelor's degree in English literature on September 1, 2010.

Following college, she lived first in California and then for several years in Washington, D.C. She worked in conservative issue advocacy and for the Republican National Committee for several years in Washington. She founded and was the president of the Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT) in 1996, which lobbied the U.S. Congress on moral issues and which focused on advocating chastity and other Christian values in the college-age generation. O'Donnell also served as a spokesperson for Concerned Women for America, which seeks to apply biblical principles to issues of public policy. She was granted a Lincoln Fellowship from the Claremont Institute in 2002.

In 2003, O'Donnell moved to Delaware to work for the conservative publisher Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) in Hockessin, and bought a house in Wilmington. She registered a gender discrimination complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, after which she was terminated by ISI in 2004. She then sued the institute for $6.9 million for wrongful termination in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware in 2005; ISI stated in response that she had been conducting a for-profit public-relations business while on their time. O'Donnell dropped the suit in 2008, claiming a lack of funds.

O'Donnell has worked as a marketing consultant; her clients have included the record-breaking 2004 film The Passion of the Christ and Natalia Tsarkova, the Vatican’s first female portrait painter. and has provided political commentary on numerous television news programs, such as Politically Incorrect, The O'Reilly Factor, The Live Desk, and Glenn Beck. She is a conservative Catholic known for her vocal opposition to abortion, pornography, and extramarital sex. In the 1990s, she argued on MTV against encouraging masturbation as a safe sexual outlet.

Political campaigns
2006
O'Donnell ran for the Republican nomination in the 2006 United States Senate election in Delaware, finishing third in the Republican primary, with 17 percent of the vote, behind winner Jan C. Ting and second-place finisher Michael D. Protack. She then ran as a write-in candidate in the general election against Ting and incumbent Democrat Thomas R. Carper, finishing with 4 percent of the vote as Carper won re-election.

2008
She was uncontested in the Republican primary for the 2008 Senate race after beating businessman Tim Smith at the state party convention with more than 60 percent of the vote. Her general election opponent was Senator Joe Biden, who was also running for vice president with Barack Obama on the Obama-Biden ticket. O'Donnell questioned Biden's dual campaigns, claiming that serving his constituents was not important to him, and criticizing his unwillingness to participate in debates and candidate forums. Opinion polling during the race showed that O'Donnell was behind by a two-to-one margin. In the general election on November 4, 2008, Biden defeated O'Donnell by 65 percent to 35 percent.

He had outspent her by $4,907,000 to $116,000. Biden's percentage of the vote was the largest of any of his senatorial campaigns, but O'Donnell was close to the 37 percent of the vote that the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket gained in Delaware's presidential voting that year.

O'Donnell experienced financial difficulties before, during, and after her 2008 campaign. She was unable to pay the mortgage for her Wilmington house and the mortgage company gained a judgment against her for $90,000; the house was due to be sold at a sheriff's auction in August 2008 when she sold it the month prior to her campaign's legal counsel.

In 2009, she moved to a townhouse elsewhere in Delaware, where she pays half the rent with campaign contributions because it doubles as her campaign headquarters for her 2010 senate run. Her 2008 campaign ended with $23,000 in debt, and between 2007 and 2009 the Federal Election Commission cited her eight times for failing to supply contributions reports on time.

As of 2010, she owes payments to staffers, consultants, and volunteers from the 2008 campaign. In 2010, the Internal Revenue Service placed a lien on her for over $11,000 in taxes owed for 2005. O'Donnell noted that the IRS agent handling the matter claimed the agency's action has been inappropriate. She listed herself as self-employed and said she was doing "odd jobs" to make ends meet.

2010
Following the 2008 election, Biden resigned the seat to become vice president, and Ted Kaufman was appointed to replace him; Kaufman indicated he would not run in the 2010 Senate special election to elect a replacement to serve out the full term. In February 2009, O'Donnell indicated that she would be running in that special election, and expressed concern that the Obama stimulus package showed that the United States was headed in the direction of socialism.

She began fund-raising appeals. In October 2009, she reiterated that she was running, despite the entrance into the race of Republican Congressman and former Governor Mike Castle. A Rasmussen Reports poll taken at the time portrayed what was likely to be a highly competitive race; O'Donnell only trailed possible Democratic nominee Beau Biden by a single-digit margin while Castle was ahead of Biden by a single-digit margin.

In January 2010, Biden indicated he would not run and Castle became the favorite to take the seat. On March 10, 2010, O'Donnell officially announced her candidacy before a small group of supporters at University of Delaware – Wilmington.

In her remarks, O'Donnell criticized excessive government spending, said that Castle was the most liberal Republican in the House, and said that the Tea Party movement and grassroots anti-incumbent trends would be in her favor.

When a report from The News Journal in March 2010 detailed her fiscal difficulties, she attributed the problems to misunderstandings and errors, and said, "I think the fact that I have struggled financially is what makes me so sympathetic." Nevertheless, her financial problems became a focal point of establishment Republican attacks against her.

As of the beginning of July 2010, she had raised more than $55,000 for her bid. In addition, she noted to a reporter in Philadelphia that she had generated $30,000 in online contributions in roughly 30 hours after her appearance on the Mark Levin Show. A July 2010 Rasmussen Reports poll showed O'Donnell running ahead of Democratic Senate candidate Chris Coons by a margin of 41 to 39 percent in a hypothetical matchup, while a similar poll in August had her trailing Coons 46 to 36 percent. During this time she picked up the endorsements of the Susan B. Anthony List, the Tea Party Express, which called her a “strong voice for conservative constitutionalist principles”, the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and the Family Research Council.

O'Donnell supporters were heartened by the late August primary victory in Alaska of little-known, Tea Party-backed insurgent Joe Miller over incumbent Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. The Tea Party Express said it might spend as much as $600,000 backing O'Donnell. The added 'buzz' about her campaign brought national attention, and also brought additional scrutiny on her record, including a contentious interview on WGMD radio. With days to go before the primary, O'Donnell was further bolstered by an endorsement from Sarah Palin.