Unelectable

Let’s see: Christine O’Donnell has been accepting and spending funds without an official treasurer (she’s been warned twice about violating FEC rules), she pays her rent, her Comcast service and a family member out of campaign funds, claiming her apartment is a home office, well, I have to think she’s not following FED regs. All that remains is for someone to file a complaint! Fred Clark:

The real reason Christine O’Donnell is unelectable is that she allegedly has violated campaign finance laws on a daily basis for years, enriching herself and her boyfriend with political contributions.

O’Donnell’s home address — the one she lists on her voter registration — is the townhouse pictured above where she lives with her boyfriend (notice it doesn’t have bushes). That townhouse is apparently paid for in large measure by campaign contributions, as is her income and that of her boyfriend/aide.

O’Donnell has thus far failed to explain how this apparent arrangement is legal.

The problem, in other words, is not that Christine O’Donnell is too extreme in her policy views or that she has made every effort to alienate the swing voters she would need to be elected. The problem is that she appears to have broken several campaign laws — that she appears to still be breaking those laws. She is still living in a home allegedly paid for with campaign donations and matching public finances. She is still living on income allegedly drawn from those same funds — as is her boyfriend.

O’Donnell has never been forced to answer these allegations or to provide any explanation for them. This was partly due, I suspect, to a misplaced pity. O’Donnell has, for years, been viewed as an earnest-but-dim perennial single-issue candidate who didn’t really matter much and thus wasn’t worth the effort of exposing or accusing. She no longer enjoys that privilege of being inconsequential.

It’s possible that O’Donnell is, in fact, completely innocent of any massive, long-term campaign fraud. The overwhelming appearance of wrongdoing here may be only that — an appearance. She has never corrected the public record that creates this appearance of wrongdoing, but it’s possible that everything everyone thinks they know about her unreported income and her dubious living arrangements is incorrect. It’s also possible that her boyfriend is a legal savant who found and exploited some loophole in campaign finance law that had heretofore eluded people like Ted Stevens and Dan Rostenkowski and their armies of lawyers. That’s all possible.

But it’s also possible that the appearance of wrongdoing here is an accurate reflection of actual wrongdoing. It’s possible that the allegations that she has never explained or refuted are actually true — that she has been pocketing campaign contributions and federal matching dollars from taxpayers and using them for her own living expenses.

And if that is the case, she may wind up serving a term in a federal institution, but it will be a place far from Capitol Hill.

Yes, but but but… isn’t she going to go to hell for living in sin, anyway?