Sarah Palin advisers prepped Christine O'Donnell for debate

By some reckonings, Christine O'Donnell had a bit of a rocky time at her Delaware Senate debate with Dem Chris Coons last night. She wouldn't say whether she believe in evolution, described Coons as a Marxist, and appeared to stumble over her answer on discretionary funding.

And yet, as Dana Milbank notes, in comparison to recent revelations about her and the national caricature that is the result, her performance was clearly an improvement.

If that's so, there are two people she has to thank for that, and they're both Sarah Palin advisers: Randy Scheunemann and Michael Goldfarb. They were the ones who took on the job of prepping O'Donnell for the debate, Goldfarb confirms.

Palin, in a conversation with O'Donnell, recommended the two men to her, and the O'Donnell campaign reached out to them to enlist their help, Goldfarb says. They spent the day with her yesterday in Wilmington getting her ready.

Goldfarb insists he was happy with her performance, claiming that Coons and the moderators had ganged up on her. "She came off as the far more likeable candidate," Goldfarb said. "Coons just kept his head down to the extent he could. My view was that it was three on one, and she held her own."

Goldfarb also rejected claims that O'Donnell botched her answer on Afghanistan, when she said that "we were fighting the Soviets over there in Afghanistan in the '80s and '90s" and that "we did not finish the job."

"Her point was that we left and that was a huge problem," he said. "Her point that we were there fighting the Soviets, that's also fundamentally true. The CIA was in Afghanistan. We were arming, equipping, training."

Still, it's hard to imagine a more daunting task than prepping O'Donnell for a high-profile, high-stakes debate. But Goldfarb insists that wasn't the case at all: "She's extremely impressive -- she's not a career politican."

No, she certainly isn't.

