Bozo-gate, anyone?

Race Profile The Delaware Senate Race The Tea Party movement scored another victory when it helped propel a dissident Republican, Christine O’Donnell, to an upset win.

Since Christine O’Donnell’s upset victory in the Delaware Republican Senate primary last month, the out-of-nowhere Tea Party sensation has been dogged by charges that she inflated her resume, exaggerated her educational record and had said some things over the years, that her detractors found, shall we say, clownish.

The latest suspicion of inflated credentials, which arose over the weekend, involved Ms. O’Donnell’s father, Daniel O’Donnell, a long-ago local television personality in the Philadelphia area whose main claim to fame, according to the O’Donnell family, was that he used to play Bozo the Clown.

The Bozo bombshell was first reported by The News Journal of Wilmington in November 2006, during one of Ms. O’Donnell’s previous Senate campaigns. The detail was included in a profile of Ms. O’Donnell that I wrote for Saturday’s Times. Ms. O’Donnell’s older brother, Daniel, confirmed in a phone call that indeed his father had played Bozo.

“Bozo the Clown is a franchise, and back then, every major city had their own Bozo,” said Daniel O’Donnell, the brother, who is a business manager at a car dealership in Trenton. “He was Philly’s Bozo for a time.” Daniel O’Donnell, the father, declined to comment for that article.

On Saturday morning, I received e-mail from a reader questioning whether this claim was true based on the absence of any “Daniel O’Donnell” listed on the ultimate authority on all things, Wikipedia. The reader demanded proof about Mr. O’Donnell’s Bozo bona fides and a level of specificity and documentation that I was not prepared to provide. My answer – that I had verified the Bozo fact with the O’Donnell family – was woefully unacceptable to her, a position that she laid out in a way that soon convinced me that devoting more time on the subject was not how I wanted to spend my Saturday.

“Given that there is no record anywhere on the Internet that I have been able to verify this claim,” the reader wrote, “and given Ms. O’Donnell’s history with the truth, it seems thick to report it as true without any kind of verification.”

By the end of the day, my new Bozo Truther friend had taken her grievance to a Web site, Stinque (“if it smells, we’re on it”), which happily took up the investigation.

“Welcome to our first installment of ‘In Search of Bozo’,” the Web site wrote, continuing:

“As students of American history know, Bozo is Large and Contains Multitudes. The ur-Bozo is generally accepted to be Larry Harmon, who wasn’t the first to don the pancake and cowl, but was smart enough to secure the licensing rights. Officially blessed Local Bozos followed in his wake, appearing on television nationwide. Notable DC Bozo: Willard Scott. Not found in Wikipedia’s Local Bozo Catalog: Daniel O’Donnell. But while Wikipedia’s Bozo Roster is commendably extensive, we hesitate to declare it definitive. And since a search for “Daniel O’Donnell” yields pages of links to a popular Irish singer, we must continue our journey in a different direction.

Soon enough, Stinque.com had even launched a billboard campaign, raising the specter that Mr. O’Donnell had lied about his Bozo background. “WHERE’s THE BOZO CERTIFICATE?” the billboards would say.

“Anybody who would lie about a cherished childhood icon is unqualified to serve in the United States Senate,” the Web site concluded, more in sorrow than in outrage. “Really. It’s in the Constitution. Look it up.”

Needless to say, I was mortified to have possibly played a small role in perpetrating such a falsehood. The first call I made Monday morning was to the New Jersey home of Daniel O’Donnell. The previous call I had placed to him – last week – did not go well; he essentially had hung up on me. But he did come to the phone this time.

“Who told you I was Bozo?” he wanted to know.

“Your son,” I said, at which point he confirmed that yes, he was Bozo, but not an official, full-time certified Bozo, more of a part-time Bozo.

“To be an official Bozo, you had to go to a special school in Texas,” explained Mr. O’Donnell. He never did. Instead, he was asked to fill-in for the official Bozos whenever they would have to travel out of the Philadelphia area for acting gigs.

“They would leave, I would come in and work for two or three weeks, whatever, until the regular Bozo came back,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “I was the fill-in Bozo.” He worked out of a local station in Jenkintown, Pa., he said, adding that station employees did his make-up and hair. He would also do remote appearances, got to supermarkets, meet kids, sign autographs and ride around in the Bozo Mobile. His son Daniel was his assistant.

Meantime, Stinque.com was becoming more and more insistent. “We demand that all politics in Our Blessed Nation cease,” the Web site declared, “until we uncover the truth about the Greatest Scandal of Our Time.”

Before I could press Mr. O’Donnell for more information, he ended the phone call abruptly. “Ok, gotta go,” he said, and he was gone, no clowning around.