Frank Rich seems to think Christine O’Donnell is an asset to the Right, and not the joke she seems to be.

O’Donnell is particularly needed now because most of the other Republican Tea Party standard-bearers lack genuine antigovernment or proletarian cred. Joe Miller and Ken Buck, the Senate candidates in Alaska and Colorado, actually are graduates of elite universities like those O’Donnell lied about attending. Rick Scott, the populist running for governor in Florida, was chief executive of a health care corporation that scooped up so many Medicare and Medicaid payments it had to settle charges for defrauding taxpayers. Rand Paul, the scion of a congressman, is an ophthalmologist whose calls for spending restraint don’t extend to his own Medicare income. Carl Paladino, the truculent man of the people in New York, grew his fortune as a developer with government handouts and favors. His California bookend, Carly Fiorina, received a golden parachute worth as much as $42 million from Hewlett-Packard, where she liquidated some 20,000 jobs….

… O’Donnell, like Palin, knows that attacks by those elites, including conservative grandees, only backfire and enhance her image as a feisty defender of the aggrieved and resentful Joe Plumbers in “real America.”

O’Donnell’s very ineptitude makes her more attractive to the Right, Frank Rich thinks, because it means she’s “one of them,” not an elitist snob. Although it seems to me that someone who lied about attending ivy league schools on her resume is in no position to play up her populist virtues. Not that inconsistencies have ever stopped a wingnut before.

In other news — The “One Nation” progressive rally in Washington today is claiming a bigger crowd than Beckapalooza. I can’t tell from the photographs if it really was bigger, but it does appear to be less monochromatic, if you catch my drift.