People are asking for her speech from the Values Voter Summit. I’ll post that later, but for now, a peace offering presented in the spirit of “true conservative”/RINO healing. From last night’s Jewish Federation candidate forum, this is a commendably deft response to the old video the left rolled out this week showing her denouncing masturbation. For all the comparisons between her and Palin, O’Donnell is actually a more fluid, confident public speaker, a skill doubtless honed from years of appearances on Maher and Hannity, etc. Palin, in fact, advised her on Wednesday night to “speak through Fox News”; O’Donnell, to her credit, is rejecting that advice, choosing to appear on “Face the Nation” this weekend along with “Fox News Sunday.” If she’s as smooth there as she is below, she’ll do herself a world of good in getting centrist voters in Delaware to take her seriously. Will she be that good? After the interviews with Dan Gaffney and John McCormack, who knows. Cross those fingers, especially since I’ve got a hunch that Chris Wallace will want to talk less about masturbation than about the dirt being thrown at her by ex-staffers. There’s nothing too terrible in there, mind you, but the Democrats aren’t looking to paint her as a criminal, just as a kook. She did a good job last night denying them an opportunity.

Incidentally, Chris Coons was also at the candidate forum last night and did something smart himself, downplaying O’Donnell’s old comments on masturbation by saying that voters would rather hear about the issues today. That’s straight out of the Obama playbook: Stay above the fray to look magnanimous while your surrogates beat the hell out of your opponent for you. Exit quotation from O’Donnell, who applauded Coons’s remark: “Let me say, I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to have an opponent who wants to talk about the issues, so I thank you for that gentlemanly approach.”