Not even tea party favorite Christine O’Donnell could draw a large crowd for her book signing Wednesday in staunchly Republican Naples, Florida during August, a month when there are few tourists and many locals are on vacation.Still, O’Donnell took the turnout of five people — members of the media outnumbered customers — at Barnes & Noble in stride.
Note that The News-Press is struggling as hard as humanly possible to make it sound as though O'Donnell's book reading would have been a success at some other time, in some other place. This is pretty standard ego-massaging if you work in a bookstore. Every bookseller knows what to say if an author event draws in only a couple of people: Oh, the weather is so nice outside that nobody wanted to come in; oh, Garrison Keillor is reading across town and that probably pulled a lot of your audience away from this reading; we're heading into a big holiday weekend; I'm sure this is all our fault. But you can't apologize this kind of a dismal failure away. Of the five people who attended the signing, one of them said he was going to launch his own presidential campaign, and another one tried to get O'Donnell to sign a book on demonology. Thank God the press was there to cover this important event—it's like the whole tea party "phenomenon" in miniature.
