OPINION: O'Donnell was a Gen Xer before she became a tea partier

Meghan Daum is author of the forthcoming "Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House" and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

It's true that Christine O'Donnell, Delaware's GOP senatorial candidate, bears some resemblance to Sarah Palin. Both are attractive brunettes who've staked their political careers on extreme social conservatism. Both emerged on the national stage seemingly out of nowhere and proceeded to make liberals and even a lot of Republicans slap their collective foreheads in disbelief. And both are catnip for media that love to search for skeletons in closets that also happen to contain several pairs of designer pumps.

We don't yet have enough information to know whether the abstinence-only, anti-gay, anti-porn, anti-masturbation platform on which she's built her reputation has worked out as well for her in practice as in preachability. But O'Donnell is no Palin clone. For one thing, we know for sure that O'Donnell, who was born in 1969, is a bona fide member of Generation X. Even if she continues to come across like a wacky, sanctimonious wingnut, it could be in a distinctly Gen X way. And that may be one more way we'll begin to see that the tea party isn't as monolithic as it appears.

Palin is just five years older than O'Donnell, but those five years make a big difference. If anything, Palin's air of self-congratulation and loyalty to the edict of "having it all" epitomize stereotypical boomerdom. O'Donnell, on the other hand, who's childless, never married and was highly focused on professional goals right out of the gate, betrays a somehow more sober sensibility.

She's also on the leading edge of the generational shift in dirt digging. O'Donnell is too old to have left a self-made trail of cringe-worthy bread crumbs on the social networks, but her career as an advocate for conservative issues was largely dependent on becoming a provocative media personality. She filled the role on shows like "Politically Incorrect" and MTV's "Sex in the '90s."

Clips from these broadcasts are now all over the place. But despite the media's insistence that it's a real issue, her brush with witchcraft, to take one example, amounts to little more than a bad talk-show anecdote. Another trope has been her distrust of condoms. On "Politically Incorrect," she suggested they didn't do much in the way of preventing pregnancy. There's also a quote from a 2002 interview with Phil Donahue in which she asserted "condoms will not protect you from AIDS."

On the one hand, it's hard to believe that any Gen Xer would think such a thing. If you were in your teens or 20s in the late 1980s and early 1990s, you had condoms shoved in your face as vigorously as the fear of HIV transmission was drilled into your brain. On the other hand, in those pre-AIDS cocktail days, the standard message was that there was no such thing as totally safe sex, protected or not. The free-for-all that baby boomers had enjoyed was over; the sex-positive, "Girls Gone Wild" sensibility of the millennials was years away. People were still getting it on, of course. But somehow it didn't quite feel like a "getting it on" kind of culture.

Amid that gloom and apprehension, O'Donnell carved out the belief system that is now perplexing so much of the nation. Halfway through college, she's told reporters, she quit drinking and having sex, left the Catholic Church for evangelical Christianity, and became a vocal opponent of pornography, homosexuality and, for good measure, masturbation.

Most Gen Xers, of course, have recovered just fine from the sexual disquiet of the peak years of the AIDS crisis. O'Donnell, obviously, is an outlier who could well have developed these views no matter what year she was born. But before we chalk her up as a Palin redux, or as interchangeable with other members of the tea party, we'd do well to consider the ways in which her membership in another relatively small, occasionally misunderstood cohort might make her more interesting than the cartoon-character "right-wing babe" that many are now assuming her to be.