Once Ashley Judd fell by the wayside, Mitch McConnell’s main pain has come from his own party in the form of tea party candidate, Matt Bevin. Now the race for the Kentucky senator’s seat finds some new strength coming from a Democrat: Bill Clinton.
Matt Bevin has been in trouble. Very popular and a real threat to Senator McConnell, Bevin “has fizzled,” Chris Cillizza wrote the other day in the Washington Post.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Republican primary challenger dealt with fallout from the revelation the he once backed a government program he uses as a punching bag. Then he stoked controversy with remarks about gay marriage. It all came as McConnell continued to avoid the pitfalls that have ensnared some of his Senate colleagues facing heat from the right.
The result is that with three months until the primary, Bevin’s bid to defeat McConnell faces increasingly long odds.
“He’s having some trouble,” said veteran political observer Al Cross, a former Louisville Courier-Journal political writer. …WaPo
Tarnation! And we thought McConnell’s downfall was dang near a sure thing. Maybe it still is.
During Bill Clinton’s first-inaugural festivities, a 14-year-old girl from Kentucky presented the new president with an honorary bouquet of red roses at the base of the Lincoln Memorial.
Two decades later, that girl, Alison Lundergan Grimes, is a candidate to become Kentucky’s first female senator. And Clinton — an uncle figure whom Grimes counts as a friend, mentor and adviser — is playing a starring role in her campaign and will appear at a sold-out Grimes fundraiser Tuesday.
As Grimes weighed whether to run for the Senate, Clinton took nearly an hour out of a visit last year to Owensboro, Ky., to huddle privately with her. …WaPo
Huddle? Clinton?
Get your mind out of the gutter. Hillary was there, too. And the Clintons are very, very popular in Kentucky.