“A Ticket To Long Term Love”: The Liberal Media’s Gift To Mitch McConnell
After a recording of an opposition research strategy meeting was leaked to Mother Jones, Mitch McConnell is demanding that the FBI investigate the bugging of his office by the “political left.” This is silly. McConnell knows it’s silly. The meeting was almost certainly recorded by an attendee, not by “bugs” planted by liberal spies.
But the point isn’t really to catch the perpetrator. The point is this ridiculous splash on his campaign website, in which visitors are told that McConnell’s office was “wiretapped” by “liberals” and are encouraged to respond by sending all of their contact information, along with some money, to Mitch McConnell’s reelection campaign.
A good “victim of liberal persecution” story is a ticket to long-term love — and cash — in the persecution-fixated conservative movement. That’s why Fox hired Juan Williams and why people gave money to Michele Bachmann and Allen West. Mitch McConnell, who is among the least popular humans on the planet, especially in Kentucky, needs to get conservatives excited to support him, and a fantastical tale of wiretapping by leftist thugs will help.
He shouldn’t actually need this, though. The weird thing about Mitch McConnell is that he’s easily the best friend the conservative movement has in Washington, and yet the activist right-wing base hates him.
No one has done more to thwart Barack Obama than McConnell. But the CPAC rabble reserve their affection for loudmouthed clowns like Louie Gohmert, who has never accomplished anything. McConnell operates quietly, but more effectively than almost any other major conservative elected official in Washington. He is keeping liberal (or, more often, moderate) judges from being confirmed, he’s hobbling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and effectively stopping the National Labor Relations Board from carrying out its mandate. If Senate Republicans were led by a squishier, more moderate senator, one who actually took seriously the “tradition” and “civility” bullshit the chamber’s old men pretend to hold dear, they might not have been willing or able to carry out four straight years of delay and filibuster on every single piece of Senate business. Despite that, McConnell is derided as a squishy moderate. In fact, it’s only through McConnell’s considerable political skill that he’s managed to avoid a serious right-wing primary challenger.
That’s why McConnell needs this battle with “the political left.” His very bright campaign manager — Jesse Benton, whom you may know from the Rand Paul and Ron Paul campaigns — clearly knew that the smart move was to immediately hype the fact that The Liberals are Attacking Mitch McConnell. While Tea Party types distrust McConnell, they loathe all liberals. That’s why McConnell kept repeating that the “bugging” of his office was carried out by “the political left,” and that’s why he broadly attempted to associate that phrase — though not assign responsibility for the taping — to the Kentucky liberal group that recently made headlines for a racist attack on McConnell’s wife. (A racist attack that much of “the political left” criticized as racist.)
If you want proof that this is working, check out this column by the National Review’s Michael Walsh, a man who used to write under a pseudonym as a parody of Hollywood liberalism, and who now writes under his own name as a much funnier and more cutting (if unintentional) parody of hysterical right-wing ranting. Walsh is pleased that Sen. McConnell has recognized the essential truth of modern politics: That the Left is vicious and unrelenting.
Good to see that Senator Mitch McConnell has finally figured out what some of us have been shouting for years: The Left plays to win and they don’t much care how they do it. When they say, “by any means necessary,” they mean it.
He goes on:
As the Mother Jones story ripples through the rest of the compliant, complicit media, the takeaway won’t be the substance of the story, or lack of it. It will be: Those mean Republicans, blah, blah, blah. In other words, it’s not a story in the old journalistic sense. It’s a meme-reinforcer. And that’s how the Democrat-Media Complex plays the game; even a nothing-burger story like this can be used as a club with which to pound the opposition, with the ultimate goal of delegitimizing them completely.
The only people here exploiting the appetite of a portion of the political press for simplistic “memes” are the Mitch McConnell campaign, who know that easily riled-up dopes like Walsh will freak out in a grand style when presented with any excuse to.
Once the FBI has finished its investigation, McConnell should send David Corn a fruit basket.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, April 10, 2013
“Popping Out Of Every Hole”: Mitch McConnell Faces A Real Threat, And It’s Not Left-Wing Leaks
As is often the case, we’ve been burying the lead as we dissect the leaked recording of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s private whack-a-mole strategy session.
Most of the talk, on the recording and in the media, has been about the cold-blooded, ruthless assessment of the alleged weaknesses of Democratic activist-actress Ashley Judd as a reelection challenger. Riveting if revolting stuff. But what caught my eye was the very last paragraph of the colloquy, in which the Kentucky Republican’s staffers assure their boss that they are going to vet and figure out how to destroy “potential primary folks.”
Specifically, they said they would investigate a wealthy Louisville, Ky., businessman Matthew Bevin, who has been willing at least to listen to some tea party types.
To understand what the Republican Senate leader is up to these days, you need to remember that he now lives in fear less of his home-state Democrats — whom he has essentially neutered in his nearly 30 years in the U.S. Senate — than of tea party and other Republicans who hate his grip on the GOP in Kentucky and his record of talking a better conservative game than he plays.
Working on that resentment is how now-Sen. Rand Paul managed to defeat McConnell’s handpicked GOP candidate for junior senator from Kentucky in 2010. And even though Paul now pledges support for McConnell, and Paul’s former campaign manager is now on McConnell’s team, the five-term incumbent can’t be sure that he is a lock in the May 2014 GOP primary.
That is one reason why McConnell took the unusual step (for a party leader) of joining a list of other senators who vowed to filibuster any and all new gun control legislation.
That is why McConnell hit the floor the other day to roundly denounce — in far more caustic terms than those used by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) — the president’s new budget.
And that is why McConnell is screaming bloody murder about what he claims was the involvement of the “left” in the “bugging” of his campaign office in Louisville last February.
McConnell and his minions have no proof of who was responsible for the recording and the gifting of it to Mother Jones. He may turn out to be correct.
But it is equally possible that the guilty party was a disgruntled Republican — or even that someone on McConnell’s team tried to emulate the tactic allegedly used by GOP strategist Karl Rove in a Texas gubernatorial race in 1986. Rove was widely suspected by the Texas press, and many Republicans, of having bugged his own office so that the device could be “discovered” and he could denounce the Democrats.
No device was found in the McConnell office, though no one apparently looked for one until this week, when the Mother Jones story broke.
Whatever the leak’s provenance, McConnell rushed to the microphones in the Capitol on Tuesday, surrounded by his loyal Senate GOP followers, to denounce the recordings as an example of how the “left wing” was out to get him in Kentucky.
McConnell campaign manager Jesse Benton stepped up the hysteria level on Wednesday, saying on Mike Huckabee’s radio show that the recording’s release were evidence of “Gestapo kind of scare tactics.”
Translation: Hey, Tea Party! You think I’m an unprincipled dealmaker with centrist tendencies? Look how the left wing hates me!
The idea that a Kentucky Republican might have gotten hold of the recording and leaked it is not so far-fetched in a state party that has begun to feel stale and discontented after decades of control by the Louisville-based McConnell.
“There is a lot of discontent in McConnell Land,” said David Adams, who blogs in Kentucky and was Rand Paul’s first campaign manager in 2010. “People aren’t feeling like the Republican Party in the state is going in the right direction.”
The relationship between McConnell and Paul — who were ferocious enemies until the end of the 2010 primary — is described by one Kentuckian on the Hill as merely “transactional.” McConnell was the tea party’s real target in that election, with his chosen candidate, Trey Grayson, just the stand-in.
Now it is McConnell himself who has to face the grassroots wrath, at a time when his overall approval rating in the state is 36 percent — the worst of any senator.
Adams ticked off his major complaints about McConnell on the issues: “The bank bailout. The sum total of all the wasteful federal budgets he voted for, especially in the Bush years. The Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, for what they did to privacy and civil rights. All the pork barrel money he brings back and all the press releases he puts out it.
“We’ve got hundreds.
“Just all the years of him claiming that he cares about freedom and liberty when his long record shows otherwise.
“He’s playing his own form of whack-a-mole. He pops out of every hole there is.”
By: Howard Fineman, The Huffington Post, April 10, 2013
“McConnell Hardball”: The Scope Of Mitch McConnell’s Anxiety Is Still Coming Into Focus
I’ve long believed we can learn a lot about politicians by how they conduct their campaigns. Candidates who are honest and above board before the election tend to be honest and above board after the votes are tallied. Those who choose to be dishonest and sleazy during the race are often less than forthright once in office.
And if this adage is true, we’re learning some unsettling things about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
For months, McConnell has made no real effort to hide his anxiety about his re-election. Despite his power and leadership role, and despite representing a “red” state, McConnell is not at all popular in the Bluegrass State. He’s sitting on an $8.6 million campaign war chest, which he’s already been forced to tap into — McConnell was the first incumbent to launch television ads in this cycle, 20 months before Election Day.
Is the panic justified? Probably — new results from Public Policy Polling shows McConnell with a 36% approval rating from his own constituents. Though his party affiliation is enough to lift him above likely Democratic challengers, PPP found his advantage over Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes at only four points, 45% to 41%.
The scope of McConnell’s anxiety is still coming into focus. Mother Jones‘ David Corn has obtained another secret recording and published this report this morning.
On February 2, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, opened up his 2014 reelection campaign headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, and in front of several dozen supporters vowed to “point out” the weaknesses of any opponent fielded by the Democrats. “They want to fight? We’re ready,” he declared. McConnell was serious: Later that day, he was huddling with aides in a private meeting to discuss how to attack his possible Democratic foes, including actor/activist Ashley Judd, who was then contemplating challenging the minority leader.
During this strategy session — a recording of which was obtained by Mother Jones — McConnell and his aides considered assaulting Judd for her past struggles with depression and for her religious views.
Even by contemporary GOP standards, some of the planned lines of attack were unusually ugly.
For example, during their strategy session, one McConnell aide argued that Judd is “emotionally unbalanced,” pointing to her “suicidal tendencies.”
Judd wrote in her autobiography about her struggles with depression, including having considered suicide as a sixth-grader.
But what kind of campaign looks at that as a legitimate area for a political attack?
On religion, Judd had described herself this way: “I still choose the God of my understanding as the God of my childhood. I have to expand my God concept from time to time, and you know particularly I enjoy native faith practices, and have a very nature-based God concept. I’d like to think I’m like St. Francis in that way. Brother Donkey, Sister Bird.”
Apparently, Team McConnell found this hilarious. Corn reported:
Laughter erupted again, with one guy in the meeting exclaiming, “Brother Donkey, Sister Bird!” The group didn’t seem to realize that Judd was referring to well-known stories about St. Francis, who once preached a sermon to birds—”my little sisters”—and who referred to his own body as the “Brother Donkey.” (In her book, Judd identifies herself as a Christian and often refers to church and prayer.)
With his comrades laughing about Judd’s reference to donkeys and birds, the chief presenter remarked, “That’s my favorite line so far. Absolute favorite one so far.”
Obviously, with Judd no longer considering the race, the specific lines of attack are a moot point. There’s no point in a senator attacking the personal life of a movie star just for the sake of doing so.
But the fact that this is where McConnell and his team were prepared to go doesn’t speak highly of the Senate Minority Leader’s values.
Postscript: The Republican senator hasn’t commented on the substance of David Corn’s report, but McConnell’s campaign wants an FBI investigation to determine how Corn obtained the recording. McConnell’s campaign manager Jesse Benton accused “the Left” of “Watergate-style tactics,” and believes “a criminal investigation” is warranted.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 9, 2013
“Obstructionist-In-Chief”: It’s Past Time To Make Mitch McConnell Pay
There’s been no end to the grief Mitch McConnell’s taken for his declaration early in Barack Obama’s first term that his party’s top goal was to make Obama a one-term president. Ironically, though, the failure of McConnell and the GOP to realize their goal may be the best thing he has going for him as 2014 approaches.
McConnell has been the Senate minority leader since 2006, succeeding Bill Frist just as the party lost its majority in the chamber. Twice in his tenure – in 2010 and again in 2012 – Republicans have seemed poised to win back the majority only to fall short thanks to a combination of counterproductive primary results and a national image problem that turned off swing voters in key races. As ’14 approaches, Republicans are again looking at a favorable map, though it would take some big breaks for them to overcome the Democrats’ current 55-45 advantage. But McConnell himself has a much simpler concern: saving his own job.
The Kentuckian, who turns 71 on Wednesday, has never exactly been beloved in his home state, where voters have moved closer to the GOP in recent years but are still more than willing to vote Democratic. In his first campaign, back in 1984, McConnell scored an upset over incumbent Democrat Walter Huddleston by a fraction of a point, a victory owed entirely to Ronald Reagan’s formidable coattails. When McConnell last faced the voters, in 2008, he held on by 6 points against Democrat Bruce Lunsford – this on the same day that John McCain carried Kentucky by 16 points. And in early polling for ’14, he’s running under 50 percent and leading Ashley Judd, the Kentucky native and Hollywood actress who is edging closer to a candidacy, by a high single-digit margin.
Senate leaders have become irresistible targets for the rival party’s activists in recent years. The trend was kicked off in 2004, when Republicans made toppling Democratic leader Tom Daschle one of their top priorities. The GOP recruited a top-notch candidate, John Thune, poured millions into his coffers and even coaxed then-Majority Leader Bill Frist into coming to South Dakota on Thune’s behalf – a violation of a tradition of party leaders refraining from each other’s home state battles. The gambit worked and Daschle was defeated in a close race. Democrats then made a serious run at McConnell in ’08, although Majority Leader Harry Reid stayed away from Kentucky during the race, and Republicans made Reid their No. 1 Senate target in ’10; if GOP primary voters hadn’t insisted on nominating the erratic, self-destructive Sharron Angle, Reid would likely have been felled.
And now it’s McConnell’s turn to face a full-court press from the other party. Already, a liberal group has aired an anti-McConnell ad in Kentucky, criticizing the minority leader for his opposition to a new assault weapons ban. Under any circumstance, grass-roots Democrats would be excited over the prospect of giving McConnell a fight. But his emergence as the face of reflexive Republican opposition to Obama and his agenda has only ratcheted up the left’s resolve to make him pay.
The question is whether they can actually beat him. The good news for Democrats is that Kentucky isn’t quite the Republican bastion it’s often thought of as. Sure, it’s voted Republican by lopsided margins in the last four presidential elections, but Bill Clinton did manage to carry it twice in the 1990s. It also boasts an impressive run of Democratic governors. The state’s top job is now held by Steve Beshear, a second-term Democrat, and only three Republicans (Ernie Fletcher, Louie Nunn and Simeon Willis) have held it over the last 70 years. Democrats also control one of the state’s two legislative chambers, and while no Democrat has won a U.S. Senate race since Wendell Ford in 1992, the party has come close a few times: In addition to McConnell’s 6-point scare in ’08, Republican Jim Bunning only narrowly fended off Daniel Mongiardo in 2004 and Scotty Baesler in 1998.
So Kentucky is willing to vote Democratic, McConnell has never set the world on fire at the ballot box, and after 30 years of incumbency a change message could be a formidable weapon against him. Plus, as my colleague Alex Seitz-Wald wrote on Tuesday, Tea Party groups in Kentucky – which mobilized behind Rand Paul in 2010 to defeat McConnell’s protégé, Trey Grayson, in a Senate primary – are threatening to challenge McConnell in a primary, which could force him farther to the right and away from the general election mainstream.
And now the bad news for Democrats: There’s reason to believe that Kentucky has moved farther to the right – and grown more hostile to the national Democratic Party – since President Obama came to office. Nationally, Obama’s popular vote margin was down last November from its ’08 level, but Kentuckians turned against him particularly hard. In ’08, he lost the state by 16 points, but last November the margin was 22. To put that in some perspective, that’s even worse than Walter Mondale fared in Kentucky in 1984, when he lost the state by 21 points amid a 19-point national landslide defeat. Obama’s unpopularity in the state was driven home last spring, when a majority of the state’s counties voted for “uncommitted” over the president in the Democratic primary. Since Obama became president, Democrats have also lost one of their House seats in the state, leaving them with just one.
Race has clearly played a role in Kentucky’s Obama-phobia, as it has in other swaths of Appalachia. The Obama administration’s supposed “war on coal” is a big factor too. These attitudes aren’t likely to dull in the next 21 months, which will give McConnell a chance to survive simply by linking his opponent to the president. Already, an attack ad from a Karl Rove affiliated group is bashing Judd as “an Obama-following radical Hollywood liberal.” Judd was an active campaigner for Obama last year and was a delegate (from Tennessee) for him at the Democratic convention. She’s also spoken out against mountain top coal mining, which could play right into the GOP’s “war on coal” theme.
There’s also the matter of Judd herself. She has Kentucky roots, comes from a famous country music family, and is a visible and vocal presence at University of Kentucky basketball games. So she has some serious ammunition to fight charges of carpetbagging. And she’ll obviously be able to raise a ton of money. But Republicans have some ammunition of their own, to portray her as a cultural elite who’s too close to Obama. Judd’s candidacy would attract national attention and money, but it’s not clear she’s the best option for Democrats. If she runs, though, the nomination will probably be hers.
One look at his electoral history shows that McConnell has been ripe for a serious challenge for years. He’s going to get it next year. If he survives, ironically enough, he’ll have the president to thank for it. Without the Obama boogeyman to run against, he wouldn’t have much else going for him.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, February 20, 2013
“A Mitch That Needs Scratching”: Mitch McConnell, The Least Popular Senator In America
One of the most powerful men in Washington, it turns out, is also the most unpopular senator in the nation.
This is probably not a coincidence.
Facing reelection in 2014, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) finds himself in a tougher battle than many anticipated. According to a recent poll, just 17 percent of Kentucky voters are committed to voting for him. Given how out of touch he is with their needs, it’s no wonder.
As minority leader, McConnell has been the architect of an unprecedented level of legislative obstruction in the upper chamber. Indeed, he was the mastermind behind the strategy of intransigence that the GOP adopted immediately after President Obama took office in 2009. He and his merry band of GOP brothers have blocked every effort to reduce the economic pain felt by average Americans and the good people of his home state.
His exploitation of the filibuster to require a supermajority for almost every vote flies in the face of the Founders’ intention. In the Federalist No. 58, James Madison warned that granting such power to the minority would undo the fundamental principle of free government, allowing the minority “to extort unreasonable indulgences.”
Senate Republicans, on McConnell’s orders, have done just that, manufacturing crises like the debt ceiling, fiscal cliff and sequester in order to demand cuts to the social safety net.
Yet there’s an even more unseemly aspect to McConnell’s obstruction. He, quite simply, employs the filibuster to benefit his wealthy donors.
As the Public Campaign Action Fund has noted, he has delayed or killed bills that would repeal subsidies for Big Oil, incentivize job creation, strengthen worker rights and close tax loopholes for companies with overseas operations. Opponents of such bills have found a champion in McConnell, who is more than willing to cripple the legislative process in exchange for campaign donations.
Since arriving in Washington, he has raised more than a quarter-billion dollars for himself and his allies while fighting every attempt to rein in our out-of-control campaign finance system.
When Congress was grappling over the fiscal cliff, McConnell seized on the opportunity to broker a deal that would avert the crisis in the eleventh hour. The final bill included a provision that granted Amgen, a pharmaceutical company, a $500 million windfall. Just weeks ahead of the deal, an Amgen lobbyist gave McConnell $3,000 and the company’s PAC hosted a fundraiser for him. Though McConnell denied any quid pro quo, the implication of the timing is hard to ignore.
When Americans suffering the effects of Hurricane Sandy needed federal assistance, McConnell was content to sit on his hands, instead of helping to pass an aid package through the Senate — that is, until a New York City billionaire offered to raise money for him. Even then, he voted no on the bill.
President Obama urged Congress to bring his legislative proposals on gun violence to a vote during his State of the Union address. The victims of such senseless tragedies across the country deserve at least a vote, Obama asserted.
Yet given the McConnell-induced dysfunction in Congress, asking for a simple vote is asking for the moon — and McConnell has already vowed to deprive them of even that.
Eighty-two percent of Kentuckians support criminal background checks for gun purchases. The number of gun deaths in Kentucky is higher than the national average. But none of this matters when the gun lobby spent $198,615 to get McConnell elected. He will, apparently, vote based on what will keep him on office, rather than what is best for his constituents or the country.
McConnell, tacitly acknowledging his vulnerability, has already kicked off campaign efforts, raising money and opening a campaign headquarters before any challengers have even officially entered the race.
He’s smart to do so — opponents smell blood in the water. Groups like the Progressive Change Campaign, which released a scathing ad lambasting McConnell’s record on guns, are already generating momentum for a fight. There’s increasing talk of potential challengers such as Ashley Judd, and Kentucky’s liberal and tea party groups — unlikely bedfellows, to be sure — are mulling the possibility of teaming up in an effort to bring McConnell down.
While McConnell’s war chest is daunting, it is stuffed almost entirely by out-of-state and corporate PAC money. His grass-roots base is anemic, and individuals contributing $200 or less make up a sliver of the pie. A strong organizing effort could capitalize on that weakness, using his unpopularity and questionable votes to unseat him — something the Progressive Change Campaign Committee hopes to do.
Time and again, McConnell has ignored the needs of the people while staunchly defending the pay-to-play electoral system that shields him from legitimate challengers. And Kentuckians just might be fed up.
McConnell’s seat was once occupied by Henry Clay, who was dubbed “The Great Pacificator.” Admired by Abraham Lincoln, he is widely considered one of the greatest senators in American history. Clay once said, “Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.”
Kentucky voters deserve a senator who understands the wisdom of those words.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 19, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 