OPINION | MICHAEL A. COHEN
Kentucky Senate race showcases the worst of politics
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Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and his Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes rehearsed with host Bill Goodman before their debate Monday in Kentucky.
ON MONDAY my confidence in representative democracy as an effective form of governance momentarily wavered. The reason: I watched the Kentucky Senate debate between minority leader Mitch McConnell and his Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes — a depressing tete-a-tete between one candidate afraid to say anything and another seemingly incapable of being honest with his constituents.
The gaffe of the night — if political Twitter was any indication — was Grimes’s continued refusal to say whether she voted for President Obama in 2012. Her response — that she believes so strongly in the principle of the secret ballot that it would be improper to reveal for whom she voted — is weasel-esque. If Barack Obama had a 60 percent approval rating in Kentucky, rather than his actual 31 percent rating, I’m fairly confident that Grimes principled stand would be “look at me, I voted for the guy in the White House.”
ON MONDAY my confidence in representative democracy as an effective form of governance momentarily wavered. The reason: I watched the Kentucky Senate debate between minority leader Mitch McConnell and his Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes — a depressing tete-a-tete between one candidate afraid to say anything and another seemingly incapable of being honest with his constituents.
The gaffe of the night — if political Twitter was any indication — was Grimes’s continued refusal to say whether she voted for President Obama in 2012. Her response — that she believes so strongly in the principle of the secret ballot that it would be improper to reveal for whom she voted — is weasel-esque. If Barack Obama had a 60 percent approval rating in Kentucky, rather than his actual 31 percent rating, I’m fairly confident that Grimes principled stand would be “look at me, I voted for the guy in the White House.”
But her inability to answer a gotcha question is far from a hanging offense or, as NBC political correspondent Chuck Todd suggested, a disqualifying moment. If anything, her substance-free, scared of its own shadow, “the less I say about what I believe the better” campaign that is relying almost entirely on her opponent’s dismal poll ratings is far worse.Monday night my pen ran out of ink trying to record all the times she reminded Kentucky voters that Mitch McConnell has been in the Senate for “30 years.”
If she wins it will be historic — proof that you can in fact beat something with nothing.
Then again nothing would be an improvement over the assault on common sense that is McConnell’s political career. During the debate, he re-stated his desire to tear Obamacare out by the “root and branch.” But he’ll leave in place the small twig that holds the Kentucky health exchange website, called Kynect, which is very popular among the state’s voters and exists solely because of — wait for it — Obamacare. It’s a bit like saying, “You can keep your shiny automobile, but I’ll take the engine, the transmission, and I’ll call in the loan that you used to buy it.”
McConnell also complained about Obama’s “job-killing agenda,” when the one person in America more responsible for the nation’s sluggish job growth over the past several years is the Senate minority leader. He fought every effort of the president to stimulate the economy through further government spending or to strengthen the social safety net for those out of work. But far be it for Grimes to point that out or say a single positive word about her fellow Democrat, the president.
Grimes instead restricted her comments to the narrow series of items that a Kentucky Democrat can talk about without alienating the state’s voters. She was happy to pile on when McConnell criticized Obama’s nonexistent “war on coal.” After all, getting on the wrong side of an industry that supports about 12,000 jobs in Kentucky would just be bad politics.
The Kentucky debate was a depressing tete-a-tete between one candidate afraid to say anything and another seemingly incapable of being honest with his constituents.
That coal is a toxic contributor to global warming was of little concern, particularly for McConnell, who when asked if he accepted the reality of climate change, replied that scientists disagree on the issue and, after all, “I’m not a scientist.” In fact, there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue — one that is accepted by even non-scientists.
Indeed, one of the many maddening elements from the debate was the focus on Grimes’s evasions rather than McConnell’s rejection of basic science and his completely irreconcilable position on Obamacare and Kynect. One would think that dealing with global warming and making sure 500,000 Kentuckians can keep their health insurance is a tad more important than whether Grimes voted for Obama.
But as has been so often been the case in this midterm cycle, policy statements and views — like the claim of Republican Representative Tom Cotton of Arkansas that ISIS operatives are plotting with Mexican drug cartels to enter the country; or New Hampshire Senate candidate Scott Brown’s assertion that Ebola-afflicted people can slip across the border into the United States; or the suggestion of state Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa that states can nullify laws they don’t like — or even the fact that the nation’s legislature is hostage to a small band of Republican radicals — are all far from disqualifying offenses.
It almost makes one feel sorry for Grimes, whose worst crime appears to be that she’s only a bit less slippery than her opponent.
Michael A. Cohen is a fellow at the Century Foundation. Follow him on Twitter@speechboy71.
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