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By The Hill Editors
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Posted: 11/06/07 07:18 PM [ET] |
Democratic hopes of taking Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) scalp in next year’s election would look a lot more plausible if the party had actually acquired a candidate.
Ernie Fletcher, the incumbent Republican governor, appears to be in trouble in Tuesday’s gubernatorial race, and Democrats have taken this as a promising sign for them, as it is. If Fletcher is ousted by Lt. Gov. Steve Beshear (D), it will signal that Kentucky is no longer the red state it appeared to become in 2000, and that Rep. John Yarmuth’s (D) victory last November over the Republican incumbent, Rep. Anne Northup, was perhaps a straw in the wind rather than an exception that proved the long-term nature of GOP rule there.
Democrats have been hitting McConnell hard recently. On Nov. 1, Sen. Charles Schumer’s (N.Y.) Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) sent out a press release blasting the Republican leader’s vote against the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, under a headline that accused him of voting “against children’s health care … again.”
A couple of days earlier, the DSCC trumpeted a poll for the Lexington Herald-Leader showing that 46 percent of Kentuckians disapproved of McConnell’s job performance, compared to 45 percent who approved of it.
On the same day, the campaign committee pointed out another story in the same newspaper about an investigation involving a donor and McConnell’s efforts to secure a $25 million earmark. And even during the writing of this editorial on Monday, another DSCC e-mail dropped into our inbox on the same subject.
All this is fine and well, or at least normal enough; this newspaper has no complaint about aggressive campaign tactics. What is notable, however, is the pattern of attacks on McConnell — a pattern that suggests Democrats really believe they can knock off the Republican Senate leader just as the GOP knocked off the Democratic Senate leader in 2004.
The thing is, as noted above, all this effort is being expended against McConnell at a time when he has no challenger. The DSCC’s position is the political equivalent of being all dressed up with no place to go — all fired up with no one to support. It’s also worth noting that McConnell has more than $6.8 million cash on hand.
There are some plausible Democrats waiting in the wings, such as Charlie Owen, a multimillionaire local businessman. And Sen. Jim Bunning’s (R) election scare three years ago — he retained his seat with only 51 percent of the vote — makes it unlikely that McConnell is taking anything for granted.
But he is also a deep-pocketed candidate who brings the bacon back to his home state, and he probably isn’t yet losing much sleep. |
