Cross posted at Hillbilly Report
By Berry Craig
Joseph Gerth of the Louisville Courier Journal:
“Matt Bevin relies on his young daughter, Olivia, to call U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell a liar in his latest television ad, which stars Bevin and his whole clan.”
Bevin is the tea party hero challenging McConnell in next month’s Kentucky Republican primary.
The ad opens with Olivia, one of Bevin’s nine bairns, piping: "Mitch McConnell is telling a bunch of lies about my dad. Don't be fooled.”
The ad must have really riled Team Mitch. One of the players couldn’t resist taking a swipe at the Bevin bunch with a tweet: “I was waiting for ‘My dad went to MIT!'”
Anyway, Gerth pointed out that the tweet was a reference to McConnell's charge that Bevin prevaricated on a LinkedIn page, where “he claimed his education to be from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
Did Bevin really go to MIT? No, but he stayed at a Holiday Inn last night.
Bevin, according to Gerth, didn’t earn an MIT sheepskin. He “took part in a program there that isn’t formally recognized by the school.”
Meanwhile, Team Mitch deleted the tweet, Gerth wrote.
So what about the ad?
Was the puppies-and-rainbows looking commercial really a cynical ploy by Bevin? Did he trot out his daughter to call McConnell a liar figuring he couldn’t lose?
Did he calculate that the ad would either go unchallenged because Team Mitch knows it looks bad to knock a little girl or that that the ad would provoke a spiteful response from the enemy camp – like the ill-advised tweet?
The commercial would have been a winner either way for Bevin.
After the tweet, Bevin spokesperson Sarah Durand sent out a statement accusing McConnell of lying anew about Bevin and MIT.
She wasn’t surprised that “that the McConnell campaign, which strives to sink to new lows everyday, is launching more false attacks,” Gerth quoted her.
The scribe also quoted McConnell spokesperson Allison Moore’s parry to Durand’s thrust: "There's no question that Matt Bevin has a beautiful family, but it's unfortunate that he feels the need to bring them into the campaign to launch political attacks.”
In another case of politics and strange bedfellows, Charly Norton, a spokesperson for Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, the all but certain Democratic senatorial nominee, backed the family Bevin: “Just last year, Mitch McConnell declared that political shots on opponents' family members should be off-limits, and I hope someone reminds the Senator of that. His campaign’s tasteless attack on Mr. Bevin’s daughters is out of bounds. Innocent children should never be mocked just to benefit the campaign of a 30-year Washington insider.”
In the commercial, after Olivia does her McConnell pants-on-fire bit, other young Bevinses, chime in. They pour on the praise for pop.
Out of the mouths of the Bevin babes come: “My dad was an officer in the army. My dad loves God…He plays with us and he prays with us. He loves our mom.”
That’s USDA Prime red meat in the Bible Belt, Red State Bluegrass State. All Republicans and most Democrats routinely serve it in hefty helpings.
In any event, the Bevin ad has me thinking about May 22, 2010. Tea party darling Rand Paul had just clobbered Kentucky secretary of state Trey Grayson in the Republican senate primary. (He went on to beat attorney general Jack Conway, the Democrat, in November.)
Grayson wasn’t just the GOP’s boy wonder. He was McConnell’s acolyte. McConnell made no bones about Grayson being his candidate.
Yet four years ago come this May 22, McConnell made a post-primary pilgrimage to Paul for a big Republican group hug. Rand was his man now, all the way, Mitch swore at the “unity rally.”
Paul obliged McConnell’s pledge of allegiance by endorsing Kentucky’s senior senator for reelection.
With the primary just a few weeks away, the polls still show McConnell leading Bevin by a wide margin.
If McConnell wins, will Bevin grin and bear it and join Team Mitch? Will there at least be a shotgun wedding in the name of GOP unity? Or will there still be bad blood between Sid Hatfield Bevin and Devil Anse McCoy McConnell?
Quick, cue the soap opera organ music: Tune in next week, same time, same station.