When the news
first broke that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had
dishonestly claimed that repealing Obamacare wouldn't impact Kynect, Kentucky's popular health exchange, the campaign of his Democratic opponent Alison Lundergan Grimes was
inexplicably silent.
But:
“At last, Grimes’ campaign manager Jonathan Hurst sent LEO Weekly the following statement calling out McConnell for not knowing the difference between fact and fiction.
“Mitch McConnell has been in the fantasyland that is Washington for so long that he cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction,” says Hurst. “McConnell has voted to destroy Kynect – and he has said he will do it again. In the U.S. Senate, Alison Lundergan Grimes will fix the law to ensure it is working for all Kentuckians.”
Good start, but this can't be the end of it—and the message needs to come from Grimes herself.
This is one of those fundamental moments in the campaign: Mitch McConnell is trying to convince Kentucky that repealing the Affordable Care Act would have no impact on the popular Kynect program. That's an absurd and dishonest claim, but no matter how easy it is to rebut these sorts of lies, they don't rebut themselves, and nobody is in a better position to rebut it than Grimes and her campaign.
It's really a golden opportunity: Not only is McConnell exposing the soft underbelly of his position on repealing Obamacare, he's doing it with the sort of dishonesty that gives the Grimes campaign an opportunity to remind Kentucky of everything they don't like about Mitch McConnell and his 30 years in Washington.
Mitch McConnell put himself on the ropes and Hurst's statement makes it clear the Grimes campaign understand exactly why. The challenge for them now is to keep going after McConnell—they can't let him get away with telling a lie this big. And if they do make him pay for his dishonesty, it's going to have a huge impact on the rest of the campaign, because a Mitch McConnell that can't get away with telling huge lies is a Mitch McConnell that can't win re-election.