The latest ad from Kentucky Secretary of State and Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate Alison Lundergan Grimes:
VO: Listen to Mitch McConnell.
McCONNELL: I've been on the Agriculture Committee my entire time there. [...] And even more important, the agriculture appropriations subcommittee.
VO: Those committees are important to Kentucky. Yet Mitch McConnell skipped hundreds of committee meetings on Agriculture, Veterans, Energy, and Defense. He only showed up seven percent of the time. If you did that, you'd get fired. So should he.
Well, that's certainly a devastating blow against Mitch McConnell ... if you're one of the half-dozen or so C-SPAN callers that actually think attending subcommittee hearings is a really big deal. I mean, I can't sit here and defend skipping these hearings and meetings, but it's the how things in Washington work, and it's nowhere near the top of the list of things that need to change.
Instead of going after an abstraction like committee hearing attendance that makes no meaningful difference in people's lives, the Grimes campaign should be going to town on McConnell for wanting to repeal Kynect, Kentucky's implementation of Obamacare. Kynect is directly responsible for delivering health insurance to nearly one in ten Kentucky families, and its impact has been the greatest in the parts of the state where McConnell is running strongest.
I'm not saying Grimes should go wrap her arms around Barack Obama. For all I care, she can come out and say she wants to impeach him because of Benghazi. But what she absolutely needs to do is wrap her arms around Kynect, because it really is making a big difference in people's lives, because it's making the biggest difference in the parts of Kentucky that Mitch McConnell needs most, and because it's one of the biggest differences between McConnell and her.
If she does that, McConnell will obviously accuse Grimes of being an Obama rubber stamp. And who knows, maybe that message will work, but she's got a pretty good response: Instead of playing political games about Obama, she can say, the real question is whether or not newly insured Kentuckians should be able to keep their health insurance or not. Maybe that won't be enough to win the election, but I suspect it would be. And going after McConnell for wanting to repeal people's health insurance certainly packs more punch than going after him for missing a subcommittee meeting.