Greg Sargent on relatively quiet, last-minute effort by Alison Lundergan Grimes her campaign allies to make Social Security an issue in the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's reelection campaign:
When reporter Joe Sonka asked whether a GOP Senate majority would pursue privatization, McConnell replied: “I’m not announcing what the agenda would be in advance,” though his spokesman clarified that he wasn’t interested “in reviving the 2005 debate.” Meanwhile, according to one local report, McConnell today “evaded questions” on the topic.
The Grimes campaign, by contrast, is pushing the topic hard. When McConnell brought Bobby Jindal to Kentucky to campaign for him the other day, the Grimes camp quickly pointed out that Jindal had supported the 2005 privatization push, too. And on the stump, Grimes has repeatedly floated variations of the idea that unlike McConnell, she would never gamble away her grandmother’s Social Security on the stock market.
The Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic PAC focused on Senate races, is running a withering ad (embedded above) going after McConnell not just for privatization, but also for having "rearranged" his financial portfolio before the 2008 stock market crash after talking with the Secretary of the Treasury. The message: McConnell not only wants to use his position in the Senate to take a wrecking ball to Social Security, but he also wants to use it to benefit himself. "What good is clout," the ad asks, "if McConnell sells us out?"
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It's hard-hitting ad and McConnell has tried, unsuccessfully, to have it removed from the airwaves, so he's scared of it. It's a powerful message, but it's also a message that perhaps should have been used earlier in the campaign. Still, if it does manage to break through the noise in the final days of the campaign, it could be one of the key things that helps put Grimes over the top.