Matt Bevin, the Kentucky businessman challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for the GOP senate nomination in the Bluegrass State,
tells ABC News that he believes McConnell is "the number one antagonist" to senators like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul who are pushing the GOP to support defunding Obamacare.
But if McConnell really is their number one foe, why is Rand Paul supporting him? That's the question ABC's Jeff Zeleny put to Bevin. Bevin's answer?
MATT BEVIN: Politics makes for strange bedfellows. I think Rand aspires to potentially other things on the political spectrum...
JEFF ZELENY, ABC NEWS: So he's not doing this out of principle, you don't think?
BEVIN: I will leave that to him to speak. Here's what I know. Rand Paul is one vote, he walks into the voting booth, he votes one time. There is nobody in Kentucky that is fooled by this Mitch-Rand love narrative. Nobody.
This is a bit of tightrope for Bevin, because even as he's essentially saying Rand Paul is full of it when it comes to endorsing McConnell, he also holds up Rand Paul as a model for the type of senator he would like to be:
The people who have ultimately coalesced behind Rand Paul are people who have from the beginning been with me in large measure and are continuing to come to my side of the equation [...] because the very things they admired in Rand Paul, the convictions and the way he has voted, have been very much to the liking of conservatives in Kentucky.
In the abstract, that might not be the easiest argument to sell, but Bevin does have one pretty good piece of evidence to back it up: That
audiotape of McConnell campaign manager Jesse Benton saying he was only working for McConnell because it would be helpful for Rand Paul in 2016—and that he was "holding his nose" while doing it. Oh, and the fact that McConnell himself seems
proud of that fact.
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