Election 2008: Will it be about the past, the future - or both?

Publication: The Courier-Journal

David Hawpe
September 12, 2007

Not to belabor the point, since many others have made it, but Sen. Mitch McConnell seems to be taking his re-election challenge especially seriously.

He's not up until next fall, but he's already the object of attention on several fronts:

The Sunlight Foundation put up a billboard along I-65, attacking the senator.

"Ditch Mitch" bumper stickers abound.

Anti-McConnell TV commercials abound, too. As reported by C-J political writer Joe Gerth, the senator came under attack again last week from two groups targeting him in television ads for his stance on the war in Iraq and on campaign finance reform, "in what could be his toughest challenge yet to hold onto his seat."

One spot, produced for the Public Campaign Action Fund, attacks McConnell's role in obtaining $8.3 million in grants for a Lexington non-profit firm represented by his former chief of staff, Hunter Bates, to provide specialized MP3-like players to villages in Afghanistan and Nigeria."

After consulting its lawyers, Insight reversed course and decided to air that commercial, even after the National Republican Senatorial Committee claimed it was inaccurate.

Another spot, aired by Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, features children in Army fatigues doing calisthenics and asks : "How long will Sen. Mitch McConnell keep us stuck in Iraq? Should we start training our children now?"

AAEI took the occasion of this week's long-awaited Washington appearances by Gen. David Patraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to issue a press release, urging that McConnell not be "swayed by the White House's spin."

In that release, Gulf War veteran and Kentucky native Brian Smith said, "President Bush and Gen. Petraeus are trying to sell Congress on keeping our troops bogged down in Iraq, policing another country's religious civil war. Kentuckians are urging Sen. McConnell not to be fooled by the White House Iraq spin again and instead work to bring the troops home."

Just yesterday, AAEI announced it was actually stepping up its ad campaign against McConnell, "for his continued support of the President's endless Iraq war policy.…"

It probably wasn't coincidence that McConnell's office, on the same day, issued its own press release, noting that he is "a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee" and that he just "obtained $89.5 million in funding for several Kentucky defense-related projects.…"

The senator was kind enough the visit the C-J editorial board during the August congressional recess, and he brought with him charts and graphs describing how much federal education money he has grabbed for Kentucky between fiscal 1998 and fiscal 2007 ($281 million) and how much he has succeeded in earmarking for various purposes in Jefferson County ($969 million).

Message: Forget the guns. Remember the lard -- er, butter.

On the Sept. 5 cover of LEO, an Alfred E. Neuman-character with a McConnell grin asks, "What, me worry?" And maybe that's right. Maybe his campaign money stash (he promises to have at least $10 million) will be enough to scare away any serious opponents.

(One scary rumor, if you're a McConnell supporter: Soon-to-retire Brown-Forman chairman Owsley Brown II, a widely respected and very successful business leader, not to mention a zillionaire, is thinking about making the race. Some say he could be attacked as a liquor baron, but then McConnell has taken loads of contributions from the Brown family over the years.)

Certainly, McConnell makes no effort to distance himself from the fiction that the falsely justified and grossly botched Bush-Cheney invasion and occupation of Iraq was necessitated by what happened six years ago at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This week, he took to the Senate floor and warned, "Real danger struck America six years ago. International terrorists had been at war against us long before that. But unlike previous attacks, 9/11 spurred America to take the war to them. By going on the offense, we are winning the War on Terror. And today we are safer at home, and have gone six years without another attack."

No mention of the fact that the Bush-Cheney war, which he relentlessly has supported, actually (1) created a kind of terrorist opportunity that did not exist before in Iraq, and (2) made worldwide recruitment of anti-American terrorists all the easier. No mention of a brave, capable American military stretched to its manpower limits, and beyond. No mention of homeland security needs left unmet in the U.S. itself.

But then McConnell says the 2008 election shouldn't be about the past. Rather, it should be about the future.

It will be. His.