Documenting My Audacity

Mitch McConnell is one of my least favorite people.  The Senior Senator from my fair state obstructs the agenda of progress that this country needs in order to move towards a healthy and sustainable future.  His unabashed support for the mismanaged war, obstruction of health care reform, and ridiculously backwards stances on ethics issues mean that we as Kentuckians really need to get rid of him.

Luckily, McConnell is up for election this year.  Progressives in Kentucky started gearing up for this election early.  A few people set up a blog to document some of the atrocities that McConnell perpetrated, Andrew Horne was drafted to run against McConnell, and independent groups started running ads against McConnell.  Things were looking good.  All this action, plus the fact that Democratic leadership was said to be targeting McConnell in retribution for their defeat of Tom Daschle made me and several other progressive in Kentucky hopeful that we could have a shot to take down McConnell.

After the November election, when Beshear was elected Governor along with a litany of other Democratic officials,  many began focusing on the Senatorial race.  Horne was running, and I naively thought he would have a clear path to the nomination.  A few other people got into the race, but I thought they were no threat to Horne and his progressive message.  I worried, because two of the early entrants were obvious thrillionaires, one who seemed like he had no clue what was going on (Cassaro), and another who had given copious amounts of money to Anne Northup (Fischer).

Then Bruce Lunsford entered, at what seemed like the prompting of Steve Beshear.  It wasn’t long before Andrew Horne dropped out.  Many hands were wrung.  A conspiracy was conjectured that Chuck Schumer, Markos Moulitsas, Steve Beshear, Achim Bergmann, Bruce Lunsford, Jennifer Moore, and Harry Reid forced out Horne.  There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth all throughout KY blogland.  Joe Sonka left BlueGrassRoots because he wrote about it and didn’t mince words and that didn’t go over well.

People got over it.  Originally, Some said that it was lights out in the Senate race–Horne dropping out meant six more years of Mitch McConnell.  Others didn’t agree.  First, there was Shawn Dixon and “Time to Fight.” Pretty soon, a few folks over at BlueGrassRoots started rallying around Greg Fischer.  Chief among them: Jennifer and RDemocrat.

The issue at this point was the fact that Fischer stood at 6% in the polls, trailing behind perennial candidate David Williams.  To make matters worse for Fischer, Andrew Horne endorsed Bruce Lunsford.  In the next poll, Lunsford increased his lead by 5 points, but Fischer managed to pick up 3 points and beat out David Williams.

At this point, most blogs were pretty neutral.  Jake Payne was being his snarky self to both Lunsford and Fischer (with good reason on both sides).  Joe Sonka was pretty blase, and while there were a few individual diarists on BGR who were in favor of Fischer, the blog as a whole was pretty neutral.

That quickly changed.  As most campaigns do, the 2008 Democratic Senate primary heated way up.  Joe Sonka read what he thought was the writing on the wall, and said that Lunsford was the way to go.  Fischer started going negative–very negative.  Some folks applauded.  Others did not.  Jake Payne began apologizing for Bruce Lunsford and going after Fischer.  BlueGrassRoots became unabashedly pro-Fischer.  People began sniping.

Right here, the entire campaign devolved into something that opposes the basics of movement building.  The blogosphere is still small and the KY Democratic Party is still more backwards than many progressive like me would like to see, but everybody began going after each other.  Back and forths began and continue to this day.  Fischer’s negative ads drew the ire of a lot of folks in the upper eschelons of the Kentucky Democratic Party (including the only unashamed progressive Important Person in the KDP–John Yarmuth).  Despite this, Fischer’s negative campaigning did some good for him–he doubled in percentage points in the next SUSA poll–to 18%.  In the most recent poll, his percentage grew again, to 22%.  Lunsford has remained stable throughout these whole shenanegans, between 41% and 47%.

So that brings us to the present–the major blogs are still sniping at each other, and we are forgetting our common enemy–Mitch McConnell.  The Fischer people contend that switching from McConnell to Lunsford is not much of a change.  I think they are wrong.  Lunsford is dramatically different than McConnell.  Dredging up shameful attacks about Vencor aside, we should all forgive Lunsford for his 2003 actions.  He has apologized.  He said what he did was wrong.  Looking back on it, I think that he had pretty good reason to be pissed at Ben Chandler.

At the same time, Greg Fischer has the thing that his supporters hit Lunsford for doing the hardest–he gave significant money to Louisville Republicans, including Anne Northup while giving no money to the respective Democrats ($250 in 98 and $350 in 2000).  At any rate,  we don’t know how progressive Greg Fischer is anyway.  All we have is his word, and I haven’t even really heard much of what he has to say (he did gave all the right answers in the one Q&A I attended with him).  Lunsford also gives all the right answers, however.  He made one mistake in endorsing Fletcher in 2003, a mistake for which he has apologized.

Greg Fischer would have won my vote had he not gone negative against Lunsford.  Lunsford was absentee in Kentucky for a long time.  A lot of important events were not attended by Lunsford, including College Democrats events which are near and dear to my heart.  His surrogates did most of his talking for him, which I don’t really like.  However, Fischer’s negativity and his inability to move his poll numbers have put me in a position where I don’t know for whom I am going to vote.

The only thing I really care about is beating Mitch McConnell.  I think Lunsford and Fischer would be equally formidible as opponents.  Each of them has their good points and their faults.  The most important thing in my mind is the ability to come together as progressives no matter who the nominee is.  The Fischer camp is nearly rabid  in their hatred for Bruce Lunsford.  That’s a shame.  I hope that if Lunsford wins, they can put that behind them and work to elect Bruce Lunsford as our US Senator.  The anti-Fischer people are riding a tide of inevitibility and think that Fischer has no chance to beat Lunsford.  They have a good point, but it could still happen.  The Fischer people bring up that Lunsford is terrible at closing campaigns–and they have a point.  If Fischer manages to pull this out, I hope that the pro-Lunsford people can quit their petty carping and come into the Fischer fold to help elect him our US Senator.

I hope that we as progressive in Kentucky can get beyond these petty differences and this negativity.  We need to come together.  What we are trying to build is too important to be torn apart by Bruce Lunsford and Greg Fischer.