A matchup between Charles Booker and Sen. Rand Paul “would provide voters one of the clearest choices between Democratic and Republican senate candidates in years,” I wrote in Forward Kentucky five years ago this month.
The choice seems even clearer this time.
Booker, a former state representative from Louisville, is “the most liberal statewide candidate in the commonwealth’s history,” according to Northern Kentucky Tribune columnist Bill Straub.
Booker will face off against former Congressman Andy Barr of Lexington, a Trump-blessed, race-baiting reactionary that Straub has likened to old time white supremacist Southern Democratic demagogues. “Barr ran the most blatantly racially-motivated primary campaign in years in Kentucky,” Straub said in a telephone interview with Forward Kentucky.
Unlike many Democrats from beyond Louisville and Lexington, Booker doesn’t run from the liberal label. “I’m fighting for livable wages, Medicare for All, affordable housing, Working People’s Bill of Rights, and ending forever wars,” he said in a fund-raising email sent on Wednesday.
Kentucky is among the reddest of Republican Red states, so Barr seems the odds-on favorite to fill the seat that will be vacated by retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell. “The numbers obviously are against Booker,” said Straub, a Kentucky Journalism Hall of Famer. “I don’t see many opportunities for him, but you have got to give him credit for being willing to take up the mantle.”
In his email, Booker urged, “... Our work to flip this seat starts now,” confidently predicting, “We’re going to run away with it, but only if we do it together.”
Especially with Trump’s advent, Kentucky, which historically leaned conservative, has shifted farther rightward. Barr appears to be to the right of the libertarian-leaning Paul, who collected nearly 62 percent of the vote against Booker in 2022. The incumbent carried all but three of Kentucky’s 120 counties, Jefferson (Louisville), Fayette (Lexington) and Franklin (Frankfort).
Paul, McConnell, and Barr got an F on the latest NAACP Civil Rights Legislative Report card. In pandering to white voters — Kentucky is just over 81 percent white— Paul and McConnell have generally opted for dog-whistling. Barr grabbed the bullhorn.
In a 30-second TV commercial in February, Barr claimed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts (DEI for short) stood for “Dumb, Evil, Indoctrination.” Straub responded with a column in which he wrote that that the ad “displays his true colors. And that color is White.”
Straub added that the commercial “conjures up great racists of the past — Jesse Helms, Lester Maddox and … [George] Wallace — to make sure voters fully understand he is the White guy in the race and he is running to represent White folks.”
The NAACP’s Kentucky State Conference denounced the ad, demanded Barr take back what he said and say he is sorry for running it. So far, he apparently hasn’t.
“DEI is meant to ensure that every Kentuckian, regardless of race, gender, age, socioeconomic status, or any other qualifiers, has access to the same opportunities and fair treatment under the law,” said a letter signed by Kellye D. Cunningham. NAACP Kentucky State Conference president.
Cunningham also called on Barr, who gave up his 6th District congressional seat to run for the Senate, “to immediately retract the misleading characterizations presented in the advertisement and issue a public apology to all the communities that were disparaged.”
In a March column, Straub wrote that “Barr is likely waging the most racially charged statewide campaign since the Civil Rights era. He is following in the footsteps of another Republican, former Gov. Louie Nunn, who, in his first, albeit unsuccessful, effort to capture the state’s top office in 1963, vowed, if elected, to repeal an executive order signed by Gov. Bert T. Combs that desegregated public accommodations, thus ensuring equal access to public services and facilities to everyone regardless of race.”
Barr evidently thinks there aren’t enough Black voters in Kentucky to hurt him politically, Straub wrote. “And it might just be that Andy Barr thinks his views on race are shared by a substantial proportion of Republican primary voters. If so, Kentucky is, indeed, facing a sad state of affairs.” Given how the balloting turned out, most GOP voters — nearly all of them white — gave the thumbs-up to Barr’s bigotry.
In his FK interview, Straub posited that Barr may dial back the race baiting. “I don’t expect him to do it as much during the campaign. During the primary, you have a bunch of Trump voters who are not exactly racially sensitive a lot of the time — I don’t want to say all of them.” Straub cited the expression, “Not every Republican is racist, but every racist is Republican.”
--30--
Comments
