Thursday afternoon, my wife, Melinda, and I drove from our old Kentucky home in Arlington to the Carlisle County courthouse in Bardwell to vote in the Democratic Senate primary. (Democrat Drew Williams, our First Congressional District hopeful, and some Democrats seeking county offices are unopposed in the primary and won’t be on the ballot until Nov. 3.)
Come November, we’re “Voting Blue No Matter Who,” a slogan popularized on Democratic buttons and bumper stickers. We will again vote straight Democratic..
Come next Wednesday, we will seek one of the Senate primary winner’s yard signs to go next to our Williams yard sign.
We were glad to see our Democratic Senate hopefuls mainly refrain from beating up on each other. They kept the hits mostly clean, unlike the other side.
I say “mostly” because Amy McGrath couldn’t resist a cheap shot at rival Charles Booker, characterizing him “as ‘so far left’ that she wasn’t sure ‘he could get elected in New York City,’” Liam Niemeyer wrote in Wednesday’s Kentucky Lantern.
Her gratuitous swipe brought a quick rejoinder from Forward Kentucky Publisher Bruce Maples:
So, wanting a universal health care program of some kind in the United States so people don’t go bankrupt from medical problems is far left?
So, wanting people who work full-time to be guaranteed a vacation, a paid vacation, that’s far left?
So, wanting the government to do things to help everyday people and not necessarily spend all its time helping the top 1% is far left?
I’m sorry, but Ms. McGrath needs to recalibrate her understanding of left and right on the political spectrum. Those are not far left positions. Those are things that most citizens in most industrialized countries already have. In fact, the United States is one of the only countries in the first world that doesn’t have them.”
Never let your mouth overload your posterior is an old western Kentucky expression. (Okay, we use a shorter word than posterior.) Booker and McGrath are considered the primary front runners. Her senseless snark might end up losing to Booker. If she does beat him, she’ll have needlessly angered a multitude of his supporters whom she must have in the fall.
The Team Red candidates — especially Andy Barr and Nate Morris — slimed each other non-stop until Donald Trump endorsed Barr and bought off Morris with the promise of an ambassadorship. Morris dutifully hopped on the Barr bandwagon right behind Trump.
Barr, Morris, and Daniel Cameron, the third real contender for the party nod, claimed to be the truest Trump true believer. But Barr’s race-baiting reminded me of old-time white supremacist Jim Crow Dixie Democrats.
Courier-Journal columnist Joseph Gerth and Northern Kentucky Tribune columnist Bill Straub wrote about the primary, but they focused on Barr, who said in a commercial that “It’s not a sin to be White.”
Gerth wrote that “We know this to be true because a) Andy Barr tells us this in his latest commercial-a 30-second spot so full of lies and obsequious behavior that the mere viewing of it might make you vomit; and b) nobody ever said it was.”
Straub, a Kentucky Journalism Hall of Famer, suggested a Wallace-Barr link: “HA! And you people thought George Wallace was dead.”
Barr is expected to cruise next Tuesday. If he’s the nominee, you can bet he’ll keep playing the race card in 86-percent-white Kentucky. You can double your bet that he’ll turn up the racist wick if the Democratic candidate is Booker or state Rep. Pamela Stevenson, both of whom are Black. Expect a sludge of sexism and misogyny if it’s McGrath.
“Facts are stubborn things;” John Adams famously said, “and whatever may be our wishes, or inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
Facts and evidence point to the Republican Senate nominee as the heavy, if not the prohibitive, favorite.
“The Kentucky Democratic Party, for those keeping score at home, is in the midst of its own confrontation with totality,” Straub wrote in another column. “After generations of iron fist control of state government, the party has essentially collapsed. Gov. Andy Beshear and his lieutenant governor, Jacquline Coleman, are the only Democrats elected and serving statewide.”
Straub is anything but a Republican apologist. But don’t take my word for it, read what he writes.
He calls ‘em as he sees ‘em: “Let’s be blunt here. Pollyanna couldn’t screw up even a minimal amount of optimism for Democrats winning this year’s U.S. Senate race regardless of the standard bearer. The candidate, and the polls, show Booker with a slight edge; but whomever is the candidate will be outspent and face an avalanche of Republican votes in a state where, for whatever reason, President-cum-Dictator Donald J. Trump remains popular.”
Democrats, don’t shoot the messenger, Straub or me.
Meanwhile, more than a few Kentucky progressives cling to the notion that there’s a wellspring of potential progressive voters in the hinterlands beyond Louisville and Lexington.
I live in the hinterlands. My politics are to the left of progressive – I’m a big fan of western European social democratic, democratic socialist, and labor parties. But I freely admit Kentuckians like me are an endangered species here in the Jackson Purchase and elsewhere in rural Kentucky.
The stubborn facts are that after 10 years, Beshear and Coleman notwithstanding, Kentucky has tacked even further rightward and shows precious few signs of reversing course.
Republicans rule the political roost. Most of them are all in for Trump, their Great White Hope, AKA the Yankee George Wallace. Those who aren’t MAGA are scared to say so publicly. So, they join the true believers on their knees at the gilded altar.
The faithful and the fearful outnumber Democrats on voter registration rolls. Most county officials from Jordan to Jenkins are Republicans. The state House is 80-20 Republican. The Senate bulge is 32-6.
There’s not a Democrat from west of Louisville in either chamber. Most Democratic lawmakers represent Louisville or Lexington and their environs.
Five of our six congressmen are Republicans. So are both of our U.S. senators.
If the predicted national Blue Tsunami somehow washes over Kentucky and sweeps the first Democrat since Wendell Ford to the Senate (and Drew Williams to the House), I will happily and publicly chow down on a hefty helping of crow with a slice of humble pie for dessert.
Meanwhile, Melinda I will do all that two senior citizen retired teachers can to help every Democrat on our ballot in the fall. We will vote like our democracy is at stake in this our 250th birthday year – because it is.
“Half the fun is making them jump,” the famous 20th century activist and socialist-friendly lawyer Clarence Darrow supposedly said of the reactionaries, fat cats, union-busters, haters, and fear mongers of his day.
So vote blue no matter who – if for no other reason than to rile the reactionaries, fat cats, union-busters and fear mongers who, sadly, run the Republican party under Donald Trump.
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