| Mitch McConnell Selects a Running Mate for US Senate |
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Mitch McConnell Selects a Running Mate for US Senator
Clinton, KY.
I had just sat down to enjoy my dinner while I watched the 6:00 pm local news. The days national news held gloom and doom with economic figures driving the stock market to yet new lows. At least, watching WSPD Ch. 6 seemed safe with their views of local crimes and community events.
Yet, at 6:14 pm, Friday January 4, 2008, an Orwellian specter of new political horror spilled out unto a defensive TV audience. Standing there on screen was Mitch McConnell in his newest election campaign ad.
Mitch was explaining how he and Alben Barkley were two of Kentucky’s greatest senators. McConnell even went so far as to claim that the Democratic Vice President and former Senator Barkley shared many of his own public service valves.
In less than 30 seconds McConnell had embraced “The Veep” (Barkley’s nickname referring to being vice president) as his defacto running mate. What was astounding was the fact that McConnell skipped over great Republican Kentucky giants like John Sherman Cooper or Thurston Morton in order to cloak his 2008 re-election campaign
with one of Kentucky’s greatest statesman and Democratic politicians of the 20th Century.
Barkley was elected to the Senate in 1926. By 1930, he had worked hard as a new senator and became the assistant to the Majority leader Joseph Robinson. In this position, Barkley soon built a strong reputation as an up and coming leader. Barkley was the keynote speaker at both the 1932 and 1936 Democratic Conventions.
In 1937, Majority Leader Robinson died. With the aid of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Alben Barkley was elected the new Senate Majority Leader. It was during this time that Barkley played a key role in passing most of FDR’s New Deal Legislation. He often confronted the issue of how he wasn’t just a yes man for FDR. Barkley spoke of how he had been a liberal and progressive Democrat long before he ever met Franklin Roosevelt.
It was, in great part, that Barkley’s 1948 speech at the Democratic Convention bashing the Republican Party which helped Harry Truman to select him as Truman’s running mate.
Maybe Mitch is running scared in Western Kentucky. Maybe he thinks that if he cloaks himself in the history of a great Democrat, that the traditional voters of Western Kentucky will rally to his side in his stand against the evils of the Bush administration.
OOPS!! Sorry, for a moment there, I got caught up in the spirit of Mitch’s ad.
Can the 2008 Senate race get any stranger than this?
Can Mitch be trying to say that he is a “closet liberal” and wants to become a true progressive just like Barkley?
Stay tune.
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