Mitch McConnell Is Paralyzed By Fear

McConnell doesn't get a lot of good news lately. But he did yesterday. The progressive Kentucky Democrat running for his seat dropped out of the Democratic Party primary against centrist Alison Lundergan Grimes and declared his intention to run as an independent.

Marksberry says Grimes is a good Democrat, but she has given up the most important fights against McConnell to pander to special interests.

"I want to give empowerment back to those that are impoverished, back to those who understand what the environment is experiencing right now and back to those who created the middle-class," says Marksberry. "And the only way to do that is to speak about the issues. And I hope that Alison Lundergan Grimes one day will open up and talk about the issues."

Marksberry had been suing the state party, alleging it has favored Grimes's campaign despite bylaws requiring it to stay neutral in primaries.

If only the DSCC and the Kentucky Democratic Party hadn't interfered in the primary, Grimes would have probably won and Marksberry would have probably campaigned for her in the general. Now he may take enough votes away from her to give the highly unpopular McConnell the margin he needs to beat her. If McConnell even wins his own primary. This week, the National Review's website posted an incendiary story about McConnell's woes with his right flank, Gunning for McConnell. The far right Madison Project is backing Matt Bevin, McConnell's very outspoken opponent.

“The problem in Washington, D.C., right now is the current GOP leadership and their unwillingness to fight the big-government policies that are coming down the pike,” says Drew Ryun, the group’s political director and a former deputy director at the Republican National Committee. “That is encapsulated in Mitch McConnell.”

While other top conservative groups, such as the Club for Growth and FreedomWorks, have remained on the sidelines so far in the Kentucky primary, the Madison Project has enthusiastically jumped in, endorsing Bevin and making a $27,000 radio buy in August for an ad attacking McConnell.

It’s a repeat of the group’s strategy in Texas in 2012, when they were the first national conservative organization to endorse Ted Cruz. “The importance of their endorsement in the early days was significant,” says John Drogin, who served as Cruz’s campaign manager and is now the senator’s state director. “When Senator Cruz was still a long-shot, far behind in the polls, Madison Project stood with him because they knew he would stand for conservative principles.”

“That gave Ted some early credibility,” says Ken Emmanuelson, a tea-party activist from Dallas. “That kind of thing can put a guy on the radar, so I’ve always given them props for that.”

But while Cruz wasn’t the establishment candidate in the GOP primary, his establishment-backed rival-- Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst-- wasn’t an incumbent, much less the top Senate Republican. McConnell is known for his ruthless campaigning, and he has a long track record of victories in Kentucky. His campaign has already vehemently pushed back on attacks claiming that he’s not conservative enough by noting that he has a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union. And Rand Paul, a tea-party favorite and Kentucky’s other senator, has already endorsed McConnell.

Drew Ryun is confident, however, that Bevin is the little engine that can, despite a McConnell-campaign poll released last month that showed Bevin trailing McConnell 21 percent to 68 percent. “He’s slightly behind [where Marco Rubio was] at this stage of the campaign, and he’s slightly ahead of Ted [Cruz],” says Ryun. “Where he is right now I actually feel pretty comfortable with it, given the fact that his name recognition is not what it could be in Kentucky.”



For the Madison Project, Bevin’s candidacy is a perfect fit for their twofold mission of transforming Republican leadership and making sure the most conservative candidate possible represents comfortably Republican districts. Republicans, says Daniel Horowitz, the group’s policy director, are “underutilizing” solidly red districts. “You look at the Democrat side, you won’t find any inner city where you have a blue-dog Democrat,” he comments. The group has launched the Madison Performance Index, which compares Republican House members’ voting records, as analyzed by Heritage Action and Club for Growth, with how Republican their district is.

As a result, don’t expect to see the Madison Project playing in purple states or swing districts, although the group won’t definitively rule that out.

The group’s passion for defeating McConnell is grounded in a worry that even conservative stalwarts can’t flourish under the current Republican leadership. Horowitz says activists have asked him what happened to certain conservative politicians, such as Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), after they went to Washington.

“The problem is leadership,” Horowitz argues. “You throw them into a situation where leadership fundamentally doesn’t want to change the status quo... we’re never going to get anywhere.”

“The same old people are going to be put into tough situations,” he continues. “We feel if we change leadership, we’ll change the direction of the party, both in the House and the Senate.”

Jim Ryun, chairman of the Madison Project and a former Kansas congressman, recalls vividly the pressure he faced when he opposed GOP House leadership. He voted against Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind, and today he remembers “some calls from the president where somehow we got disconnected when he didn’t agree with what I was going to do.”

The Madison Project isn’t as much of a fundraising powerhouse as some other conservative groups; it raised just under $2 million in the 2012 cycle. But the group is looking to expand their influence significantly in this cycle. “Will we be an 800-pound gorilla this election cycle? No,” Drew Ryun remarks. “But maybe a 400-pound gorilla.”

For the Madison Project, however, there’s less of an interest in pricey TV buys and more of a fascination with how a well-executed ground game can change the outcome of an election. “You have to do such a massive amount of television to even move the political dial incrementally,” says Drew Ryun, whereas “if you put the time and effort into the ground game, you can actually move a political dial, 3, 4, 5 percent in a precinct versus these television buys that are moving it half a percentage point.” Emmanuelson, the tea-party activist from Dallas, says that Ryun is known for helping inexperienced campaign teams with ground-game politics.

Drew Ryun is cautiously optimistic that the GOP could take back the Senate in 2014, but “a Republican majority that is led by Mitch McConnell, frankly, is not that appealing to me.”

Nonetheless, he thinks that 2014 could be a crucial year for conservatives. “2014 has the potential to be like 2010, except on steroids,” Ryun enthuses. And perhaps even more important, “what we do and the races that we win in 2014 will dictate how 2016 unfolds.”

With Grimes leading McConnell in the polls-- and his negative ratings with Kentucky Republicans soaring-- McConnell is, basically, hiding in his closet and refusing to come out. (No, not the gay closet, the leadership closet.) He must be hoping no one in Kentucky reads the NY Times:

At the climax of each of the fiscal crises that have paralyzed the nation’s capital since the Republican landslide of 2010, Senator Mitch McConnell, the wily Kentuckian who leads the Senate Republicans, has stepped in to untangle the seemingly hopeless knots threatening the economy.

But as Congress trudges toward its next budget showdown, the Mr. Fix-It of Washington is looking more like its Invisible Man as he balances his leadership imperatives with his re-election ones.

...Democrats and, increasingly, Republicans are complaining that the minority leader’s absence from many of this year’s most intense and consequential negotiations-- from immigration overhaul to the budget to a fight over internal rule changes that almost paralyzed the Senate-- has created a power vacuum and left Democrats without a bargaining partner.

They worry that Mr. McConnell is too hamstrung by political concerns in the Capitol and back home in Kentucky. In Washington, a rebellious crop of new Republican senators, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, has adamantly rejected his compromising brand of politics. Mr. Cruz has almost single-handedly led the charge to tie any further government financing to gutting President Obama’s health care law, a movement that has angered many veteran Republicans but has also brought the federal government to the brink of a shutdown. The junior senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, has largely set the agenda for a Tea Party-infused Republican Party in his home state.

And in that home state, Mr. McConnell is dealing with an unwanted primary challenge from a well-financed Tea Party candidate who keeps telling Kentucky voters the senator is an establishment pawn.