Bugging Mitch McConnell

Chris Cillizza writes at The Washington Post:

The political world is a-twitter over an audio tape obtained by Mother Jones of a private campaign meeting involving Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell and his 2014 re-election staff in which the past public statements — and mental health — of his one-time potential opponent Ashley Judd is discussed.

The reality: This is much ado about not much.

Yes, if you are predisposed not to like McConnell then his voice on the tape saying “This is the ‘Whac-A-Mole’ period of the campaign…when anybody sticks their head up, do them out” will make you like him even less. And, yes, the fact that the McConnell team talked about Judd’s mental health — “she was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the ’90s” — will further enrage the McConnell-haters.

But, this — as any campaign operative will tell you — is the basic blocking and tackling of opposition research that every candidate does both against their potential opponents and against themselves. And, the average voter won’t a) follow this story or b) care all that much if they do — especially since this news is breaking on the day after the Louisville Cardinals won the NCAA basketball tournament.

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What’s lost in the fuss over the McConnell-Judd tapes — but shouldn’t be — is what the meeting reveals about Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, the candidate Democrats are trying to recruit into the race.

“With Alison Lundergan Grimes it’s sort of more traditional issues, as far as, you know, needle in a haystack sort of the inversion of that,” said one of the attendees of the meeting, adding that “the best hit we have on her is her blatantly endorsing the 2008 Democratic national platform.”

Translation: McConnell doesn’t have much on Grimes.

2014 Update

From The Washington Post:

Update: Ashley Judd has announced via Twitter that she will not run for Senate. “After serious and thorough contemplation, I realize that my responsibilities & energy at this time need to be focused on my family,” she wrote.

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A source close to Judd said that Secretary of State Allison Lundergan Grimes’s interest in potential race made the decision not to run easier. “The timing just wasn’t right,” said the source.

Judd’s potential candidacy against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) drew national headlines. While she received encouragement from the likes of Kentucky Rep. John Yarmuth, other Democrats in the state expressed apprehension about her candidacy.

Catalina Camia writes at USA Today:

GOP strategist Rob Jesmer looks at states where there will be elections in 2014 and proclaims some optimism the Republican Party can win the Senate majority.

Democrats have to defend 21 Senate seats next year and seven are in red-leaning states won by Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. Those seven states include South Dakota, where Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson announced his retirement Tuesday.

On the GOP side, there are 14 seats needing protection and only one — held by moderate Republican Susan Collins of Maine — is in a state President Obama won in November.

"Right now, I'd rather be us than them," said Jesmer, a former executive director of the Senate GOP campaign committee.

Pew reports:

Barack Obama’s job approval rating has tumbled since shortly after his re-election, as the public’s economic expectations for the coming year have soured. Despite substantial public awareness of recent gains in the stock market and rebounding real-estate values, the percentage saying economic conditions will get worse over the next year has risen to its highest point in nearly eight years.

Obama’s job approval measure has fallen eight points since December, from 55% to 47%. His rating is comparable to George W. Bush’s (45%) at the same point early in his second term and is much lower than Bill Clinton’s 60% rating in February 1997.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted March 13-17 among 1,501 adults, finds that despite Obama’s lower job rating, he retains greater public confidence than congressional Republicans in dealing with the budget deficit: 53% express at least a fair amount of confidence in him to handle the budget, compared with 39% who express the same confidence in GOP leaders.

At Fox News, Chris Stirewalt writes that Obama's current trajectory resembles that of his first term, which resulted in the 2010 GOP takeover of the House.  He rebounded once he had a GOP foil, winning a modest victory in November 2012.

Obama came out swinging, pushing a suite of tax increases and big changes on the top liberal priorities: gun control, gay marriage and global warming. Obama’s new aggressive stance carried over to automatic reductions to automatic increases in federal spending, with the president doing his darndest to punish Republicans for the consequences of the 2011 debt deal he had struck.

Meanwhile, the most consequential but least discussed part of Obama’s December tax deal – an across-the-board increase in federal payroll taxes – kicked in. As households in the median income range saw their take-home pay drop by $40 a week, gas prices shot up by 50 cents.

U.S. personal income dropped 3.6 percent in January, the steepest decline since 2006. At the same time, the cost of a tank of regular unleaded climbed by $10. While this combination was sinking its teeth into the wallets of middle-class Americans, the president was pushing a more liberal agenda and demanding more federal spending despite growing concerns about debt.

Voters, predictably, recoiled.

Kentucky Senate Race

Mitch McConnell comes out of the gate with a response ad to bigoted attacks on his wife:

National Journal reports:

The honeymoon is over for Ashley Judd.

At a time when Democrats in Washington are having second thoughts about embracing Ashley Judd as their standard-bearer against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2014, Kentucky Democrats are waving red flags about the actress, arguing that her candidacy plays into the GOP’s strengths and tarnishes the party brand in the Bluegrass State.
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“Electing Ashley Judd gets a Republican Legislature elected. That's what I see at stake here. Your perspective is different if you're in New York or Los Angeles. They don't live here. We do. Judd's candidacy makes it seamlessly easy to Obama-ize this election,” one Kentucky Democratic strategist said.

Team Red v. Ashley Judd

Politico reports on the early effort to counter Ashley Judd's possible race against Mitch McConnell:

This early opposition research effort seems as much about scaring Democrats nationally about a Judd candidacy as informing Kentuckians before Judd even decides to make the race.

“Ms. Judd has a bit of a habit of making bizarre comments and observations that will put Democratic officials and candidates across the country in uncomfortable positions,” said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. “As for Kentucky, well let’s just say that Ms. Judd’s comments are outlandish for Hollywood, never mind Covington.”

The latest of Judd’s unorthodox views to rise to the surface courtesy of the GOP is a 2006 statement about why she doesn’t have children — which Republicans say will not sit well in Kentucky. “It’s unconscionable to breed, with the number of children who are starving to death in impoverished countries,” Judd said. Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), who has been advising Judd, said that the actress was speaking for herself, and added that people in Kentucky understand the word “breeding.”

In a disjointed talk at George Washington University Friday, Judd, 44, may have given her opponents more fodder by referencing U2 rocker Bono, her dog being on a hunger strike and her extravagant travels. “We winter in Scotland. We’re smart like that,” she told students.

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 McConnell strategists said the campaign is well aware that it has to walk a fine line between defining Judd negatively and appearing nasty. Privately, senior advisers say they were dismayed that Karl Rove — himself a controversial figure — chose to produce an online ad recently, ridiculing Judd as an “Obama following radical Hollywood liberal.” By comparison, McConnell’s first Web ad was a humorous riff on how the Democrats have been unable to find a candidate to run against McConnell, and it included a clip of Judd saying that Tennessee — not Kentucky — was home.

Meg Whitman, Ashley Judd, and the Cost of Not Voting

In the 2010 California gubernatorial race, Republican Meg Whitman suffered political damage because she had sometimes failed to vote. Primary opponent Steve Poizner and Democratic candidate Jerry Brown both pounced. George Skelton explained in The Los Angeles Times:

Poll director Mark DiCamillo offered likely voters a long list of characteristics — or "attributes" — that fit one or both of the candidates, without mentioning their names. He asked people whether they would be more likely or less likely to vote for a candidate with such a characteristic. Then he calculated the net positive or negative effect of each trait.

The biggest negative, by far, was if a candidate for high office "hasn't voted in many past statewide elections." That fits Whitman, who has acknowledged and apologized for a dismal voting record. Opponents accuse her of not voting during a 28-year span.

"I was focused on raising a family, on my husband's career and we moved many, many times," she told reporters last year in her only public explanation, adding, "It is no excuse. My voting record, my registration record, is unacceptable."

Specifically, 54 percent said nonvoting would make them less likely to vote for a candidate, 4 percent more likely, for a net negative of 50 percent.

Now, another political novice turns out to have a spotty voting record.  Robert Costa reports at National Review Online:

Actress Ashley Judd is active in Democratic politics, but her voting history is spotty. According to public records, she did not vote in several elections over the past two decades.

Judd, a resident of Williamson County, Tenn., voted in the 1996 election via absentee ballot, but did not vote again until the 2004 general election — an eight-year gap. She then sat out another four years, before returning to vote in the 2008 Democratic primary.

American Crossroads v. Ashley Judd

Actress Ashley Judd is considering a Senate race in Kentucky against Mitch McConnell. American Crossroads is making a preemptive attack.  Steven Law, the group's CEO, once served as McConnell's chief of staff.