Amy McGrath has conceded that Mitch McConnell is at least consistent.
The Democrat, who wants the senator’s job, called his video speech at the Trump National Convention “the same old tired stuff he’s been saying for 36 years.”
McGrath, a retired Marine fighter-bomber pilot, took to Twitter to challenge the Senate majority leader’s paean to the president, a Yankee George Wallace, who has given the term “White House” new meaning.
McGrath condemned the “fear mongering and half-truths meant to pit us against one another.” Trump’s been using those tactics ever since he descended that golden escalator four years ago – but Mitch McConnell has been at it for 36 years.
In 2014, before Trump announced his candidacy, Alec McGillis wrote a book about McConnell called The Cynic. His assessment of McConnell’s fundamental goal? The Senate’s top Republican ultimately concluded “that his own longevity in Washington trumped [prescient term] all.”
Trump took a page from the well-thumbed playbook of McConnell, who has become the president’s chief enabler on Capitol Hill. McGillis found that McConnell was “… willing to feed the public disillusionment with its elected leaders if it would increase his and his party’s odds of success at the polls.”
“As grotesque as Trump is, McConnell is worse,” Jeet Heer wrote in The Nation. “McConnell has been around longer and has helped create the conditions that made Trump’s rise possible.”
Nobody has done more than McConnell to turn the GOP into the Trump Party. They “are nihilists, eager above all to hold on to power and to serve the wealthy donors of the Republican Party,” Heer wrote. Then he added,
The president and the majority leader are a perfectly paired duo. They work well together as a grifter team. Trump is the clown who grabs all the attention, while McConnell picks the pockets of the distracted crowd.
In her video response to McConnell’s speech at the RNC, McGrath said,
Now during the single worst public health failure in the last one hundred years, Kentuckians don’t want to hear partisan rhetoric. They want to know what our leaders will do to pull us out of this crisis and give them a fighting chance at a good life. They’re looking for leadership.
That’s not what they heard from Mitch McConnell.
Mitch isn’t going to change. But in November, Kentucky can make a change.
Polls show Democrat Joe Biden beating Trump, and McConnell and McGrath in a close race.
“Democrats are eager to defeat Trump in the fall election,” Heer wrote. “But they should bear in mind that McConnell is the bigger villain. The goal should be to make sure McConnell loses his position as majority leader. Even sweeter would be if he is ejected from his seat.”
Bluegrass Biden-McGrath boosters are clued in. “It isn’t enough to dump Trump,” said a veteran Kentucky labor activist. “We’ve got to ditch Mitch too.”
–30–