“Everybody wants to focus on the presidential race,” Democratic Senate hopeful Amy McGrath told about 50 supporters in Paducah on Friday afternoon. “But I’ll tell you what, the statement the world needs from us is to get rid of Mitch McConnell.”
The Senate majority leader has beaten six straight Democrats, including Walter D. Huddleston, a two-term incumbent, in 1984.
“The man is stuck in 1985,” said McGrath, referring to McConnell’s first year in Washington. “Earlier!” somebody in the crowd yelled. “More than that!” somebody else chimed in.
The crowd — all masked — gathered at the concrete Noble Park amphitheater, where moviemakers shot a scene from In Country, the 1989 Bruce Willis film.
Everybody obeyed McGrath campaign rules and observed social distance seating.
The first woman Marine to fly in a jet in combat, McGrath arrived in her old brown leather flight jacket. An Annapolis grad and a retired lieutenant colonel, she didn’t unmask until she took the stage about a dozen feet from the closest fans.
McGrath spoke for about 30 minutes, then masked up again to mingle with the faithful on a cool, crisp, and sunny autumn day.
Before exiting stage left, she said that by defeating McConnell “we can change the trajectory of our country for the better, and we have to. Only we can do that in Kentucky … by getting rid of the man who has literally destroyed what was once the greatest deliberative body on earth … the United States Senate.”
Elected minority leader in 2006, McConnell became majority leader in 2015 after the GOP flipped the Senate. McGrath said McConnell made the Senate “more partisan than ever, more polarized than ever” and “more dysfunctional than ever. … All that’s happened on his watch.”
But she called her Oct. 12 debate with McConnell “quite fun.” McGrath earned high marks for her strong showing.
“He talked about Washington, D.C.,” she said. “He talked about lots of people I’ve never met; he talked about Puerto Rico. He talked about other states; he never talked about Kentucky.”
McGrath said that when she talked about the COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating impact on Kentucky — thousands of Kentuckians losing their jobs and health insurance or getting evicted because they can’t pay rent — “he started laughing.”
As a result of Washington’s “terrible” response to the global pandemic, “this is the first time in 100 years that we have a major international crisis in the world and no one — no one — is looking to the United States for leadership because we have terrible leaders,” McGrath said. She didn’t cite President Trump but put “Mitch McConnell … at the top of that list” of bad leaders.
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