As I covered in last night's Last Call, Progress Kentucky has shaped up to be just about Mitch McConnell's best weapon in defusing the primary charge against him from the right, and completely disarming Kentucky Democrats on the left.
I'm glad I'm not the only one out there who thinks these clowns need to exit the stage as quickly as possible. Evan McMorris-Santoro and Ruby Cramer bring us the epitaph:
It's probably possible for a political group to be worse at
accomplishing its core mission than Progress Kentucky is, but it's
difficult to imagine how.
In its short lifespan, the super PAC
focused solely on defeating Sen. Mitch McConnell has instead helped the
Republican incumbent deflect his low approval rating and conservative
critics by subjecting McConnell to comically incompetent political
attacks.
"They've managed to become McConnell's favorite whipping
boy," said Jimmy Cauley, a longtime Kentucky Democratic strategist.
"It's kind of laughable because they didn't exist four months ago. And
yet they've gotten wrapped up in a string of four or five
controversies."
Kentucky Democrats aren't ready to say Progress
Kentucky has helped McConnell, but national Democratic observers have
their jaws on the floor as they watch the group turn McConnell into a
sympathetic figure, generating good headlines for him time and again.
And that's the real damage done, these
idiots have managed to make one of the most personally vile and villainous scumbags in Congress into the aggrieved victim, despite McConnell's awful, misogynist attacks on Ashley Judd and his atrocious voting record, all while he's managed to use his office to enrich himself by tens of millions of dollars. The story should be how vulnerable, ineffective, and terrible McConnell is. Instead, these two pudknockers have collapsed the circus tent and are running around setting bits of it on fire.
If the leakers of the tape wanted it to hurt McConnell, their plan
backfired. McConnell raised money off his claim that he had been the
victim of "Nixonian" tactics, and generally fomented conservative
support with his outrage-based spin strategy
after the tape came to light. Now that it looks like McConnell might be
proven right about the origins of the tape, it's likely he'll get even
more mileage out of Progress Kentucky.
The longer Progress Kentucky is in the news, the less McConnell's record is. Kentucky Democrats are already a lost cause for most Americans. If the rest of the Dems across the nation throw in the towel on beating Mitch because Heckle and Jeckle here have made the KY Dem brand too toxic to help...
McConnell has real political problems, including low approval ratings and Tea Party types in the GOP who are less than thrilled
with his leadership in the Senate. National Democrats fear that the
repeated Progress Kentucky faceplants are letting McConnell coast along.
"If
it was them, this is an idiotic move and something that could
jeopardize the larger push against McConnell in '14," one senior
Democratic strategist in D.C. said of the tape. "If this is true, you
ask yourself, why anybody would risk such a maneuver, especially on a
tape was damning but not a game changer?"
In fact, Progress
Kentucky is so bad at its stated task that some Democrats whisper behind
the scenes (a better word is "hope") that it must to be a front set up
by McConnell to make him look good and Democrats look terrible. Jennings
had a message for those Democrats: no such luck.
"That's wishful
thinking on the part of Democrats, I am sure, who seriously want to be
as far away from these people as possible," he said.
Gives me a headache just thinking about it.