Blue America Live Chat With Jack Conway
by digby
If you’ve been around the blogosphere the past week or so you’ve notice that Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway is holding a money bomb today in an attempt to raise funds to fend off the inane Galt worshipping Rand Paul. I don’t have to tell any of you what an LSD-laced tea induced nightmare it would be to have this nutcase join the other GOP nutcases in the US Senate. If you like the idea of getting on a bridge to the 19th century, you’ll love Rand Paul.
Luckily, Conway is a very good candidate and this race is winnable even in this potential November bloodbath. And he isn’t doing it by being Republican lite, but by speaking to people’s real needs and wants on the economy and the deteriorating state of their communities and their country. Kentucky is a red state, but it’s hurting just like everywhere else and Paul’s ideological freakshow is making even Republicans down there very nervous.
Howie wrote a piece the other day about a very famous Kentuckian named John Sherman Cooper:
I grew up in a Democratic household in Brooklyn but back then it wasn’t hard to say that there were inspiring political leaders of the Republican persuasion– as well as really terrible Democrats. There are still some really terrible Democrats, plenty of them, but I can’t think of a single inspiring Republican in office anywhere. When I was a kid, Kentucky Republican John Sherman Cooper, for example, was someone any American could look up to. Aside from an exemplary personal life, he always believed his job was to fight for the interests of ordinary American families rather than for Big Business and he was one of the first Republicans with the guts to denounce Joseph McCarthy, to lead the battle against the Vietnam War, and to vote for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and, before that, the very Civil Rights Act of 1964 that current Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul says he would have opposed
.
He was one of those Southerners driven out of office by the GOP Southern Strategy and now his seat is held by Mitch McConnell. Cooper was a certain kind of Southern politician we see less and less of today unfortunately, an enlightened populist who worked to bring his state out of poverty and into the modern world. He was a perfect example of how many Republicans in the South used to be before the Nixon team determined that they could get more votes by appealing to fear of change and racism. In the bizarroworld of American politics, it’s the enlightened populist Democrat Jack Conway who is Cooper’s rightful successor.
I’ve met Conway personally and he is a very impressive politician, which I’m grateful for. Rand Paul is one of the creepiest Senate candidates I’ve seen in my lifetime and the idea of him becoming a US Senator —- especially as part of a bloc of wingnuts —- is very frightening indeed. We need someone with intelligence, skill, savvy and toughness to beat him and Conway has all that.
Maybe it just comes down to this: Rand Paul wants to kill social security. Seriously. That is a number one priority for him; it goes against everything he believes in. Jack Conway refuses to even consider cutting benefits or raising the retirement age. That says everything about the two of them. One feels that a society has no obligation to ensure that its elderly are taken care of. The other does. It’s really that simple.
Please contribute to Conway’s campaign today if you can. Rand Paul has his daddy’s big libertarian list and he’s collecting big bucks from them and from the corporations (which he had previously promised to reject.) Jack needs us to stay competitive.
He’s going to be at Crooks and Liars at 11pdt/2edt for a chat if you’d like to come over and say hello or ask him some questions.
Again, here’s Blue America’s Senate Page. If you can throw a few bucks his way today it would be much appreciated.
.