Al Cross: One Tough Week For Grayson And Conway.

One tough week for Grayson and Conway

FANCY FARM, Ky. — The weekend of the Fancy Farm Picnic can be the great equalizer in Kentucky politics, because it's a minefield for frontrunners. It was so this year in both U.S. Senate primaries, not just the Democratic one.

We saw that well before the annual picnic and political speaking at St. Jerome's Catholic Church in Graves County. At preliminary Republican events, Bowling Green ophthalmologist and anti-tax zealot Rand Paul had bigger crowds of supporters and gave better speeches than Secretary of State Trey Grayson, the presumptive GOP nominee now that Sen. Jim Bunning is retiring. Even Bill Johnson of Elkton, an oil executive who is also in the primary, made a better impression on some Republicans.

Grayson did have the best crowd and best speech among Republicans at the picnic, but the weekend showed that Paul could be a factor in the Republican primary, making arguments and posing questions that could force Grayson to the right and into mistakes, and make him less palatable to moderate and conservative Democrats. Grayson can probably handle a top-tier race, but has yet to prove it. Paul will test him.

Alluding to Grayson, Paul said at a Republican dinner in Marshall County that the usual strategy is to run as a conservative in the Republican primary and as a moderate in the fall. He presented himself as a candidate of firmer principles, winning applause when he said “I'm for smaller government and balanced budgets.” He said Republicans “have lost our believability as fiscal conservatives,” and must decide anew the direction and leaders of their party. “Your new leadership may not be people who have been involved in politics,” he said, alluding to himself.

Paul didn't mention his father, U.S. Rep Ron Paul of Texas, who ran for president last year and appeared with him on CNN last week. The congressman is expected to tap his national following to raise money for the Senate campaign, and the sum could be considerable.

Among Democrats, strong fund-raising made Attorney General Jack Conway the favorite over Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo, but after the last eight days, the Democratic primary has no clear front-runner.

Conway erased his advantage, not so much by calling himself a “tough son of a bitch” at the church picnic but by failing to apologize immediately and allowing the story to last more than one day, burning it into the public consciousness and raising questions about his judgment.

Saturday night, the Paducah TV station led its newscast by noting Conway's “interesting language” and bleeping out the last word of the phrase.

Tuesday, his picture appeared next to the word “profanity” in a headline on the front page and home Web page of this newspaper. That's poison, especially when people in the socially conservative region remember that he always begins his speeches there by saying he was raised on “Western Kentucky values of faith and family.”

The next day, TV satirist Stephen Colbert spent a minute and 20 seconds on the episode, generating even more news coverage. Then YouTube videos of uncertain origin, mocking Conway's self-declared toughness, made the story viral. And now this space is obliged to address it.

Conway told a crowd the morning before the picnic that he hadn't gotten a good night's sleep all week, after his wife bore their first child. He looked tired all day, and at the picnic he had a short fuse when Mongiardo and his hecklers baited him with childish class warfare.

That's all the excuse Conway has, and it's not much. He was so unready for the critical event that he went over the five-minute time limit and was cut off by recorded music. (Disclosure: As master of ceremonies for the picnic, I took the timekeeper's signal and relayed it to the sound man.)

All that being said, too much has been made of the incident. Fancy Farm is not only the great equalizer; it can be the great distorter. What often matters more than the speeches is the resulting chatter, or the damaging video. Ask Democrat Scotty Baesler, who might hold the Senate seat today if he hadn't gone wild in 1998 in a misguided effort to show some sizzle.

As my summer assistant, Ashland native J.J. Snidow, correctly deduced after his first trip to Fancy Farm, “It's hard to score points for your team, but all too easy to score some for your opponent's.”

The only upside for Conway, and it's temporary, is that the incident obscured Mongiardo's contention that the Attorney General supports the cap-and-trade bill that would mitigate climate change. Conway strengthened his caveats against the bill during the weekend, telling Democrats in Marshall County, “I won't vote for a bill that harms Kentucky coal or does harm to Kentucky families.” He might as well say he's against it. It's hard to imagine any meaningful climate bill that wouldn't hurt coal or raise electric rates in this state, which gets 91 percent of its electricity from the black rock.

So, even without Conway's foul-up, Mongiardo probably would have more forward momentum from the weekend, in a region he carried as Senate nominee in 2004. Now that he has received a real boost, he will need to capitalize on it with strong fund raising in the third quarter of the year. The money numbers, and Conway's deeper skill set, could still make it his race to lose. And money could make a race of the Republican primary.

Al Cross, former Courier-Journal political writer, is director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. His e-mail address is al.cross@uky.edu. His views are his own, not those of the University of Kentucky.