Al Cross: Paul May Affect Both Parties' Primaries.

Paul may affect both parties' primaries
By Al Cross

Barring a head-slapping gaffe or lots of bad polling, Rand Paul will become Republicans' nominee for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky on Tuesday, scoring a landmark victory in the nation's first election showdown between insurgent fiscal conservatives and the national GOP establishment — including the man who holds the state's other Senate seat, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Paul's opponent may not be known until early Wednesday morning, the Democratic race between Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo and Attorney General Jack Conway is so close. In the end, Paul may help decide that race, too, because of the anti-establishment fervor he has tapped and amplified.

But the national attention will be on Paul's race with Secretary of State Trey Grayson, and what the results mean for the party and the country. You can expect declarations that Paul's victory is a harbinger of a sharp right turn in the November elections, perhaps as drastic as the one that gave Republicans control of both houses of Congress in 1994.

Perhaps so. In tackling an economic crisis, President Barack Obama and the Democrats had to turn left, too far for many voters. But Tuesday's primary is about much more than Democratic fiscal and economic policy. It's also about both parties being too cozy with business and too comfortable in “the Washington machine,” as Paul's most memorable TV ads put it. (He's had plenty of TV money because he tapped the presidential campaign network of his father, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.)

And Tuesday's result will be about more than Rand Paul. From the start, Grayson's campaign skills were in doubt because this was his first tough race. Those concerns were well founded; the Harvard graduate and former Democrat sometimes acted more like he was running for the Cambridge City Council than a Senate seat representing one of America's more rural and undereducated states.

Grayson might have put himself back in the race if most Republican primary voters had watched him and Paul on KET last Monday night. He was much more senatorial than Paul, whom he subtly dismissed as a crank who would be a national gadfly but a poor representative of Kentucky. “I want to actually get things done,” Grayson said.

Can Paul get things done? Many of his followers concede that electing him will not necessarily end budget earmarks and deficits and bring a new era of term limits and a much smaller and less active government. But they want to send someone to Washington who will at least try to push the place to the right. For them, that would be “getting things done,” and things bigger than the more incremental measures Grayson favors.

And Paul supporters can also argue that electing him would be a big step in changing the “Washington machine,” because he is part of a national movement that manifested itself in Utah last weekend, when Republicans refused to renominate McConnell lieutenant Robert Bennett to the Senate, and last week in West Virginia, where 28-year U.S. Rep. Alan Mollohan lost in the Democratic primary.

In states like Utah, West Virginia and Kentucky, the anti-Washington, anti-establishment movement faces little headwind because Obama is highly unpopular. In TV ads, Grayson and McConnell run against Obama; Paul's running against Washington.

McConnell's belated endorsement appeared to do Grayson little good, and had its downside. His own campaigns have stressed his earmarks, which make good TV spots but have direct impact on few voters and are soon forgotten. Now voters are more focused on overall spending, including bailouts, and McConnell voted for the Wall Street bailout before Obama took office. Paul is the first candidate for the many Republicans who think The Boss has grown too big for his britches and needs to be taken down a peg — like Winna Ramsey of Monticello, who told The Washington Post, “We're sick of McConnell.” (That full article appears today in this section.)

The Democrats

At a time when endorsements by the political establishment seem to mean less than ever, Conway's main closing message in the other primary is that he is the candidate of the state's two metropolitan newspapers and most of the state's top Democratic figures: 6th District U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler, House Speaker Greg Stumbo, state Auditor Crit Luallen and former Sen. Wendell Ford.

Mongiardo has the endorsement of Gov. Steve Beshear, but at the price of not being on next year's gubernatorial slate even if he loses Tuesday, and the governor has played little role in the race. Mongiardo rarely touts the endorsement, perhaps because he's been caught disparaging Beshear and the governor is not all that popular — but surely because he heads Frankfort's political establishment.

Mongiardo is running the anti-establishment campaign in the Democratic primary, with ads saying Conway would be “a senator for Wall Street and the powerful.” Conway has had more money for advertising and has more policy skills, but Mongiardo has a big base that voted for him in his 2004 race with Sen. Jim Bunning.

Mongiardo's anti-establishment campaign is not as strident as Paul's, but they harmonize, and the Paul phenomenon is probably helping Mongiardo. There are plenty of Democrats with anti-establishment, anti-Washington feelings, and many have been voting Republican for years. They can't vote for Paul yet, but for them Mongiardo is the next best thing. And while many of them tend to shun Democratic primaries, most will probably go to the polls Tuesday, because local offices are also on the ballot.

The polls show Conway on the verge of inching ahead at the wire, and he says undecideds are breaking his way, but many people polled in primaries don't vote. Close primaries are often determined by turnout; Friday, when reporters asked Ford the key to victory, he replied, “Get 'em out, and we're doing that.”

But turnout is often determined by intensity of feeling, and it seems reasonable to presume that those who want to vent against the establishment are more likely to go to the polls. Mongiardo may ride on Paul's cranky coattails.

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.