Courier Journal Editorial: "Jack Conway's Odious Ad".

Jack Conway's odious ad

This shoe has been on different feet now, and it's time to junk the old thing. It stinks, and it never offers a good fit on anyone who tries it on for size.

The “shoe” in question is playing the religion card in a political contest. This unappetizing move has brought a new edge of nastiness to the current race for Kentucky's U.S. Senate seat, in which there's already no love lost between the major-party candidates.

Democratic contender Jack Conway, the state's attorney general who has trailed his opponent in a tightening race, raised eyebrows, hackles, objections and blood pressure when he approved and started airing a new message on TV that brought up some questionable antics that occurred during Republican opponent Rand Paul's college career at Baylor University.

Since Dr. Paul is now 47 years old, and has done and said plenty since his school days to rile skeptics and critics and to prompt serious questions about his fitness to represent Kentuckians in the Senate, this is practically time-traveling to someone's Paleozoic era for ammunition.

Granted, his more recent and legitimate negatives — Dr. Paul's abject fealty to free-market solutions for practically everything, his now well-known distaste for federal solutions to discrimination, his commitment to curtail or abolish programs that help poor states like Kentucky, whose votes he is courting — haven't really stuck to his candidacy as they should.

But some silly and strange stuff from the time Dr. Paul was little more than a kid, attached to some flash-point buzzwords (“bow down before a false idol,” “his god was Aqua Buddha,” “a member of a secret society that called the Holy Bible a hoax,” “banned for mocking Christianity and Christ,” “end all faith-based initiatives”) might be something that could stick in the waning days of the campaign.

So along comes a Jack Conway-approved message, loaded with that language and seemingly custom-designed to prick the suspicions of Bible Belters who might otherwise have tilted Dr. Paul's way.

This same maneuver was odious when it was played on Barack Obama, as a presidential candidate and as president, and it's odious now, as applied to candidate Paul. Moreover, the Conway campaign's talking points notwithstanding, the ad seems — in abhorrent conflict with American principles — to invite voters to infer that a candidate must be a practicing Christian to hold high office.

Dr. Paul's overbaked reaction — refusing to shake hands, threatening to pull out of a last debate — is hardly surprising to those familiar with this “I'm taking my ball and going home” response to everything from reporters to ophthalmology boards to which he objects. (And that temperamental tip-off is a salient disqualifier for his Senate hopes.)

But that doesn't let Mr. Conway off the hook. His disavowal that the ad questioned only Dr. Paul's actions, not his faith, is laughable. The attorney general's message was a distasteful, opportunistic appeal to religious fear and ignorance, and he stumbled badly when he tried this shoe on for size.