What, Me Worry? Inside the growing movement to oust Senator Mitch McConnell
by Stephen George - Louisville Eccentric Observer
Kentucky’s senior senator, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnellAgainst the history of great American protests, 800 people howling like a pack of hyenas in a university gathering hall doesn’t stack up to King’s March on Washington or mid-May 1970, when 100,000 strangers pounded on Washington’s doorstep demanding an end to the Vietnam War. But in a content Midwestern city that hasn’t had a crisis of conflict since Gerald Ford was in office, a place that’s also home to an increasingly unpopular Senate Minority Leader tied inextricably to the latest war disaster, it doesn’t have to.
The crush of people collectively publicizing their opposition to the Iraq war at Bellarmine University last Tuesday evening provided the most direct statement this city has made on the issue to date. A scene normally reserved for the most dedicated among them — the flower-sniffing hippie archetype that Republicans (at least in the case of this war) love to flog publicly — the number of avowed, placard-waving Catholics Against the War there alone should have tipped anyone off to the broader significance of the quiet suddenly becoming the loud.
It was the country’s largest single gathering on a night full of them, the culmination of a 10-week, highly coordinated national campaign trying to force Congress to initiate a change in White House war policy. Forty-nine other “Take a Stand” rallies took place that evening, a combined gathering of more than 11,000 people across 15 states.
Most conspicuously absent was Kentucky’s senior senator, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, an unflinching Iraq war supporter. Early estimates say McConnell is walking headlong into a brutal re-election campaign next year. Much of the clamor hounding the senator can be attributed to a loose coalition of antiwar, labor and grassroots activist groups hungry for the blood that comes with political responsibility. Iraq is an albatross for McConnell.
For better or worse, though, serious politicians don’t show up at places where they’re guaranteed to take a whipping — especially guys like McConnell who are known for dealing with matters behind the scenes, ruthlessly, severely and sometimes cripplingly. Leave the public humiliation thing to guys like Mark Foley and Larry Craig.
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