Wonders never cease when it comes to editorialists who must have something to say about everything when it's obvious that they have a hard time having something sensible to say about the simplest things. Here's the opening of the lead editorial in the Lexington Herald-Leader of 23 May (the day after the Primary): "This morning, it's fair to start with congratulations to Gov. Ernie Fletcher. He managed to survive his own party's primary -- just barely."
Well…okay. The republican governor won only 104 of the state's 120 counties, with a plurality well over 50%. So…one has to conclude that the editorialist has a strange definition for the term "just barely." The democrat winner managed only a 41% plurality, so the term "just barely" defies description in his case. Maybe "just barely barely" would do. The paper's view is that half of the republicans voted against a sitting guv, but didn't take the view that nearly 60% of democrats voted against their standard-bearer in November. Editorialists have a hard time, especially when their agenda is being chopped-up into little pieces.
It could be that an important contributing factor to Fletcher's win was the presence of Attorney General Greg Stumbo's name on the ballot in the lieutenant governor slot of the losing democrat team that won a measly 21% of democrat voters. Stumbo said years ago that he would consider running for governor (not lieutenant governor) if Fletcher became "wildly unpopular." He then attempted make the guv wildly unpopular by running an investigation out of his office that properly belonged elsewhere – for instance, before an ethics committee. He racked up a raft of misdemeanors, mostly, and the guv just pardoned the accused, not allowing the obvious witch-hunt to hurt governing and bankrupt bureaucrats hung with huge attorney-fees trying to fight simple misdemeanors. Stumbo even charged the guv, but made nothing stick and dropped everything.
The governor's two republican opponents entered the primary advancing the proposition that Fletcher was too mortally wounded by the faux charges that were obvious to any reasonable person as politically motivated – especially in Kentucky, where the politics surely are the damnedest. For his trouble, Stumbo has been let out to pasture. In his portion of the concession speech, he vowed to try the governor on every street-corner and in every barbershop in Kentucky between now and November, admitting, though obviously unintentionally, that he wasn't able to trap him in the only place that mattered – the court.
The biggest losers financially were the ones who largely – if not almost altogether – bankrolled their own campaigns. Republican Billy Harper spent mega-millions to get 13% of the vote. Democrat Bruce Lunsford (Stumbo's running mate) also spent mega-millions to get 21% of the democrat vote. A few days ago, republican contender Anne Northup shot another $500,000 into her campaign that garnered 37% of the republican vote. Democrat Steve Henry also "loaned" his campaign a cool million in April, and collected 17.5% of the democratic vote for his investment. The biggest loser, of course, was Lunsford, who wasted another $8 million four years ago trying for the office, then dropped out and actually supported republican Fletcher in his successful race against Ben Chandler, who kissed the whole crowd goodbye by going off to Congress the next year and avoiding the current gubernatorial mishmash altogether.
The editorialist one more time: "No matter your campaign rhetoric, people will still know that they don't have affordable health care, that good jobs are hard to find, that their kids aren't learning enough in the early grades and that college is too expensive." These are the exact words rumbling through the editorial pages during every election cycle for decades…so what else is new?
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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