One of the key segments McConnell set out to pursue was organized labor. For a Southern state, Kentucky had strong unions—unlike every state to its south, it is not “right to work”—and McConnell was running as such a moderate-to-liberal Republican that it was not inconceivable that he could get some labor support. Over and over, his scheduler, Griffin, tried to set up a meeting with one of the top leaders of the local AFL-CIO labor council. “I used my sweetest soft sell,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Can you meet him Monday? No? Tuesday? No? Wednesday? No? Thursday?’ And he said, ‘Thursday, that’s my bowling day.’ So I actually sent Mitch to bowling.”
McConnell did not just go to the lanes. He told the unions that he would support passing a state law to legalize collective bargaining for public employees, a liberal position that even Hollenbach, the Democrat, had reservations about. It paid off: the labor council endorsed McConnell.
That McConnell was running to Hollenbach’s left on some issues—he ran separate from the rest of the local Republican slate, and even got the endorsement of the Courier-Journal—complicated the question of how to go after Hollenbach over the busing issue. It was tempting to do so, given how much ill will it had stirred up in the county, and how well McConnell had set himself up as an opponent of busing with his letter to Ford. McConnell had the consultants make up a spot with him standing in front of a school bus saying, “Some say Judge Hollenbach could have done something about this. Some say he couldn’t.” But the campaign decided not to air it: the issue had already done its damage to Hollenbach.
Not that McConnell was going to play nice across the board. Goodman came up with a memorable spot, the defining one of the campaign, showing a farmer mucking out a horse’s stall while commenting on Hollenbach’s claim to have cut taxes four times. “When Hollenbach says he cut my taxes, he doesn’t credit me with any more sense than old Nell here. Maybe Hollenbach ought to have my job, because in my business, I deal with that kind of stuff every day.” The farmer closes by pitching a load of manure right at the camera. The ad, which debuted during the first game of the World Series, appalled some of McConnell’s supporters in Louisville high society, but was a hit in less tony quarters. “Some of the nice people said, ‘Ooh, that’s pretty rough,’ ” says Goodman, the ad maker. “But the guys around the feed store said, ‘Hey, that guy’s got balls.’ ” One person who had no reservations about the ad was the candidate himself. “Oh, God, he loved it,” says Goodman.
A couple of other ads turned the knife more subtly—the campaign went heavy on spots showing McConnell smiling happily with his wife and children, an obvious contrast with Hollenbach’s splintering marriage, which also provided the subtext for an ad with a man in a clerical collar intoning, “Speaking for myself, I think that Mitch McConnell has the character that’s been missing.” (Hollenbach stews over this line of attack to this day. “It was just the snideness of his remarks, about how ‘I feel so sorry for the children.’ In my judgment, it was disgraceful and disgusting how he talked about it.”) To cap it off, McConnell ran an ad showing himself strolling with his mentor John Sherman Cooper in Washington’s Lafayette Park, with Cooper (who’d left the Senate in 1972) remarking, in an implicit rebuke to Hollenbach, that two terms was enough time for anyone to serve in office.
McConnell won by six percentage points. A giddy, raucous crowd assembled at the campaign office off Bardstown Road. It seemed like everyone who was anyone in Louisville had turned out for it. McConnell was beaming, and did something his staff had never seen him do before or in the years that followed. He told them he was taking them to lunch the following week at the Galt House, the city’s new riverside hotel.
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Mitch McConnell had made it into office, and seemed to have a good idea of what to do when he got there. He overhauled the upper levels of most departments and launched a methodical search for replacements that extended well beyond Louisville, a process that riled some old-timers in the county. (One of the Democratic county commissioners threw a punch at McConnell’s closest aide, former college classmate Dave Huber.) He stocked his inner office with his top campaign aides—Huber, Runyon, and campaign manager Joe Schiff—but also brought in Minx Auerbach, a leading Louisville liberal. He followed through on priorities he had laid out in the campaign, like the creation of an office of historic preservation and boosting spending on libraries.
One campaign pledge, though, was strikingly dropped: he never did push for collective bargaining for public employees. He later acknowledged, as related by John David Dyche, that his pledge was nothing more than “open pandering” to the unions.
Another of McConnell’s most notable accomplishments as county leader was barely discernible to the public. With Roe v. Wade having legalized abortion in Kentucky only a few years prior, abortion opponents were trying to rein in the procedure via local ordinances that, among other restrictions, required married women to get their husbands’ approval and imposed waiting periods. Abortion rights supporters had an ally in McConnell: every time one of the ordinances was introduced, McConnell would see to it that it never came up for a vote, much less a public hearing, says Jessica Loving, who was then the director of the Kentucky chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “He was one of the best elected officials I ever worked with in terms of dealing with the issue,” she says. “He said, ‘You’re right, this flies in the face of Roe v. Wade,’ and he just stopped the legislation dead in its tracks. . . . Mitch understood procedural ways to stop legislation, and that’s what he did.”
It was clear to her, she says, that McConnell was screening the ordinances not only on legal grounds but also because they clashed with his pro-choice leanings. “He had a very feminist perspective on it and I appreciated it,” she said. Indeed, when Dolores Delahanty, another feminist activist in town, approached McConnell and asked if he would lend his name to a fund-raiser being held by the pro-choice Kentucky Women’s Political Caucus, he assented. “He fully understood what the caucus was all about and where we stood on abortion,” Delahanty says. “It was obvious to me that he supported the caucus in that regard.” And Yarmuth recalls McConnell as having been pro-choice when they worked together in Cook’s office. In turn, Schiff, McConnell’s chief strategist, praised Yarmuth as a “good, progressive, pro-choice Republican” when he ran for the county board.
Loving kept McConnell’s cooperation quiet at the time—one of the local ACLU’s then-board members, Suzy Post, says she had no inkling of McConnell’s assistance. And it wasn’t hard to deduce why McConnell was happy to forgo public credit for these efforts. Just days into his county administration, Meme Runyon, now his press secretary, was given a list of all of Kentucky’s newspapers and was instructed to start sending her news releases about McConnell across the state. McConnell was already thinking how he would get to Washington—specifically, the Senate he so revered—which meant running for office beyond relatively liberal Jefferson County. “We were planning in those first three months a campaign that was going to take place eight years away,” she says.
The problem was there was another election standing in the way, his county reelection in 1981. McConnell nearly lost it, to an uninspiring county commissioner. He’d lost his support from the unions after his betrayal on the collective-bargaining pledge; the recession of the early 1980s had voters in an anti-incumbent mood; and McConnell could no longer feature his family in ads, having divorced his wife, Sherrill Redmon, just a few years after so effectively deploying her against Hollenbach. (Dyche describes the end of the twelve-year marriage as “amicable” but “personally unpleasant.” He also quotes Redmon hinting at the challenge of being married to a man whom she describes, euphemistically, as a “self-contained person.”)
And McConnell by his own admission simply hadn’t focused enough on the race. On election night, even as it became clear that he would survive, he was stewing over the numbers, wondering how he didn’t get a bigger margin in this or that precinct. “Here’s a guy winning re
election in this tough battle . . . and Tully and I are saying, this is real good, winning is better than losing,” says Goodman. “But Mitch wasn’t all that happy.”
“He damn near got beat, which would’ve ended him—it would’ve ended his life,” says Larry Forgy, a veteran Republican lawyer in Kentucky who served as Ronald Reagan’s state campaign chairman in 1980, and later had a falling-out with McConnell. “I don’t know what Mitch McConnell would do if not for politics.”
McConnell had learned his lesson. He would never let his guard down, never take his eye off the next election.
And so he resumed the preparation that Runyon had started for him in 1978 with those statewide press releases on the doings of the Jefferson County judge/executive. Even better than sending press releases to every county paper, he realized, was having a reason to visit every corner of the state himself. And partway through his second term, he found a reason: his aide Bill Bardenwerper returned from a visit to the Chicago police department, where he’d learned about an underage prostitution ring that had tentacles to Louisville. McConnell jumped on the issue—he called for expanded fingerprinting of children, held hearings across the state, and created a “Statewide Task Force on Exploited and Missing Children,” which produced state legislation, passed into law by the Democratic-led legislature, that included preventive measures and stiffer penalties for child trafficking.
Bardenwerper insists that the motivation was not entirely political. “Cynics criticized Mitch for making politics out of the issue, but I always said he could have been on the wrong side of the issue, like some members of Congress turned out to be in their various sordid personal lives,” he says. “If you get a politician on the right side of right, no matter the motivation, how can that be bad?” Still, he and others acknowledge the dividends that the crusade paid. It helped get McConnell to every one of the state’s 120 counties in 1983 and 1984, and gave him an identity that went beyond a lawyer turned county administrator from Louisville. “The child abuse thing went around the state,” says one former Republican officeholder in the state, “so it was, rather than ‘oh, that’s the lawyer guy,’ ‘oh, that’s the child abuse guy.’ ”
Preparation came in another form, too. Frustrated with how close he’d come to losing his reelection, McConnell decided it was time for a new media and polling team. Goodman and Plesser, who had delivered McConnell his big win against Hollenbach, were out. Now McConnell wanted nothing less than the best. In 1984, he hired Roger Ailes.
Ailes was still a dozen years from founding Fox News, but his reputation was already well established. After meeting Richard Nixon backstage at The Mike Douglas Show, which he helped produce, he’d been brought on to tutor the dour candidate in the ways of television for the 1968 campaign. After stormy forays into theater and TV news, he was by the early 1980s specializing in creating ads for Republican Senate candidates. There was no mystery what you were getting when you hired Ailes as your adman—hard-hitting spots that went straight for the opponent’s weak spot. Factual accuracy was not a priority. To elect Alphonse D’Amato senator in New York, that meant highlighting his opponent Liz Holtzman’s unmarried status. To reelect Harrison “Jack” Schmitt in New Mexico, that meant producing an ad that accused his opponent, state attorney general Jeff Bingaman, of having freed a “convicted felon” on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. As Gabriel Sherman notes in his biography of Ailes, the FBI had “requested [the convict’s] temporary release into its custody in order for him to testify as a key prosecution witness at a trial in Texas for the murder of a judge.” Asked about the ad, Ailes said it was Bingaman’s job to point out the context of the felon’s release. “My responsibility ends with the act. Maybe folks can say I’m an unethical guy. But it’s not my job to make . . . Bingaman’s case.”
Ailes brought with him not only an unrestrained approach to the business of making ads but a penchant for personal drama. He was known to get into physical scuffles with coworkers and once punched a hole through the wall of the control room of the NBC late-night talk show where he worked. His personal style could hardly have been in starker contrast to that of the buttoned-down McConnell, for whom cutting loose meant sitting back with his aides in the county office after work to sip from the bottle of Old Forester bourbon he kept on hand.
But Ailes and McConnell shared one thing in common. And it trumped all difference, as well as any misgivings McConnell might have about hiring someone with an unscrupulous reputation. As Janet Mullins, McConnell’s manager for the coming campaign, later recalled: “Roger lived it and breathed it and wanted to win as badly as Mitch did.” Or as Ailes himself put it in his favorite office mantra: “Whatever it takes.”
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The person unfortunate enough to find himself in the sights of McConnell’s new hire was a second-term senator named Walter “Dee” Huddleston, a World War II tank gunner who’d entered politics after several decades in the radio business. He had won the race to succeed the retiring John Sherman Cooper. Now Cooper’s protégé wanted the seat back.
Huddleston was well liked and politically in tune with his constituents, a quintessential Southern Democrat. But like Todd Hollenbach, he did not realize what he was up against with this mild-mannered young Louisville lawyer. This miscalculation was understandable, to a degree—if Mitch McConnell had seemed ill-suited to campaigning among his fellow Louisvillians, he seemed even more so out in the state’s outlying areas. He did his best to develop what Joe Whittle, the Republican state chairman at the time, calls his “mountain presentation,” but he was never going to be as natural with rural voters as, say, Gene Snyder, who, on visiting country stores, was known to pull out a knife and start whittling some wood.
McConnell, on the other hand, “hasn’t enough personality to wash a shotgun,” as Forgy, who in 1984 was again serving as Reagan’s campaign chairman, puts it. It didn’t help McConnell in the common-touch department that he was often carrying around a briefcase, an accessory that Forgy suspected was totally for show—a ploy by Ailes to make the youthful-looking forty-two-year-old look more senatorial. “I remember once, in Bowling Green, [Vice President George H. W.] Bush came to speak and said, ‘What’s he doing? Why does he have that briefcase with him?’ ” Forgy recalls. But regardless of the quips, McConnell persisted. “Most people wouldn’t be willing to carry around a briefcase that’s empty,” says Forgy. “You’d say, ‘Shit, I’m not going to do that.’ But he did it. . . . Whatever they were telling him to do, he did.”
No Republican had won a statewide election in the state since Cooper’s big win in 1966. To plot a path to victory, McConnell’s new pollster, Lance Tarrance from Houston—whom McConnell had courted with two separate trips to the Kentucky Derby—had segmented the electorate into five different groups: registered Republicans, younger suburban ticket-splitters, white conservative Democrats, white liberal Democrats, and black voters, who tilted Democratic. Even if McConnell got nearly all of the first group and the vast majority of the second, that still left him only at about 40 percent. The “key to everything,” Tarrance says, was the white conservative Democrats. If he could get more than a third of them, then he might pull it off.
Except McConnell’s numbers with these conservative Democrats were, if anything, declining over the summer of 1984 in the surveys Tarrance was doing. “We were sixty days out, and I told him, if this continues, we’re not going to get it,” Tarrance says. As Ailes recalled: “He was so far behind we almost had to flip a coin about who was going to give him the bad news.”
* * *
One Saturday night, Tarrance received an excited call from Ailes. “He told me he’d just finished with some wild and crazy ads that might blow up the campaign or might save it,” Tarrance says. Ailes sent the scripts to Tarrance by express mail. “They were brilliant,” says Tarrance. “Even though they were right out of Hee Haw.”
As Ailes later told it, he’d been watching TV at home that weekend when an ad for dog food came on, with a pack of dog
s scurrying after a bag of kibble. This ad had stirred a recollection of a tidbit a campaign researcher had noted, that Huddleston had missed several important votes while giving paid speeches around the country (which senators were then allowed to do). Sherman, in his Ailes biography, describes the rest of the creative epiphany:
Ailes jotted down the word “Dogs!” on a piece of paper. During a strategy meeting, Ailes presented his vision. McConnell’s campaign manager, Janet Mullins, recalled the moment: “There was Roger, sitting in a cloud of pipe smoke, and he said, ‘This is Kentucky. I see hunting dogs. I see hound dogs on the scent looking for the lost member of Congress.’ ”
Thus was born a classic of the attack ad genre. Larry McCarthy, the Ailes associate who would go on to fame for crafting the Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign, was put in charge of finding dogs and a trainer. This task proved difficult—McCarthy first came back with bluetick hounds, which were deemed not true Kentucky hounds. He went out for different ones. “If you’re going to be culturally calling someone on the carpet, you better have your cultural facts right,” says Tarrance. “We threw everything we had at this, because we had maxed out everything else we could do.” Finally, it was ready: A pack of bloodhounds straining on their leashes head off from Capitol Hill, through the woods, across a beach, past a swimming pool, with this voice-over, scripted by Ailes: “My job was to find Dee Huddleston and get him back to work. Huddleston was skipping votes but making an extra fifty thousand dollars giving speeches. Let’s go, boys!”
The charge that Huddleston was playing widespread hooky was, as Newsweek noted at the time, “baseless”: Huddleston was present for 94 percent of votes. McConnell himself later admitted that an accompanying radio ad attacking Huddleston for his attendance at committee meetings was “fundamentally unfair” and “kind of ridiculous.” But the line of attack rang true, given that the phlegmatic Huddleston was running such a lackluster campaign. Voters ate it up—especially the conservative Democrats who might otherwise be left cool by the Louisville lawyer with the briefcase. “People would say, ‘Mitch, what about the coon hounds!’ ” says Whittle, who was often with McConnell on the trail. And McConnell’s numbers with that key segment surged.
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