June 4, 2018
‘I think he’s done a great job’ McConnell says
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants Gov. Matt Bevin, once his sparring partner in a contentious Senate primary, to run for re-election.
“I think he’s done a great job,” McConnell said in response to a question on Friday at an event for Louisville business leaders.
The vote of confidence from McConnell is a marked shift from the dynamic between the two Republicans four years ago, when they quarreled often during Bevin’s primary challenge to McConnell.
“Mitch McConnell seems to be focused on one job and one job only, and that’s keeping his own,” Bevin said in 2014, before ultimately losing his Senate bid.
During the race, McConnell’s aides called Bevin an “East Coast con man,” and McConnell used television campaigns to call Bevin dishonest, dub him “Bailout Bevin” and suggest he wasn’t a “Kentucky conservative.”
“Twenty years from now, we will all remember the time when the East Coast con-man thought so little of Kentuckians that he pathologically lied to us about absolutely everything until an undercover camera caught him red-handed at a a cockfighting rally,” a statement from McConnell spokeswoman Allison Moore read in 2014.
Bevin, meanwhile, called McConnell a coward and his campaign childish and also used his daughter to call McConnell a liar in one advertisement.
When Bevin won the Republican primary for governor in 2015, McConnell offered a brief statement: “I congratulate Matt Bevin on his victory and endorse him for governor,” he wrote.
Bevin has yet to declare his intention to run for re-election as governor. He doesn’t have to formally file until January.
But long before filing, candidates for governor normally announce their intention and file a “letter of intent” with the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance so they can begin fundraising for their campaign. Bevin has not done so.
At this same point in his first term, Bevin’s predecessor Democrat Steve Beshear had already raised more than $2 million for his re-election campaign.
By Darcy Costello
Louisville Courier Journal
