KENTUCKY’S
KING
holler over” can be the best way
to give directions.
McConnell capitalizes on his
country cachet with ads accusing
his opponents of being inauthentic
creatures of the political machine.
The first and most notorious was a
cold-blooded ad he ran in his first
Senate race in 1984 against Walter “Dee” Huddleston, an ad that
became infamous for debasing the
tone of national campaigns.
Although Huddleston had one
of the strongest attendance records in Congress, he had missed
a few votes while giving paid
speeches. McConnell’s “Hound
Dog” ad, produced by future Fox
News chief Roger Ailes, featured a
man with a pack of dogs searching
for Huddleston. It was funny, wry
and gently mocking, but the effect
was devastating.
Huddleston didn’t think anyone
would fall for the ad. “I thought
the bloodhounds were kind of silly, but as it went on, I thought it
was pretty effective,” he told HuffPost. “It wasn’t true.”
The ad was so effective that
McConnell spit out a sequel in
which the man chases an actor
playing Huddleston up a tree.
It was a sign of things to come,
and the launch of a long arc in a
HUFFINGTON
08.11.13
lengthy and controversial career.
Once McConnell won high office
and moved to Washington, his
embrace of the broad uses of government dwindled, and he came
more and more to focus his career
on the goal of acquiring power.
By 1990, when Sloane took on
McConnell for his Senate seat,
the old respect between the two
men had gone out the window. On
the stump, McConnell called for
abolishing campaign donations
from political action committees,
yet by October he had taken close
to $900,000 in PAC money. He
deployed class-war tactics, calling
Sloane his “millionaire opponent”
for holding stock in oil companies, although McConnell and his
campaign were highly favored by
the industry. “Just remember:
Every time the price of gas goes
up, rich people like Harvey get
richer — and Kentucky families
get poorer. We need to fight back,”
McConnell argued.
McConnell’s campaign even
came out and said he was open
to raising taxes on the wealthy by
eliminating some deductions. In
a TV ad, he professed the belief
that “everyone should pay their
fair share” in taxes, “including
the rich.”
The central selling point of
Sloane’s campaign was his long
dedication to universal health