KENTUCKY’S
KING
exploited to comic effect. McConnell slammed Baesler as a “blue
chihuahua,” who had “mistaken
Kentucky taxpayers for a fire hydrant” and who would serve as a
“lap dog” for President Bill Clinton. Bunning delivered a call-andresponse mockery with the festival’s GOP audience.
“He would go through all these
votes Baesler made and say, ‘What
do y’all think about that?’ And
the crowd would shout, ‘Bad
doggy!’” recalls Trey Grayson, an
attorney and party activist who
would later be elected Kentucky’s
secretary of state.
The typically mild-mannered
Baesler took the bait and responded with a brutal stemwinder of a
speech against Bunning, replete
with outsized hand gestures and
ugly facial contortions. Although
his rant played well with the live
audience, an angry man wildly
waving his arms and shouting in
the August heat left a visual impression that was ripe for McConnell’s manipulation. As soon as
Baesler’s rant ended, McConnell
was eager to make sure his staff
had caught it on tape.
“We filmed it,” says Hansen, who
was working for McConnell at the
time. “We put it to Wagner music,
HUFFINGTON
08.11.13
and it made one hell of an ad.”
With Baesler’s antics playing
out in slow motion over music by
Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer,
McConnell moved the tone of
American political ads even lower
than his landmark “Hound Dog”
spot or the Beshear sheep ads had.
“Mitch saw the video and
thought he saw something. He
showed it to the Bunning folks,”
says Grayson. “Baesler looked crazy. He looked kinda like Hitler.”
“When I ran, he was the best
help Jim ever had,” Baesler says
of McConnell. “He got that ad
running lookin’ like I was a crazy
man. I thought that thing — without question, he saw its value.”
The race was not called until
well after midnight, but Bunning
eventually emerged victorious by a
little more than 6,000 votes. The
barrage of negative ads against
Baesler not only worked, they effectively ended his career in national politics. At 57, he was a
washout. Two years later, Baesler
ran for his old House seat and lost
to a Republican by 18 points.
At least in Kentucky, McConnell has proven to be an incredibly effective Democrat-vaporizing
machine. He has ended the political careers of everyone he has ever
defeated, except Beshear, who was
elected governor in 2007, 11 years
after losing to McConnell.