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KENTUCKY’S
KING
HUFFINGTON
08.11.13
ARLY IN McCONNELL’S FIRST CAMPAIGN
for Jefferson County judge-executive in ’77,
staffer Charlie Musson remembers calling businesses and asking if his candidate could stand
outside their storefront and do some politicking. On the way to one of those first campaign
stops, he could see McConnell stewing in the
backseat of their car.
“The whole drive out you
could tell he’s getting anxious,”
Musson says.
Finally, McConnell couldn’t
help but speak up. Maybe they
could turn the car around and
just go back home. “How do I do
this?” he asked.
McConnell was actually good
with young voters and had impressed Musson with the way he
took the time to talk politics over
Cokes with his high-school-aged
volunteers. But even with this
first campaign, the 35-year-old
McConnell understood his true
value. “Can I go back and make
fundraising calls?” he offered
from the back seat.
Before the race, when he was
teaching political science at the
University of Louisville, McConnell
had explained to his class what
built a political party. He’d written on the blackboard three words:
“Money, money, money.” Although
he would churn out position papers, he told Louisville Today after
his victory that “issues, unfortunately, usually are kind of peripheral to winning a campaign.”
McConnell eventually carried
that philosophy into the Senate.
It’s what people note most vividly
about his tenure.
The day after winning his first
reelection contest in 1990, he was
already using the occasion to solicit
funds for his next campaign. Former Louisville Mayor Wilson Wyatt
told Louisville Magazine about a