POLITICO Whips Flames For Grimes, Scores Points For McConnell

It's a political writer's dream:  The toughest most powerful republican in America being challenged by a fresh female face for a seat in the US Senate where Mitch McConnell serves as minority leader and could soon become the majority leader of that powerful body.  And POLITICO is whipping up those flames.

Alison Lundergan Grimes was 6 years old when Mitch McConnell started his Senate career, and she’s held elected office for not even two years.

But the fresh Democratic face could give the Senate minority leader the fight of his political life.

A once-bitterly divided state party is embracing Grimes, who rallied big and energetic crowds this week at her first campaign events following her botched July 1 announcement. The Kentucky secretary of state’s stump speech focused heavily on McConnell — she roused supporters with a stampede of attacks against the GOP leader’s nearly three-decade tenure in Washington.

And Grimes’s campaign comes as McConnell’s poll numbers are weak, he faces a primary challenge from a deep-pocketed businessman and he’s leading a group of Senate Republicans increasingly at war with itself.

And while they admit that this is shaping up to be the most closely watched race in the nation, they also hit the bulls-eye with this observation.

The Kentucky Senate race will be the country’s most closely watched contest of 2014, something that will be highlighted this Saturday when the candidates share the stage at the state’s annual Fancy Farm Picnic.

But the largely untested Grimes must also survive a formidable political machine McConnell has methodically built for the past three decades.

Grimes knows full well that the key to victory is to make the race a referendum on McConnell. She’s quick to attack McConnell for being the leader in a “dysfunctional” Washington, but she’s reluctant about revealing her own positions on issues such as abortion, taxes or gun control. Whether her own forthcoming policy views can pass muster with conservative Kentucky voters could very well be the biggest challenge of her candidacy.

And while Alison would like to think she can make this race all about Mitch, while keeping her distance from Barack Obama, the fact that she is unable to articulate a better agenda is in fact taking a page right from the Obama playbook.  She is running against the past, offering nothing for the future and hoping for that change, for change sake, will carry the day.

America, and more importantly Kentucky, knows we got a bad deal out of that strategy when Obama played it and therefore Grimes is banking on her obvious view that Kentucky voters are dumb enough to fall for it again.

It's going to take more than POLITICO to get her elected.  She better come up with some better ideas for the future, and quickly, or she's going to be pegged as "Obama-lite", and wrong for America.