Better that than more out-of-touch comments about how creating jobs in hard-pressed Lee County, in the most economically depressed party of coal mining eastern Kentucky, isn't his job. Lee County has an unemployment rate of 14.3% and a median household income of $22,789. The state's biggest newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal hasn't stopped writing about it all week. Last night:
There was a time when U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell didn't eschew his role in creating jobs for Kentucky. In fact there was one instance when he gladly took credit for it.
We'll get to that in a minute.
What brings this up is McConnell's statement to Edmund Shelby, the editor of the Beattyville Enterprise, last week when Shelby asked him what he would do to bring jobs to Lee County, where the jobless rate is 12.8 percent.
"Economic development is a Frankfort issue," Shelby reported McConnell saying. "That is not my job. It is the primary responsibility of the state Commerce Cabinet."
That's not exactly what folks in a county with the 19th-worst jobless rate in the state wanted to hear, and it probably wasn't what McConnell wanted to say in a race where his chief Democratic foe has traveled the state ballyhooing her jobs plan and criticizing the senior senator for not having one of his own.
Shelby reported that McConnell said his job is, however, to fight against President Barack Obama, whom he has repeatedly accused of "job-killing" policies.…It's doubtful that McConnell would have denied involvement back when he was a freshman senator, trying to make a name for himself and impress how important he was on the people back home.
Climb aboard my Wayback Machine to December 1985, when McConnell was finishing up his first year in the U.S. Senate and Kentucky was fighting with Missouri, Kansas, Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee, North Carolina, Illinois and Georgia for Toyota's $500 million plant-- its first manufacturing facility in the United States.
Gov. Martha Layne Collins and her administration, which had worked feverishly to bring the plant to Kentucky, had learned that the state had won the huge economic development prize that continues to provide jobs and better futures to folks in Central Kentucky to this day.
But she had promised that the state would not release any information or even confirm the decision had been made because Toyota officials wanted to make the announcement on their own.
"These Japanese are very strict about protocol and formality," then-House Speaker Don Blandford said at the time.
But that didn't stop McConnell from spilling the beans.
He slipped out of a dinner at the Watergate Hotel where Toyota officials had, as a courtesy, informed him, then-Sen. Wendell Ford and others about the decision, and began calling the news media.
Television news stories that night had McConnell confirming that Toyota was coming to Kentucky, as did newspaper stories the next morning. This, of course, infuriated the Collins administration, which believed McConnell was trying to take credit for its hard work.
One administration official called it "the most dastardly and common thing I've ever seen an elected official do."
McConnell denied that he was horning in on Collins' glory and defended his decision to break the news, saying that "a lot of people were involved" in luring the Toyota plant to the state and that he had visited Japan earlier that year and frequently talked with Toyota officials.
There he was, he said, working to bring jobs to Kentucky.
So last week we saw him backpedaling on his statement to Shelby after handing the Alison Lundergan Grimes campaign a made-to-order quote for future television ads.
And Alison Lundergan Grimes is doing more than tweeting. She's been reminding Kentuckians about McConnell's new attitude about their jobs every day since the unfortunate, distracted remark. "The only job that [McConnell] has cared about over the past 30 years is his own… I stand in complete contrast and disagreement with him. Unlike Mitch McConnell, I listen to Kentuckians. It is the job of a U.S. senator to put hardworking Kentucky families back to work and to grow our middle class. He shocked not just myself but all of Kentucky when he declared that economic development is not his job."
A little over a week ago, HuffPo reported that, although Rand Paul had officially endorsed McConnell, he doesn't feel speaking about it in public-- sort of defeating the whole purpose of an endorsement. That was because someone asked him about at a forum in Glasgow last week and he said he didn't want to respond in public. But last February when Glenn Beck asked essentially the same question-- a variation on "how could you endorse that corrupt DC shill?"-- Rand responded: "Because he asked me. He asked me when there was nobody else in the race, and I said yes.”
