Was Ashley Judd sabotaged by rival Democrats?
Ashley Judd was forced out of the Kentucky Senate race by Democrats, says an adviser. But, in many ways, the charges he makes sound a lot like typical, sharp-elbowed politics.
Actress Ashley Judd, seen here in Pasadena, Calif., last year, was considering running for Senate.
Lucy Nicholson/Reuters/File
Was Ashley Judd’s Kentucky Senate bid undone by rival Democrats? That’s the charge Judd adviser Jonathan Miller is making today in a piece on The Daily Beast.
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Peter Grier is The Christian Science Monitor's Washington editor. In this capacity, he helps direct coverage for the paper on most news events in the nation's capital.
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Mr. Miller, a former Kentucky state treasurer, writes that Democratic supporters of current Kentucky secretary of state Alison Lundergan Grimes kept up a steady stream of sniping at Ms. Judd via a credulous national mainstream media. Furthermore, some unnamed Democrat circulated a false report that Judd, at a private Louisville dinner, said “I have been raped twice, so I think I can handle Mitch McConnell.”
“I was at that dinner and never heard her say anything remotely like that,” writes Miller.
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The last straw was news stories reporting that former President Bill Clinton had met with Ms. Grimes and was trying to force Judd out of the race. The problem here was that the Big Dog had met with Judd and actually urged her to run against incumbent GOP Senate minority leader McConnell, according to Miller.
“ABC News ultimately cleared up the record, but by then the narrative was set – the most popular national figure for Kentucky Democrats was opposed to a Judd candidacy, providing further oxygen to the anti-Ashley conflagration,” writes Miller.
OK, we’re not a Kentucky insider. We did not even put Louisville in our March Madness Final Four. (Go Wolverines!) But it seems pretty obvious to us that Judd’s candidacy unraveled due to larger, basic political forces.
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