Taking the Temperature of the Bluegrass

Kentucky has a thing called “Fancy Farm” where politicians of both parties gather to do retail politics:

The annual Fancy Farm Picnic is a massive barbecue and bipartisan campaign rally held on the property of the historic St. Jerome Catholic Church, known for its flame-cooked meats and flaming political debates.

Residents carry out the barbecue supper in grand style, cooking thousands of pounds of chicken, pork, and mutton every year. The event even holds a place in the 1985 Guinness Book of World Records as the “World’s Largest Picnic,” on account of the 15,000 pounds of meat cooked that year.

As the guests eat, the event proceeds into its next phase: the political rally. Every prominent state campaigner of any party is expected to make an appearance at the Picnic to eat, socialize, and deliver vibrantly informal speeches, full of razor-sharp jibes, jabs, and quips to decorate the next day’s headlines. Speakers deliver their speeches from a covered pavilion, built in 1968 and outfitted with large white fans to stave off the late summer heat, although in decades past, speakers would simply orate from the bed of a truck parked under an old tree in front of the church building. It was often joked that “that tree heard more lies than any other tree in Kentucky,” before it was split by lightning in 1974. A silver plaque remembering the days of those old speeches now graces its stump.

There’s some debate about whether Democrats should bring a larger contingent:

Democrats have “been in the wilderness” for too long, Kentucky Democratic Party Chair Colmon Elridge told a group of supporters Friday night ahead of the annual Fancy Farm political picnic. Now is the time to mobilize, he shouted into a microphone at the Kentucky Dam Convention Center, by “doing the things we’ve gotten away from” as a party. “You can focus on what happened yesterday, or you can think on what happens tomorrow,” and the wise choice is the latter, he added. “The question is, what do we do about it?” While their goal is “mobilizing, organizing, recruiting,” and “going back to basics,” which includes reminding disillusioned voters the principles of their platform, Kentucky’s minority party opted against attending Fancy Farm, Kentucky’s oldest — and arguably the most accessible — political speaking event. Elridge, joined by Kentucky’s Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman and John “Drew” Williams, who’s running to unseat incumbent Republican Congressman James Comer, were the only notable Democrats to attend the dinner the night before the picnic.

“In this moment,” Elridge said, “we have to figure out: are we going to sit on the sidelines or are we going to do the work?” Coleman said she wasn’t attending Saturday’s festivities because there would be a lot of jokes, and “not much worth laughing about at the moment,” but to also allow for people who are on the ballot to showcase their political messages.

But to Kelley and Terry Thompson of McCracken County, spreading the party message starts with showing up, even in the off years. “There should be more of them here,” Kelley said of Democrats. “They’ve got to get out enough for people to know who they are.” How else are they going to combat the “division and hatred” that’s become integral to the current Republican party platform, they said.

A decade ago there was a huge Democratic contingent because there were a huge number of Democrats in the state legislature. Now, not so much. I can imagine that makes it physically unpleasant to actually be at Fancy Farm (there are limits to politeness especially among MAGA folks) and I can also understand the argument against Dem engagement (appearing in a bipartisan venue legitimates the other party especially when the other party is full of fascists)… but seriously ceding the terrain (literally in this case) is not the path back to an electorally viable Democratic Party in Kentucky and elsewhere in the South.

Meanwhile the three major GOP Senate candidates have committed to competing over who can drive a knife deepest into Mitch McConnell’s back, and Mitch doesn’t seem to care all that much:

“Surely this isn’t true, but I’ve heard that one of the candidates running for my office wants to be different,” McConnell said. “Now, I’m wondering how you’d want to be different from the longest-serving Senate leader in American history. I’m wondering how you’d want to be different in supporting President Trump.” He also posed a question to the crowd, which gave him a lengthy standing ovation when he took the stage. “A little quiz: Which of Kentucky’s two Republican senators supports President Trump the most?” “You,” the crowd bellowed.

And if you’re wondering what the media environment looks like right now:

That one is, if you will believe, a lot more pleasant and less confrontational than his “deport every illegal immigrant” ad.

Photo Credit: By Gage Skidmore – https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/4870814624, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=171264027