KyKurmudgeon

Sunday’s column:

FRANKFORT — Leftovers from a transformational national election that bypassed Kentucky:

After Bruce Lunsford gave Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell a scare in the closing days of the fall campaign, some Democrats may be playing the “what if” game.

As in: What if U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler or state Auditor Crit Luallen had been the party’s candidate instead of the baggage-laden multimillionaire Louisville businessman?

But Democrats who let their minds wander in that direction ignore several important points.

At the time Chandler and Luallen opted out of the race last year, McConnell appeared farstronger than the vulnerable incumbent he became down the stretch.

And even though both Chandler and Luallen could have expected considerable help from national Democrats, it’s questionable they could have raised the kind of money Lunsford pulled out of his pockets and invested in his own campaign. It was that investment up front that put Lunsford in position to be competitive when the collapse of the financial markets put McConnell at greatest risk.

Of course, if this year’s events could have been foreseen, national Democratic organizations likely would have made sure either Chandler or Luallen had the kind of big bucks Lunsford spent on his own.

And under those circumstances, either of the two would have had a better shot at taking McConnell down because each feels far more love from the Democratic base than Lunsford does.

But absent that foresight, Chandler or Luallen might not have been able to make the kind of up-front investment necessary to be in position to take advantage when McConnell became vulnerable.

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All of that said, if Lunsford had won, it would have been in spite of the campaign he ran rather than because of it.

From the outset, his was a campaign of blown opportunities, starting with his failure to make Issue No. 1 of his pitch to the public McConnell’s joined-at-the-hip relationship with the most unpopular American president in the history of polling.

Lunsford should have pounded that issue on the stump and in his ads every day from Day One. He didn’t do a good job of that.

Then, when the financial markets tanked, McConnell’s vote for a $700 million bailout should have become Issue No. 2, again pounded into the public’s consciousness on a daily basis.

Even McConnell acknowledged, in a post-election media conference call, “It was the biggest issue in the country, but it was not the biggest issue in (Kentucky) people making up their minds.”

Of course, it wasn’t — because Lunsford never exploited it. Instead, he hemmed and hawed for weeks before taking a semi-firm position on the bailout.

Finally, when McConnell’s buddy Sen. Ted Stevens was convicted on seven felony counts, Issue No. 3  pounded on a daily basis should have been the numerous summer vacations McConnell and his wife Elaine Chao spent visiting Stevens in Alaska.

Lunsford’s response consisted of about three e-mail statements to the media. If a single ad aired on the McConnell-Stevens connection, I didn’t see it.

Three easily exploitable issues became three big-time blown opportunities.

In a wrap-up of Sen. Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign, Sharon Cohen of the Associated Press described the scene in the middle of the September financial collapse when Obama staffers heard Sen. John McCain utter words he must certainly now regret: “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

Campaign manager David Plouffe and communications director Dan Pfeiffer knew immediately what they had, and the ad folks were at work within an hour on a spot that aired the next day depicting McCain as out of touch.

That’s the difference between winning campaigns and losing ones. Winners have instant “Aha!” moments. Losers never have them at all.

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One of the bigger losers in Tuesday’s election wasn’t even on the ballot.

Kentucky Democrats underperformed at all levels, while the state’s Republicans defended well in a year when their national counterparts were taking their lumps. Nowhere was that more evident than in state legislative races.

In the federal races, a Democratic win would have been considered an upset. But the Democrats expected to pick up one Senate seat and had an outside chance at another. And they expected to add a handful of seats to their House majority.

Instead, the Senate numbers didn’t change at all. And House Democrats had a net pickup of one.

Since Gov. Steve Beshear’s party was unable to budge the numbers at all in an uncooperative Republican-controlled Senate, he has to be considered one of Tuesday’s losers.

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Carroll Hubbard, the former U.S. representative who was convicted on several felony counts and sentenced to three years in prison in the 1990s, needs to give up his quest for political redemption. It ain’t gonna happen.