KyKurmudgeon

Wednesday’s column:

Attorney General Jack Conway screwed up, but not because he spiced his Fancy Farm Picnic speech with a few salty words. Conway’s screw-up came when he apologized for the speech.

Conway and Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo, his chief rival for the Democratic nomination in the 2010 U.S. Senate race, both performed well at Fancy Farm. They were the stars of the show. Everyone else played supporting roles.

But at the end of the day, my scorecard had Conway ahead on points, precisely because of his salty language.

You see, the knock on Conway from his critics has always been that he’s just a rich guy with good looks but little substance. Such a condescending characterization implies some level of weakness, some lack of steel on Conway’s part. Mongiardo’s frequent references to “silver spoon” issues in his own speech sought to exploit that image.

By calling Mongiardo out with the “you sure as hell can’t speak the truth” line and by responding to hecklers by describing himself — himself, not anyone else — as “one tough son of a bitch,” Conway added a previously unseen “edge” to his image, an edge that would serve him well in a hard-fought primary and perhaps in an even harder-fought general election.

Some considered his salty words inappropriate because of the setting where they were uttered — a church fund-raising event. Well, I’m a big fan of Fancy Farm (and a huge fan of the food they serve). But with all due respect to the good folks of St. Jerome Parish, when the political speaking commences, it ain’t no church picnic anymore.

Not with raucous (dare I say irreverent?) crowds from both parties shouting down the speakers. And members of this particular congregation aren’t yelling “Amen!” and “Praise the Lord!” I can’t point to a specific instance, but I would be extremely surprised if a few salty words haven’t spiced up some of these confrontations at previous picnics.

Although the crowd annually is admonished (semi-jokingly) to mind its manners, no serious attempt is made to control the heckling. Nor should there be. Fancy Farm wouldn’t be Fancy Farm without audience participation. But as long as the rowdies are allowed to run riot verbally, no one should go all holier than thou if a speaker drops a cuss word or two into the conversation.

So, Conway’s words held no shock value for me. On the contrary, I took them as a display of backbone that elevated his stature in my eyes.

I left the picnic thinking Conway remains vulnerable on “cap and trade” in a coal state, at least until he takes a more definitive position than he has voiced so far. And a Duke Blue Devil may have some explaining to do to the Wildcat fans among Kentucky voters.

But I also left thinking it might be wise of Mongiardo to ease up on the “silver spoon” references in the future, because the Jack Conway on the stage at Fancy Farm seemed perfectly capable of taking that figurative spoon and filing it down into a figurative shiv he could use in a political street fight.

Had Conway chosen to weather the overreaction that followed his speech, his campaign probably would be the better for it today.

Since you can’t take back words once they leave your lips, whatever damage he might suffer from having uttered them was already done. Why compound the problem by backpedaling, which could only be seen by voters and by his opponents as a sign of weakness?

But that was the path Conway chose. He apologized, losing the edge the speech added to his image. And the figurative shiv morphed back into a spoon.