When President Bill Clinton stumped for Kentucky’s Democratic nominee for Senate, Jack Conway, he was met with a barrage of jokes about his past from Conway’s Republican opponent, Rand Paul. Clinton tried to raise fears about foreign donor money with the voters he spoke to in Kentucky; Paul responded by reminding everyone that Clinton once had oral sex performed on him in the Oval Office.
It was not rhetoric in the style of the Lincoln-Douglass debates. But it was fairly entertaining.
“I’m not sure I would trust a guy who had had sexual relations with an intern. I mean, do you think he’s an honorable person?” Paul told supporters at a campaign stop on Monday, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.
“I think that’s disgusting,” Paul added. “It gets to the point where we discount what he says.”
There was more, as PoliticsDaily reports. “They complain they want all these workplace rules,” Paul told the audience in Shelbyville, KY. “Do you think there ought to be a law against having, using the prerogatives of your position and your power of your job, to have relations with an intern? I think that’s disgusting. It gets to the point where we discount what he says. He showed himself less than honorable in office.”
For his part, Clinton tossed a few jabs Paul’s way at his stops on Conway’s behalf — but the former president steered clear of the really fun stuff, like the whole Aqua Buddha thing.
“We have a practical, progressive, common-sense moderate who has actually done things and actually has a plan,” Clinton said of Conway before switching over to talk about Paul, “running against a man with radical ideas and no record to back it up, no evidence that anything works that they’re advocating, who has embraced an agenda that will add a trillion dollars to the debt, not reduce the deficit and not create jobs, but let us go back to what got us in trouble in the first place.”
Clinton also took a stab at pushing the campaign scandal du jour by joining other Democrats over the weekend in flipping out at the possibility that the Chamber of Commerce is using foreign funds to pay for campaign ads.
“Be mad,” he told the Conway crowd, according to NBC. “They’re playing you and you know it.”
Paul seemed to think that Clinton’s visit to Kentucky, which came with much fanfare from Conway’s Democratic supporters, won’t mean anything when Election Day comes in November. “Paul dismissed Clinton’s visit as largely irrelevant,” the Herald-Leader reports, “saying the election is about the agenda of President Barack Obama, who is unpopular in many parts of Kentucky.”
But as the paper points out, Clinton’s visit could give Conway more of a boost than Paul would like to admit. Clinton carried Kentucky in 1992 and 1996, and remains a popular figure in the state. That’s not just true for Kentucky either: recent polls have shown him to be the most popular Democratic politician anywhere these days.
The TPM Poll Average shows Paul leading Conway by a margin of 46.9-41.7.
