By: Keith Kappes
Columnist
Carter County Times
Coal billionaire Joe Craft must be Kentucky’s most devoted husband, according to what happened in this year’s May Primary.
He provided his wife, Kelly, with something like $15 million to spend on her failed campaign for the Republican nomination for governor…and she finished third!
Her campaign’s TV attack ads focused on State Attorney General Daniel Cameron, the early leader in the public opinion polls. His connections to a man named Trump and another named McConnell obviously were major factors in his dominance of the race with 44 percent of the vote.
By the way, there apparently is no truth to the rumors that Cameron’s wife is the niece or granddaughter of Sen. Mitch McConnell. That speculation appeared in social media before the primary.
As for Kelly Craft, her service in the Trump Administration as ambassador to Canada and the United Nations apparently did not impress that many voters, especially after it was reported that she only came to work about 50 percent of the time.
Her campaign advisors led her astray on several key matters, most notably the extravagance of those poorly produced TV ads, her absence from some of the gubernatorial debates, her misleading claim about drug addiction’s impact on her family and presenting herself as a sweet little farm girl from Western Kentucky.
Sadly, bad campaign advice had her collecting lots of photo opportunities at the kitchen tables of average Kentuckians, a tired old tactic that’s been around since Harry Truman was elected president in 1948.
In my opinion, she should lay aside her political ambitions and go back to helping her husband continue to give away his millions to good causes in Kentucky like MSU’s Craft Academy.
As a political junkie, I noticed that she became the first super-wealthy candidate to fail in her quest for the governor’s office in Kentucky in the last 50 years.
Four others made it — John Y. Brown, Wallace Wilkinson, Paul Patton, and Matt Bevin. Three of them were Democrats, back when that party controlled the legislature and statewide political offices.
I fondly remember those times as the good old days.
(Contact Keith at keithkappes@gmail.com.)