To Grimes ad, McConnell quickly counterattacks

A busy Tuesday . . .

• Sen. Mitch McConnell has a new ad, responding to Alison Lundergan Grimes' ad distancing herself from President Obama.
• Grimes's ad "is a continuation of what has become a central theme of Grimes' campaign: Telling voters who she isn't instead of telling them who she is," Sam Youngman writes for the Lexington Herald-Leader. "For more than a year, Kentuckians have heard Grimes say in every conceivable way that she is not McConnell, with cursory efforts to introduce herself or what she stands for — a couple of bio ads and a jobs plan short on specifics. . . . Meanwhile, McConnell's portrayal of Grimes as an appendage of Obama found a receptive audience in the eastern and western parts of the state, and polling shows that McConnell has amassed enormous leads in those regions."
  
  Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2014/09/15/3431013/sam-youngman-does-alison-lundergan.html?sp=/99/164/329/#storylink=cpy
  
  Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2014/09/15/3431013/sam-youngman-does-alison-lundergan.html?sp=/99/164/329/#storylink=cpy
• The "99 percent" voting record referred to in another McConnell ad is for Senate roll calls, his campaign says. The ad is a response to a Grimes ad saying he has missed 93 percent of Senate committee meetings since 2009.
• "Kentucky is arguably one of the health law’s biggest early success stories," but "There is little evidence that the expansion of health coverage will help Kentucky Democrats in this fall’s midterm elections," Abby Goodnough writes for The New York Times. "Despite his unyielding attacks on the law, Mr. McConnell also takes positions that suggest he knows it would be difficult to dismantle. He has hedged on whether he would take away Medicaid from new enrollees and suggested — without explaining how — that the Kynect marketplace could survive even if the law was repealed."
• The "hedged" line is based on a statement McConnell made to Times national political correspondent Jonathan Martin, who reported it in a collection of leftovers from reporting for his recent Times Magazine profile of McConnell: "When I pressed him about the politics of taking away Medicaid from those individuals that now have it, he suggested that was unlikely – even while still faulting Beshear for the decision. 'I don’t know that it will be taken away from them,' McConnell said of the expanded Medicaid coverage. Speaking about Beshear and Kentucky’s state government, he added: 'They’ve made the decision to expand it, they’re gonna have to pay for it.'"