Column by Richard Becker

Just ten months after the conclusion of a nearly two year campaign for president, the 2010 midterm elections are already heating up. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Bluegrass State where multiple Democrats and Republicans are vying for their respective party’s nomination to succeed outgoing Republican Sen. Jim Bunning. The race has already gotten nasty on the Democratic side. Attorney General Jack Conway of Louisville has entered the race to take on the man who almost beat Bunning in 2004, former state senator and current Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo.

Unfortunately for Mongiardo, the evidence for his unelectability has been stacking up against him from day one.

There are practical reasons not to support Mongiardo for U.S. Senate, and they are simple. First of all, Mongiardo is intimately wedded to the political fortunes of Gov. Beshear, whose administration is pitifully thrashing in the riptide of the Republican State Senate. Secondly, Mongiardo’s campaign, according to Kentucky political blog Page One, is bleeding campaign funds at the very same time that Jack Conway is raking in money from all over the Commonwealth. Finally, while Jack Conway may not be the hottest public speaker in Kentucky history, Mongiardo has demonstrated time and again his inability to do any better. That simply won’t do in ­a state where we still do old-fashioned stump speeches each election year.

Last month Mongiardo and his campaign assistant Kim Geveden wasted about a week’s worth of news cycles attacking Conway for uttering a profanity at the annual Fancy Farm picnic in Western Kentucky. Mongiardo and Geveden characterized Conway’s performance as “screaming profanities.” Anyone familiar with the annual barbecue fest and political stump-speaking extravaganza knows that such utterances are not exactly out of place. But that’s not the point.

Already, after mere months since the start of the race, Mongiardo has made clear what he wants this race to be about: petty personal grievances and a slash-and-burn, divide-and-conquer appeal to the electorate that is predicated on the perceived stupidity of Kentucky voters.

Mongiardo is frantically trying to convince the voters that his opponent, an attorney from Louisville, is somehow not as qualified as a former state senator from rural Eastern Kentucky to represent rural Kentucky voters. This argument is coming from a man who attended school for a time in Canada, where they have socialized medicine and speak (gasp!) French, of all things!

So while Mongiardo criss-crosses the state attacking his “city-slicker” opponent for whatever trivial matter strikes his fancy on a particular day, he’s also running away from his unconscionable positions on issues important to Democratic primary voters. For instance, being from Eastern Kentucky, Mongiardo is a resolute supporter of Big Coal in Kentucky, including supporting the horrific and destructive practice of mountaintop removal mining.

Furthermore, Mongiardo (again, running as a Democrat), himself a doctor, has come out against our Democratic president’s healthcare reform plan because the said plan may include a public option. What’s more, Mongiardo, presumably in response to the thousands of dollars he has received from the coal industry, is opposed to cap and trade, the program by which the president and other progressive Democrats hope to curb the disastrous rise in climate-altering carbon emissions.

Kentucky has languished at the bottom tier of states in terms of quality of life and other metrics for as long as anyone can remember. Republican readers may wish to remind me that Democrats have been in power in Kentucky for most of its existence. To them let me say that the very problem for much of Kentucky’s political history is the same as the problem in this race: we are obsessed with the notion that somehow, magically, replacing a bad Republican (Jim Bunning) with a bad Democrat (Dan Mongiardo) will somehow make things better for the millions of Kentuckians who suffer in our present state of poverty and backwardness. Guess what? It won’t.

As long as we desperately cling to that fallacy, we’re only going to continue the downward political spiral that we’ve been in for years which has rightfully earned us the ire and ridicule of the nation. The problem is poor leadership in general, and we need sound leadership from both parties. We need elected officials who actually stand for something and who are willing to wage a campaign for public office based on ideas and ideals, not on slander and slime.

Next November, we may finally have the chance to get a truly progressive leader in office as the Junior Senator from Kentucky. Please, Kentuckians, let’s not miss the opportunity to put another nail in the coffin of the good ol’ boy wing of the Kentucky Democratic Party by rejecting the divisive politics of our lieutenant governor.