The RP in The Daily Beast: “McConnell’s Fancy Farm Monster Comes Back to Haunt Him”

The RP had the number one clicked piece in Sunday’s The Daily Beast: “McConnell’s Fancy Farm Monster Comes Back to Haunt Him.”  Here’s an excerpt:

For those uninitiated in Bluegrass State politics, the Fancy Farm picnic is neither fancy nor on a farm. The picnic, held annually on the first Saturday in August in a tiny, far-Western Kentucky hamlet called Fancy Farm (population 458: Salute!), is hosted by St. Jerome’s Catholic Church, which bills the event as the “world’s largest one-day BBQ.” While the day’s menu features bingo, 5k runs, and some of the world’s most savory sandwiches (Try the mutton… seriously), the main event begins at 2:00 PM when the state’s most powerful politicians (and occasionally a few national figures such as George Wallace and Al Gore) take the stage for five to ten minute riffs on the year’s hottest campaigns.

Over the past few decades, the picnic’s celebrity has generated a full long-weekend’s worth of satellite activities all over the Jackson Purchase: four days of small-town meet-and-greets, skeet shooting competitions, watermelon smashes, bean suppers and country ham and egg breakfasts. It’s politics just the way the old-timers remember it: plenty of hand-grabbing and bear-hugging and back-slapping and tall-tale-telling. Best yet, it’s the one weekend that the most remote area of the state (and one of the country’s most economically-struggling regions) receives the full respect and attention of the big city slickers, capital politicos, and budget-debilitated Frankfort press corps. This is grassroots politics at its finest.

The Fancy Farm political speaking forum used to have a similar old-fashioned feel. Al Cross, the dean of Kentucky political journalists, remembers that Fancy Farm used to be a “traditional community gathering with the focus on the interests of Western Kentucky,” with a small-town, state-fair sort of ambiance.

But that all changed dramatically in the 1980s, when the picnic’s political forum devolved, according to Cross, into “a piece of political theater”: a hyper-partisan, name-calling screaming match, a microcosm of everything that Americans hate about politics.

The primary culprit? Cross points squarely at Mitch McConnell, and few would disagree. Al Smith, a retired journalist who’s such a Kentucky legend that the state’s major journalism award bears his name, argues that the Senator must assume significant responsibility for the precipitous decline in civility at Fancy Farm: “McConnell was the first with the idea to bus in hundreds of noisy supporters from the rest of the state, and maybe out-of-state as well…[and he] was the first to use the stage as political theater,” cutting down his opponents with elaborately designed, choreographed productions, dressing up his staff to make fun of his opponents.