Radioactive MItch--McConnell's Opponent About To Beat Him Over The Head With His Opposition To Uranium Plant Worker Deal (pictures)

With Alison Lundergan Grimes down in almost every poll in a tight race against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, her success may hinge on whether she can bring Paducah, a small city more than three hours west of Louisville, into her camp.

Paducah has long been a lynchpin in McConnell’s simple but effective “west of Interstate 65” strategy. McConnell, who started his career as a political moderate, has pursued a campaign strategy that depends on winning over the counties west of I-65, the highway that bisects Kentucky from Louisville in the north to the Tennessee border in the south. McCracken County, which covers Paducah, didn’t swing McConnell’s way when he was first elected to the Senate in 1984. But the county soon fell into McConnell’s column and has remained there ever since.

McConnell has relied on a Cold War-era uranium facility for the core of his support. The plant helped put Paducah on the map, and the town’s identity has long been tied to it. Paducah called itself “The Atomic City” during the postwar years, and murals celebrating its 1950s heyday still line the town’s floodwall along the Ohio River. By the mid-1980s, however, the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant had become a relic. As similar facilities were shuttered in other states, McConnell pitched himself as the one man who could work the Senate to keep the plant open.

This is the first campaign in which the plant could be a liability for him. After decades of decline, it finally shut down this year, when the last of its more than 1,000 operators were laid off.

In a recent campaign ad, Grimes used the Paducah plant as a backdrop. “You want to know the difference between Mitch McConnell and me?” she says directly into the camera. “Just look at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant … He’d just show up at election time and say he’d saved the plant. Now it’s shutting down anyway.”

Grimes has visited the county at least eight times since launching her campaign, pounding away at Paducah’s economic trouble. The city’s 7.8 percent unemployment rate is above both the state and national rates, and was nearly 10 percent as recently as February. The old plant workers may be swayed by Grimes’ message.

“They are taking a different view of the senior senator,” said Jim Key, vice president of the local steelworkers union to which the plant workers belonged.

Paducah isn’t a hotbed for hardline anti-government conservatism. Mayor Gayle Kaler praises McConnell for delivering federal dollars to her beleaguered town. McConnell’s pitch to the town has relied on the same — keeping the plant open with federal money, and helping to start a program that provides free health care to workers who had been poisoned working in the facility’s hazardous conditions. MOREHERE