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Grimes turns to Bill Clinton as she battles McConnell in Kentucky

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, former President Clinton and Democratic Senate candidate Allison Lundergan Grimes rally voters in Paducah on Oct. 21.
Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, former President Clinton and Democratic Senate candidate Allison Lundergan Grimes rally voters in Paducah on Oct. 21.
(Ellen O’nan / Associated Press)
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En route to his 1992 victory, Bill Clinton held one last campaign stop in Kentucky - at the time a bellwether state in presidential contests. In an acknowledgment of how the state has turned against national Democrats, the former president came here Tuesday urging the state not to make its U.S. Senate race a referendum on President Obama.

Speaking at a rally for Democratic Senate hopeful Alison Lundergan Grimes, Clinton noted that the next Senate term runs for four years after Obama leaves office. So five-term incumbent Sen. Mitch McConnell was asking, Clinton said, that voters overlook his failed record and let him “vote against you for six years.”

“Whoever heard of giving somebody a six-year job for a two-year protest,” Clinton said. “You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to realize you’re blowing four years.”

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Obama’s unpopularity has been a staple of Republican campaigns this year, but particularly so in Kentucky, which the president lost by more than 22 percentage points in 2012. No Democratic candidate in a competitive race this year is running in such difficult terrain.

Grimes has nonetheless managed to run neck-and-neck with the Senate’s top Republican, with a new poll released Monday putting her just 1 percentage point behind. But in the closing weeks, McConnell has spotlighted Grimes’ refusal to answer a simple question: Did she vote for Obama in the last election?

Grimes, Kentucky’s secretary of state, has explained that her non-answer is a matter of principle, since she serves as the state’s top election official and contends doing so would violate the secrecy of the ballot.

Standing with Clinton before 3,000 supporters in Owensboro in western Kentucky on Tuesday, Grimes called herself “a Clinton Democrat,” and said that’s the kind of senator she would be. She carried a similar message last week when Hillary Rodham Clinton campaigned with her in Louisville.

As McConnell argues the best way to stop the Obama agenda would be to make him the Senate’s majority leader, Grimes sought to turn the tables Tuesday.

“This election [is] about holding Mitch McConnell accountable for all that’s happened on his watch,” she said, listing the loss of coal jobs and the implementation of “overburdensome EPA regulations.”

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“As best as I can tell we’ve got a problem with who’s been in Washington on behalf of Kentucky,” she said. “We can change that.”

Clinton, who barely mentioned McConnell by name, criticized the Republican for voting against raising the minimum wage and other policies that would help grow the middle class.

“This is an easy decision,” he said. “You’ve got to go out and convince your neighbors to think.”

Clinton and Grimes were to hold a second rally Tuesday in Paducah, the same city where Clinton had ended his 1992 campaign.

Follow @mikememoli for more news out of Washington.

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