NYT editorial: Boiling Point in Kentucky

The Kentucky Senate race has been particularly childish and nasty — even by this year’s dispiritingly low standards. So we suppose we should not have been surprised when a county coordinator for Rand Paul, the Republican candidate, stomped on a MoveOn activist outside Monday night’s debate in Lexington. The politicians need to cool it and they need to urge their supporters to cool it.

The incident took place just before Mr. Paul and the Democrat, Attorney General Jack Conway, began their second debate. Lauren Valle — who was arrested in May during a Greenpeace demonstration against the Gulf oil spill — tried to present Mr. Paul with a mock award as part of a provocative skit that MoveOn had organized about secret corporate money in the campaign. Tim Profitt, Mr. Paul’s Bourbon County coordinator, helped wrestle her to the ground and pushed his foot into her head and shoulders. The police issued a criminal summons to Mr. Profitt, and the campaign dismissed him.

The Kentucky race has been boiling ever since Mr. Paul unexpectedly won the Republican primary on an extreme libertarian platform, saying he was not fully supportive of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and calling the Obama administration “un-American” for its strong criticism of BP during the oil spill. But it was taken to a shrill new level earlier this month when Mr. Conway decided to run an ad saying that Mr. Paul had been part of a college secret society that mocked Christianity and worshiped invented idols.

Mr. Paul’s college behavior 30 years past may have been bizarre, but Mr. Conway’s decision to bring it up smelled like desperation — he is behind in almost every poll. The issue has become a distraction from what should have been a campaign centered on Mr. Paul’s rejection of government’s role in so many aspects of public life: health care, retirement, regulation of dangerous industries, even access for the handicapped.

(More here.)