Yarmuth was a Rino huh? Shocking.
Cook was only a young man of 78 when he endorsed John Kerry.
If he thinks Bush was bad it’s hard to fathom his reasoning as to why Obama isn’t.
Yarmuth worked for Cook while he was Senator. It was quite odd, though. Aside from Cook’s last year when he scored a 40, he was scoring 60s for his prior years (although the ACU didn’t grade his first two years, 1969 and 1970), so while that was a bit more liberal than we’d like, that was nowhere in the class of moonbats (and he was more Conservative than liberal Republican seatmate John Sherman Cooper), but more of an establishment guy. He was, of course, one of the victims of the 1974 Watergate fiasco (though even if that hadn’t occurred, given it was a 6-year election and facing Gov. Wendell Ford, he was going to have a tough time, regardless, and he lost by 10%).
I can’t quite make a definitive statement on why the far left appealed to Cook. Perhaps it was his post-Senate period practicing law in DC and falling in with the cocktail circuit crowd. Could be, as a Louisville-centered pol, he always harbored elitist views towards the non-urban and non-urbane crowds. Then again, Mitch McConnell followed a similar trajectory as Cook (held the same position as Judge-Executive, like a County Mayor, before ascending to the Senate) and though we’re not fans of his, he certainly doesn’t seem to have gone so far off the reservation.