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Monday, Oct 6, 2008
The increasingly strange behavior of Republican Sen. Jim Bunning has led to speculation that he is suffering from some kind of dementia -- and tightened a race he once had in his pocket.
Oct 12, 2004 | It's no secret in Kentucky that Sen. Jim Bunning, a Republican who was expected to coast to reelection on Nov. 2, has been acting strange. Over the past few months, Bunning has angrily pushed away reporters, exchanged testy words with a questioner at a Rotary Club and stuck to brief, heavily scripted remarks at campaign events, delivered in a halting monotone. The former major league baseball star now travels the Bluegrass State with a special police escort, at taxpayer expense. His explanation? Al-Qaida may be out to get him.
More substantively, the incumbent would agree to only one debate with his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Daniel Mongiardo. And the rules Bunning negotiated were bizarrely rigid: The encounter could not be live; the taping has to occur in the afternoon, not the evening; no audience could be present in the studio; and, under threat of legal action, Mongiardo could not use any sound clips or video of Bunning's debate performance in campaign advertisements.
This apparent fear of the spontaneous has spurred rumors in Kentucky that Bunning, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, is suffering from some sort of dementia, perhaps Alzheimer's. Bunning has declined to release his medical records. But until now, there was nothing hard to suggest that the one-term Republican senator was anything but a crotchety, occasionally confused, or arrogant old man.
On Monday, however, Bunning -- who turns 73 this month -- abruptly retreated behind yet another barrier, in an action so inexplicable that it appears likely to bring the rumors about his health, now referred to obliquely in Kentucky news reports, into open discussion. It may also mark a turning point in a race that, against all expectations, has been tightening recently.
Saying falsely that he was needed in Washington this week for Senate votes, Bunning tore up his own carefully crafted debate agreement and refused to return to Kentucky on Monday for his one scheduled debate with Mongiardo. It was to have taken place at 2:30 p.m. Monday in the Lexington, Ky., studio of WKYT-TV. Instead, Bunning insisted on "debating" via satellite from the womblike conditions of the Republican National Committee headquarters studio in Washington.
The senator refused to allow a member of the Kentucky media to be present at the RNC studio to monitor whether Bunning was receiving assistance with his answers, according to Mongiardo campaign manager Kim Geveden and WKYT news director Jim Ogle. And Bunning refused to engage reporters via satellite in a previously agreed upon post-debate news conference, insisting instead that his 15 minutes of answering questions occur by telephone, without accompanying video footage.
"The people of Kentucky are very smart. They can put two and two together," Bill Garmer, chairman of the Kentucky Democratic Party, told me by telephone Tuesday.
Garmer and former Kentucky Gov. Julian Carroll, a Democrat, called on Bunning last month to release his medical records, and Kentucky news reporters have also sought the records, all to no avail. A spokesman for Bunning, David Young, did not respond to phones calls and an e-mail from Salon seeking comment.
Mongiardo campaign manager Geveden said Bunning is "clearly afraid" of debating. "For six months we have been pursuing debates with Jim Bunning, and all he does is hide. He's hiding from the people of Kentucky, he's hiding from the press corps, and when he does on occasion travel into the state, he surrounds himself with bodyguards. Now he's hiding behind a satellite dish in Washington," Geveden said in a telephone interview Monday.
The full political impact of Bunning's debate maneuver won't be known until after Wednesday, when WKYT plans to air the debate in Lexington and on its sister stations in Hazard and Bowling Green. The broadcast is slated for 8 p.m., right before the third presidential debate. To symbolize Bunning's retreat from the public square, WKYT's Ogle said he planned to leave the screen blank when airing the audio of Bunning's post-debate news conference. He said he would not fill the empty visual with a photograph of the senator. "We'll do that just to make the point, with a lead-in" that Bunning abruptly changed the rules, Ogle said.
Until recently, the Kentucky Senate race was shaping up to be an easy home run for Bunning. In mid-August, a Survey USA poll conducted on behalf of two Kentucky television stations showed the incumbent with a 24-point lead over Mongiardo, a surgeon from Hazard, Ky. Bunning had raised a vast amount of money, with $4 million in the bank in June, compared with the Democrat's $300,000. The race was considered so over that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of Senate Democrats, wasn't spending any money in Kentucky, preferring instead to channel funds to races where Democrats appeared to have at least half a chance.
Then, slowly, the dynamic began to change. At first, Bunning's gruffness with reporters, odd statements and apparent discomfort with public appearances merely sparked gossip. Then the incidents began making news. In February, he "shocked many Louisville civic leaders," as the Louisville Courier-Journal put it, by declaring at a chamber of commerce luncheon that one of two new bridges the city had expected to build with federal funds would be delayed because northern Kentucky needed the money more. Not only was Bunning's statement factually wrong, but it forced the Louisville-area Republican who had worked to secure the bridge funding, U.S. Rep. Anne Northup, to scramble to reassure business leaders. Bunning was "confused" and "mistaken," she told reporters. Bunning at first denied he had made the remark, then admitted he had after he was told his talk had been recorded.
Likewise, Bunning at first denied in April that he had said at a private Republican Party event that the dark-complexioned Mongiardo looked like one of Saddam Hussein's sons and "even dresses like them, too." He admitted making what at best was a bad joke, at worst an ethnic slur, only after realizing it had been videotaped.
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