Then the voice continues its mock-serious tone, calling Judd “a leader who knows how to follow," and “someone who will never forget where she came from."
That last line is followed by a clip of Judd saying, “and it just clicked: Tennessee is home.” (It’s true that Judd has split time between a Tennessee ranch and a home in Scotland with her soon-to-be-ex-husband, race car driver Dario Franchitti.)
The spot continues from there, mentioning that Judd’s own grandmother has called her a “Hollywood liberal," highlighting her support for Obama’s health-care reforms (“Obamacare has done so much right for us here in Tennessee,” she says in a clip), replaying clips of her saying “hillbilly” and “radical” several times, and so on.
The narrator wraps up with a flourish. “Ashley Judd,” he says, “an Obama-following, radical Hollywood liberal, who’s right home here in Tennessee. I mean Kentucky.”
We’ll note here that it’s unusual to launch campaign ads against people who aren’t actually running. Judd – daughter of country singer Naomi Judd and someone with deep Kentucky roots of her own – has said she’s considering the Senate race, and she’s been flattered to be asked, but so far she hasn’t done anything concrete to indicate she’s actually going to jump in. She hasn’t put together any campaign or money organizations, for instance, or begun to talk about issues in a manner more likely to appeal to voters in Kentucky, a state that’s reliably Republican at the national level.
But maybe the GOP is taking her seriously. After all, a December survey from Public Policy Polling found her to be Senator McConnell’s strongest potential challenger, trailing him by only four points, 43 percent to 47 percent.
