A tip for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: The liberal blogosphere wants you out in '08.
They despise your loyalty to President Bush. They loathe your support of his Iraq war plan and your ability to block Senate Democrats from passing a legislative rebuke of it.
They appear ready to revolt.
"The phenomenon is real," said Matt Stoller, an editor at the liberal blog MyDD. "It is a potential reverse-Daschle situation."
After Republicans dislodged Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) in 2004, the parties have grown increasingly bold in their hunt for prey. Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, the third-ranking Senate Republican, fell last year, as did GOP presidential contender and Virginia Sen. George Allen.
Democrats want more, and McConnell, a four-term Kentucky Republican, might be their dark-horse target in 2008.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, made a request last week of the Netroots:
Help me find a candidate for Kentucky, one of 21 Republican seats that "we'll be fighting to take back," he wrote on the liberal blog DailyKos.
And in the last two months, two Internet-based efforts -- started by Kentuckians -- have emerged. There's a social-networking group on Facebook called DitchMitch that claims more than 600 members, and a separate Web site called DitchMitchKY.com, which was created by a Kentucky native and Yale University doctoral candidate.
"The first time that was used against me was in high school," McConnell said in an interview Monday, referring to the DitchMitch tagline. "I won."
The Republican response is roughly equivalent to this: Dream on.
"I don't think you can dismiss it, and I do think there will be a serious challenge," said John David Dyche, a conservative columnist for The Louisville Courier-Journal who is writing a book on McConnell.
"I just think he knows they are coming after him, and he is preparing for it," Dyche added. "You won't see him swept away in a national tide."
To be clear, even foes acknowledge that McConnell is as formidable as they come.
He has secured millions of dollars for federal projects across Kentucky. He is the architect -- "the godfather," some say -- of the state Republican Party. The headquarters, The Mitch McConnell Building, bears his name.
His success at thwarting Democratic attempts to ink a critical Iraq war resolution has tickled conservatives. The blogs appropriated a phrase -- "Mitch slapping" -- to describe his tactical maneuverings.
An example of its usage from ColoradoPols.com: "Mitch-slapped! Mitch McConnell: leading the GOP back from the brink by leading America to victory. Fear the red!"
McConnell already has several million dollars in his re-election account, including more than $2 million collected at a Bush fundraiser earlier this month, the largest in state history.
"I am not taking anything for granted," McConnell said. "I always like to be well-funded early and prepared for anything."
Jerry Lundergan, the Kentucky Democratic Party chairman, gets it.
"I am not so naive as the party chair to see this as an easy task," he said.
But Lundergan, like other Democrats, sees weaknesses.
Chief among them is McConnell's airtight association with Bush and the Iraq war. In January, McConnell said, "The president doesn't have a stronger supporter in the Senate than the person you are looking at."
Returning the favor, Bush told McConnell's supporters last month: "I'm glad to have Mitch by my side."
Those words, though, could haunt McConnell later.
A Courier-Journal Bluegrass Poll last month found that 43 percent of Kentucky voters approved of Bush's job performance and 55 percent disapproved -- the worst of his presidency, but better than the national average.
For McConnell, the poll found that 54 percent approved of his performance, 23 percent disapproved and 23 percent had no opinion.
While some other Senate Republicans may be able to distance themselves from Bush in an election year, McConnell is locked in as his chief defender -- it's practically in his job description as minority leader. But that defense-of-Washington stance has contributed to the defeat of other congressional leaders.
In Kentucky, the GOP brand has also suffered from a scandal involving Gov. Ernie Fletcher and the state merit system in hiring.
McConnell helped to elevate Fletcher four years ago, but has not backed him in this year's gubernatorial race.
"I try to identify strategic openings for progressives," said Stoller, the MyDD editor who runs BlogPAC, a political action committee that funds liberal bloggers and activists. "McConnell is a strategic opening. … The national blogosphere will get behind it if there is a local push."
A Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman, Matthew Miller, would not say where Kentucky ranked on the committee's list of priorities.
Jennifer Duffy, a Senate analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said she believed the DSCC considers it a second-tier race and that the Democrats need a viable candidate for the race to move up the list. Kentucky is still in the "solid Republican" column, she said.
Charlie Owen, a wealthy Louisville businessman who has spent millions of his own money on three unsuccessful campaigns in the past, is expected to challenge McConnell, Lundergan said.
"He has basically told me that he will be a Democratic candidate," Lundergan said. "If Charlie wants to be the nominee, then we want him to be the nominee because of the finances he brings to the table."
Owen could not reached for comment.
In the meantime, bloggers like Matt Gunterman, the founder of DitchMitchKY, said they will try to chip away at "McConnelism," one post at a time.
"Whether we can kill it this time around, I don't know," said Gunterman, 30, who ran unsuccessfully last year for county office in Kentucky and now blogs from Connecticut, where he is earning a Ph.D. in the history of medicine. "But I think we can damage it."
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