Cocaine Mitch: Don Blankenship’s factually dubious attack on McConnell, explained

One week ago, Don Blankenship — a Republican candidate for Senate in West Virginia, facing a primary this Tuesday — released a new ad with a truly bizarre kicker. “One of my goals as US senator,” he said, “will be to ditch Cocaine Mitch.”

The idea of the mild-mannered, hopelessly square, seemingly vice-free Senate majority leader being some sort of cocaine baron comes off as ridiculous and even hilarious to many in the political world.

The thin-to-nonexistent basis for this charge is that McConnell’s in-laws, the Chao family, own a cargo shipping company, and a few years back, about 90 pounds of cocaine was found on one of that company’s ships as it was about to leave Colombia. However, no one has ever alleged that this apparent smuggling operation was run by the company itself, let alone that McConnell or his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, had any involvement.

The accusation of criminality is all the stranger since it’s coming from a candidate who himself was only recently released from prison. Blankenship is a former coal company CEO convicted of conspiring to violate federal mine safety laws after a disaster that killed 29 miners. Because of this, establishment Republicans, including McConnell and even President Trump, are desperate to defeat him in this week’s primary. (The winner will take on Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in the general election.)

But Blankenship is using a political strategy first honed by Trump to fight back. He’s crafted a brief, catchy, insulting, and vaguely absurd nickname for McConnell that is so outrageous and bizarre that he’s gotten the entire national media to talk about it. In doing so, he’s elevated McConnell — who is unpopular among Republican voters — as his foil. He’s also positioned himself as the most anti-establishment candidate in a three-way field.

And as the famous political saying goes, if you’re spending time explaining how the cocaine on your father-in-law’s ship isn’t a big deal, you’re losing.

Though Blankenship’s initial reference to “Cocaine Mitch” in an ad was unexplained, his campaign soon released a statement making clear what he was referring to — an article in the Nation from 2014, written by journalist Lee Fang.

Fang reported that in late August 2014, a cargo vessel owned by the Chao family company, Foremost Maritime Corporation, was supposed to sail from Santa Marta, Colombia, to the Netherlands. But before leaving Colombia, inspectors searched it. And they found 90 pounds of cocaine, in 40 separate packages.

This is, of course, not great. But there’s no evidence that the company was responsible for this (no charges ever seem to have been filed). Perhaps more likely is that this was an illicit operation on the part of some members of the ship’s crew. (The Washington Post’s Salvador Rizzo points out that the ship in question, the Ping May, is enormous, and even 90 pounds of cocaine would take up relatively little space on it.)

So how in the world does Blankenship tie this cocaine bust to the Senate majority leader?

Well, of course, there’s the obvious connection that Foremost Maritime Corporation was founded by James Chao, a Taiwanese-American shipping magnate and father of McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao. Foremost is still controlled by the Chao family, and its current CEO is Elaine’s sister, Angela Chao.

It also appears that a large chunk of McConnell and Elaine Chao’s wealth comes from the Foremost fortune. Disclosure forms reveal that in 2008, the couple’s wealth soared enormously as a result of a multimillion-dollar gift from James Chao after the death of his wife (Elaine’s mother). The gift was worth between $5 million and $25 million.

But of course, there’s nothing tying McConnell or Chao to any knowledge of or involvement in cocaine smuggling. Why, did you think there would be? What would have led you to believe that?

It’s probably a mistake to ascribe too much strategic mastery to Blankenship, who has the charisma of a damp dishrag and whose ads seem downright amateurish.

But with “Cocaine Mitch” specifically and his attacks on McConnell generally, he may have stumbled into an effective strategy, of launching both corruption-focused and racist attacks at the unpopular majority leader and his family.

“Swamp Captain Mitch McConnell has created millions of jobs for Chinapeople,” Blankenship says in his second “Cocaine Mitch” ad (embedded above). “While doing so, Mitch has gotten rich. In fact, his China family has given him tens of millions of dollars.” He continues: “The war to drain the swamp and create jobs for West Virginia people has begun. I will beat Joe Manchin and ditch Cocaine Mitch for the sake of the kids.”

Indeed, even before all this, Blankenship told Politico that McConnell “has a lot of connections in China” and that because Elaine Chao is “from China ... we have to be really concerned that we are in truth” protecting American interests. (Oddly enough, according to Politico, Blankenship’s current girlfriend was also born in China. Whatever!)

From all this, you can see how the “Cocaine Mitch” attack could actually work. Voters hear this silly thing and naturally ask, why is Blankenship talking about Cocaine Mitch? And the answer is, “Well, McConnell’s in-laws are the Chao family, and they own a ship on which cocaine was found, but no charges were filed!” and suddenly voters with racist leanings are thinking about McConnell’s Asian relatives and drugs and corruption.

If all of this sounds familiar to you, well, you’re not alone.

McConnell and his allies tried their hardest to stop Roy Moore, a deeply controversial former judge with a history of extremist comments, from winning the Alabama Republican Senate primary last year. But Moore simply ran on the fact that the unpopular McConnell hated him — a message that powered him to victory in the primary despite President Trump’s support of his opponent. (The accusations that Moore preyed on underage girls came out after the primary, and he narrowly lost the election to Democratic nominee Doug Jones.)

Now, again, President Trump is urging West Virginia voters not to support Blankenship because he’s unelectable:

But of course, similar arguments were made against Trump during his primary campaign and fell on deaf ears — Republican voters have a remarkably low level of trust in their party’s establishment these days.

And there may be further similarities to the 2016 presidential primary here. Yes, Blankenship has come up with a strange nickname just like Trump did. But beyond that, he’s saying outrageous, ridiculous, and racist things, and that’s helping him get attention in a divided field. (It’s a three-way race and his opponents, state Attorney General Pat Morrisey and Rep. Evan Jenkins, are more obviously establishment figures.)

Media coverage in the last week of the race focused a great deal on Blankenship’s controversies, and in a race where he only needs plurality support to win, that could be helping him draw in voters. Though the outcome is still of course uncertain, the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack reports that two internal polls taken in the past few days both show Blankenship with a narrow lead.

But surely a corrupt, racist outsider businessman with a penchant for disparaging nicknames who’s named Don couldn’t win a high-profile Republican primary ... right?