Rand Paul can’t remember ever seeing an Ashley Judd movie.
“I’m guessing I’ve seen some,” he said at a National Review breakfast today, “but I can’t recall any sort of plotline of anything that I’ve seen.”
Judd, who is flirting with making a Senate bid in Kentucky, has appeared in a number of movies over the years, including Double Jeopardy and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
Paul said it would be “very difficult” for Judd to win in the conservative state. And the fact that she doesn’t currently live in Kentucky — she has a home in Tennessee, and was a Democratic delegate for that state in the 2012 convention — is a “big problem.” He also criticized her views on coal and said that her 2006 comment that “it’s unconscionable to breed” “doesn’t fit too well with our state.”
Paul had warm praise for Mitch McConnell, who has been under fire from Kentucky tea partiers. “Senator McConnell’s always been a conservative. And I say that sincerely: He has always been a conservative,” he said.
“He’s been in leadership for a long time,” Paul added, “and the difference between being in leadership and not is that they’re trying to get a solution all the time and the solution doesn’t satisfy me a lot of times and other conservatives. And so the solution doesn’t seem to be what we want, so he gets tagged ‘oh, he was part of the solution.’ But if you said, ‘Is he someone who believes in smaller government, lower taxes, less regulation?’ I think he’s been consistently that throughout his career.”