[*”… in order to get the candidate out of the Kentucky Senate race.” As noted elsewhere, the title was a little clumsy.]

Like Jim Geraghty, I don’t expect that this story will go anywhere – Democratic primary in a Democrat-controlled state with a Democrat in the White House to quash an investigation on the federal level and a former Democratic Senate candidate as Attorney General to quash it in-state – but, man. Democrats do not play nice in Kentucky, do they?

The Republican Party of Kentucky plans to ask a U.S. attorney Monday to investigate claims made by former Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Ed Marksberry that he was offered future favors to drop out of the race against Alison Lundergan Grimes.

In a letter provided to the Herald-Leader by the Republican Party, state GOP Chairman Steve Robertson asks U.S. Attorney David Hale in Louisville to investigate Marksberry’s claims.

Remarkable thing about this story is, of course, how unnecessary it’d be to try to force out Ed Marksberry. Everybody familiar with the situation seems to agree that the fellow was not going to win the nomination (the local progressive* blogger who broke the original story vouches for Marksberry’s truthfulness, by the way), so what’s the harm in letting him run? …Except that Alison Grimes has, in point of fact, very little going for her as a candidate. The Kentucky Democratic strategy seems largely to be to hope that the Republican primary** is sufficiently vicious as to provide them with an opening; I suppose that having a primary opponent who wants to talk about things that delight progressive liberals would be a distraction from Grimes’ long-term goal of going to Washington DC and settling down there like a limpet settles on a rock.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*I know that he claims to be Independent, but the blogger’s National Politics sidebar is diagnostic. I’ve been doing this for over a decade, too. Mind you, I’m not saying that to be mean or anything. For once.

**I am generally reluctant to take sides in that primary. I have to work with the winner, after all: we can ill afford to lose any Senate seats this cycle.