Benton sees the pain he causes after making negative comments about McConnell. | AP Photos Aide sees 'hurt' in McConnell's eyes

Mitch McConnell’s campaign manager on Friday offered a remorseful take on explosive comments he made about his boss.

“He wasn’t angry, he wasn’t upset, but I could see the hurt in his eyes,” Jesse Benton said on a report that aired Friday on the Louisville, Ky., station WHAS11 News.


Those remarks came a day after a recording of a conversation between Benton and a conservative activist surfaced, in which Benton made deeply negative comments about McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate minority leader who is seeking reelection in 2014 against Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes.

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“Between you and me, I’m sort of holding my nose for two years because what we’re doing here is going to be a big benefit to Rand in ’16, so that’s my long vision,” he said in the recording.

Benton, who has deep ties to the Paul family, worked for Paul’s successful Senate bid in 2010. The junior Republican from Kentucky is considered a 2016 presidential possibility.

“(I was) talking to a hard-core Ron Paul supporter that, I guess they don’t quite understand what we’re trying to build here,” he explained in the Friday interview.

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“It was just so dumb. I don’t feel that way at all,” he said, also noting that “I apologized from the bottom of my heart, [and] I told him it’s not what I believe [and] that I am here because I believe in him.”

On Thursday, Benton denounced the recording and release of the phone conversation as “truly sick” and described his commitment to McConnell’s reelection, calling his own role as campaign manager “one of the great honors of my life.” In the Friday interview, he is set to call the remarks “stupid.”

“He asked me how I could say something like that, and I just didn’t have a good answer,” he said in the interview.