“Call it supreme self-confidence or misplaced bravado,” Politico’s Manu Raju recently wrote. “But at 35 years old and barely two years into her public career, Alison Lundergan Grimes betrays no hint that she’s even the slightest bit cowed taking on one of the toughest and wiliest tacticians in the U.S. Senate.”

Raju recently caught up with the Grimes campaign in Prestonsburg, the Floyd County seat, which is about as far east as Kentucky goes.

This retired newspaper scribe turned history teacher sensed the same élan in the candidate at a recent rally in Paducah, the McCracken County seat, which is about as far west as the Bluegrass State goes.

The temperature had tumbled into the teens outside Kirchhoff’s Bakery and Deli, where Grimes, Kentucky’s secretary of state, spoke and raised some cold cash for her race against Sen. Mitch McConnell. Chilly as the weather was, the candidate had no trouble warming – make that firing up — the Democratic faithful, 100 or more in number, according to one crowd estimator.

McCracken County supplied McConnell more than 57 percent of its vote against Democrat Bruce Lunsford in 2008. The senate minority leader likes to brag that western Kentucky is McConnell country.

Maybe die-hard Purchase Democrats are whistling past the graveyard, but they don’t fear a McConnell blowout this time. Call it bravado if you wish, but they’re seriously talking a Grimes win.

“Lunsford was a good guy, and we helped him out a lot,” said Kyle Henderson, business manager of Paducah-based Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 184. “But he just wasn’t an exciting candidate.”

The lack of ardor for Lunsford was palpable in Paducah and its environs. It was painfully obvious when the votes were counted.

Henderson, who is on the county Democratic executive committee, said the party is all in for Grimes locally and statewide. That prompted a nod from Larry Sanderson, who is also from Paducah. A longtime Local 184 business manager, he ran for the state senate as a Democrat a dozen years ago.

“She has the fire,” said Sanderson, who retired as an international representative for the Union of Plumbers, Fitters, Welders and HVAC service techs, or United Association.

Sanderson, an accomplished stump speaker himself, introduced Grimes to the crowd. “You can tell she really wants it, that she’s hungry for it,” he said. “People can see that, and they get enthusiastic.”

So is Grimes guilty of “supreme self-confidence or misplaced bravado?” It doesn’t really matter. Perception is what counts.

And a lot of Kentuckians, and not just Democrats, perceive she’s got the chutzpah – okay, not a commonly used word in my neck of the woods – to pose a serious challenge to the well-oiled and well-heeled “Team Mitch,” whose captain is a veteran practitioner of bare-knucks, no-holds-barred, meaner-than-a-junkyard dog politics. (Grimes calls her side “Team Switch.”)

Poll after poll has revealed a tight race between Grimes and McConnell, Kentucky’s longest serving senator. He’s a five-termer and his party’s minority leader to boot.

Grimes has seemed unfazed by Team Mitch since her baptism of fire at the famous – in Kentucky, anyway — Fancy Farm political picnic last August. It was the first time she and McConnell met on the campaign trail.

Grimes got off a shot at the senator that has become a signature line of her campaign: “If the doctors told Sen. McConnell he had a kidney stone, he’d refuse to pass it.”

I was there. McConnell forced a fake smile that made him look like he might really have a kidney stone.

After her Fancy Farm debut, the folks at the Politicus USA website admiringly dubbed Grimes “…all Southern steel magnolia with her gorgeous smile and her sugar coated daggers.”

As has always been my practice at political shindigs, I left the schmoozing with the candidate to others and hung around the fringe of the Paducah crowd.

While she spoke, I spent most of my time watching people watching her. Even in my eye, jaded as it is from my time as a reporter and my study of politicians in history, I saw the genuine enthusiasm Henderson and Sanderson were talking about.

That crowd on a cold Kentucky evening seemed warmed by faith, or at least by reasonable hope, that Grimes is the Democrat who can finally ditch Mitch.

Anyway, in the gathering, I spotted three or four other friends of mine, who, like me, are Kentucky-born-and-reared liberals, an endangered species in the Bluegrass State.

Like me, they were agreeable to seeing entertainer Ashley Judd come home and mix it up with McConnell. (My favorite Kentucky politician, Rep. John Yarmuth of “Liberal Louisville,” was amenable to a Judd run, too.)

I watched my fellow Judd fans, including Jeanie Embry from Paducah, whoop it up as loudly as everybody else did.

Like me, Embry wishes Grimes were a liberal in the Sen. Elizabeth Warren mold. But we understand the Bluegrass State isn’t the Bay State. We’ve both joined “Team Switch.”

“Grimes delivers fiery, heart-felt stump speeches, is very approachable, responds subjectively to tough questions, and has demonstrated her ability to raise money,” Embry said, “and I’m excited about the opportunity of electing the first woman from Kentucky to represent me in the U.S. Senate.”

Me, too, but the first time I went to the polls, in 1968, I voted for the first woman who ran for the senate in Kentucky, Katherine Peden of Hopkinsville. I also cast a presidential ballot for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, one of my all-time favorite Democrats.

Anyway, the Juddites, too, chipped in some money to the Grimes campaign and went home with pockets or purses stuffed with “Ditch Mitch” and “Alison Lundergan Grimes U.S. Senate” bumper stickers.

I already had some of the stickers. I’d bet Yarmuth has some, too.

Berry Craig

Photos: Berry Craig