The last time Ashley Judd made
headlines as an actress, it was March 2012 and she was
responding to plastic surgery gossip. This was no boilerplate
denial. Speculation about
her
puffy face had trailed her as she promoted the debut of
her ABC drama "Missing," and Judd, in
a
Daily Beast essay that went viral, wrote that
"the conversation was pointedly nasty, gendered, and
misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our
culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day, in
ways both outrageous and subtle."
To the lady blogs, her words were catnip. "I've never thought
much about Ashley Judd,"
Jezebel's Lindy West
wrote."[S]he's
pretty, she seems nice, her pores look really small—but it
turns out she's also a smart, bold, kickass feminist." But
when she discussed the whole episode on the more staid "Rock
Center with Brian Williams," Judd looked vulnerable. "I have
never been so genuinely surprised in all my born days," she
told
Williams, her usually level voice warbling. The idea that a
subtle change to her facial features—that "maybe I had
somethin' salty, as we say in the South, and got all swelled
up"—had invited so much finger-wagging, she said, "
hurt
me. It really hurt my feelings."
A feminist who can summon the sudsy enthusiasm of Jezebel,
but also channel genteel, Southern sensibilities? If only
she'd run for office! Which, of course, is exactly what
she's considering: a challenge of Senate Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The rumors began last fall, and
only grew after she didn't
deny them. When sources confirmed
as much, two polls were promptly commissioned—one by
PPP showing
that she was the preferred candidate of Kentucky Democrats,
and another by McConnell himself. His campaign's internal
poll, readily
shared with the press, was less newsworthy for its
results than the fear it betrayed.
That fear has since spread. Karl Rove's super PAC, American
Crossroads, released an
ad last week featuring photos of Judd sauntering down
the red carpet, a clip of her saying "Tennessee is home,"
and her effusive praise of President Barack Obama, who lost
Kentucky by
23 points. Rove has promised there's more
to come.
They have reason to be scared: A recent
PPP poll found that McConnell is the nation's least
popular senator, judged by his constituents, and in January
a Louisville
Courier-Journal poll found that 44 percent of
Kentucky voters withheld their support of him until his
opponent is known; 34 percent planned to vote against him,
and only 17 percent for him. But Judd would face obstacles
of her own in the deep-red state. She is, after all, a
Democrat, a Hollywood star, an environmentalist, and an
abortion rights agitator.
But it is clear, from her response to the plastic surgery
rumors, that Judd is adept at turning cheap personal shots
into media-resonant strikes on her opponents. It's not
difficult to imagine her, in the face of a GOP attack on her
jet-setting celebrity, finding just the right measure of
righteous disgust to make McConnell, or her other potential
opponent, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, appear sexist—especially
since they're already giving her material. "Ashley Judd is a
famous actress, she's an attractive woman, and presents
herself well, and from what I understand is articulate,"
Paul said recently, when asked to evaluate
Judd as a foe. "But the thing is, she doesn't really
represent Kentucky."
In fact, Judd, a diehard
Kentucky basketball fan, can trace her family back eight
generations in the Bluegrass State. She lived there for a
big chunk of her vagabond childhood, and it was where her
mother and half-sister kicked off the famous '80s country
music duo The Judds. Judd's 2011 memoir, All
That Is Bitter and Sweet, is thick with gauzy
memories of growing up in the state. As a child, she writes,
"I recall looking out the window at redbud, dogwood,
daffodils, irises, and pom-pom bushes, knowing exactly what
heaven must look like: a spring day in Kentucky." She is
adroit at drawing upon those romantic recollections to
explain the roots of her liberal convictions. The dreams of
her parents, "small-town kids from rural eastern Kentucky,"
are waylaid by teenage pregnancy and the social pressure to
marry. A backcountry drive to her grandmother's house in
Black Log Hollow, which an "almost mystical sense of place"
compels her to make, is preceded by a plane flight over
"catastrophic mountaintop removal coal-mining sites." Her
unofficial major at the University of Kentucky is
rabble-rousing, "or at least as much rabble-rousing as one
could do and still belong to an old, elite social sorority."
And her heroes? "Jesus has always been my favorite radical."
It's enough to make you almost believe, when she boasts that
her eleven-city AIDS awareness bus tour with Bono bypassed
"the media-rich, oh-so-sophisticated East Coast and West
Coast" in favor of the American heartland, that she's a bona
fide resident of the mythical "real America."
The problem, of course, is that believing Judd to be
authentically Kentuckian requires reading past the
headlines, something most voters will never do. An Ashley
Judd campaign for Senate no doubt would include serious
liberal ideas, witty rejoinders, and effervescent moments,
as when she buried her nose in a pot of flowers on
the "Rachel Ray Show." But it is all too easy to
cherry-pick Judd's activism for wounding sound bites.
Sometimes, in that weird Hollywood way, she seems to be
overawed by her own goodness: In a March talk show
appearance, where she cradled her cockapoo, Shug, Judd told
the host that she cries sometimes when she watches
herself on screen, or when she takes particularly inspired
graduate courses at Harvard University. And in Bitter
and Sweet, this is how she describes her visit to a
refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: "A
smiling girl in her too large, dirty yellow dress; the
moment we begin to hold hands, she shines. My heart sings
alleluia." Judd may not regard these as liabilities. "I hold
that it is none of my business what people think of me," she
wrote in the Daily Beast essay. But, of course, it
will have to become her business—in a way, her only
business—if she decides to run for office.
Judd might not understand that yet, but she understands how
to render a certain public image. She has pondered how, for
The Judds, her mother Naomi created an "origin myth" and
"transformed herself" in order to hide her turbulent family
situation. She gets that years of Bono bus tours, stumping
for Obama, and celebrity "ambassadorships" would generate
speculation about her ability to serve in Congress, a charge
she preemptively rebutted in her memoir. "The cynics contend
that if I were to give up acting to focus exclusively on
public service, well, my service would never be valid,
because I had once had a career as an actor," she wrote.
"Forgetting, of course, the previous job description of that
right-wing icon Ronald Reagan." She is, after all, an
actress, one whose main talent is her ability to portray
archetypal women—the
tough mom, the
crazy girlfriend, or the
pensive girl—with convincing depth. Judd is similarly
textured in real life. She's a sharp-tongued celebrity but
also a just-folks Southerner, apparently contradictory roles
that instead are complementary: Her activism would be
unbearably self-righteous if it wasn't leavened with such
down-home sincerity.
Would this translate in the political arena? It's all
speculation. Any race is inevitably complicated by the
hot-button issues of the moment, campaign-trail gaffes, and
outside money. For now, Republicans are content to portray
Judd as a stereotypical "Hollywood liberal"; if she declares
her candidacy, the attacks ads will multiply and diversify.
But on her best days, Judd does not settle for being a stock
character. One can imagine her embracing her radicalism as
just one piece of a more complicated whole: a true
Kentuckian and feminist movie star whose liberalism is as
fierce as her manners are charming. To make voters believe
it, though, she'll need to deliver the performance of a
lifetime.
