The Jack Conway for Senator campaign has run an attack ad on The New Republic website disguised as an article about Rand Paul by one of the magazine’s interns. The tipoff is the word “radical” which appears five times in a short article along with “eccentric,” “unconventional” and similar words. (Doesn’t TNR bother to edit the web-only stuff?) Yeah, yeah, you’re saying by the end of the article, I get it: Paul is a radical, weirdo libertarian.

The evidence so far suggests that the Conway for Senate campaign seeks to paint Paul as an extremist while Jack, of course, is a moderate who will provide plenty of pork and don’t worry about the debt. Like most Democrats, Conway is facing a tough electorate this year, and he is responding by the party’s political playbook: demonize, mobilize, and spend. He will have adequate funds to pursue that strategy along with more than a little help from affiliated outside groups like TNR.

Parts of the article provide a useful political analysis of Kentucky’s different regions, presumably provided by the Conway campaign. So the article does offer a look into how Conway thinks he can win this.

Our intern concludes that the Conway-Paul race “is suddenly a close race.” It is true that a survey at the end of June, cited by TNR, indicated an even division. But the article appeared on August 4, and three polls in July showed Paul up by 3 to 9 points, the last one having Paul over fifty percent for the first time. That most recent poll also indicated that Paul had the support of one-quarter of Democrats and two-thirds of independents in the state.

With TNR flailing around like this, the Conway campaign seems pretty desperate pretty early.