McConnell’s youth was peripatetic—his early years were spent in Athens, Alabama, a small town in the northern end of the state; at eight his family moved to Augusta, Georgia; and before the start of high school they arrived in Louisville, where his father, a manager with DuPont, had been transferred. His parents hailed mostly from Scots-Irish stock, more humble on his mother’s side (tenant farmers) than on his father’s (his lineage included a county judge and mortician).
From age two to four, McConnell suffered from polio, and his mother, who was named Julia but went by Dean, devoted herself to the rehabilitation of her only child. She brought him to the polio treatment retreat founded by Franklin D. Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Georgia, but there were no rooms available, so staff instead instructed her on how to do the physical therapy back home on her own, with occasional visits to Warm Springs to check on Mitch’s progress. And she was on her own—her husband was with the army in Europe in the final months of World War II. There were three hours of exercises to be done each day, and Dean was under orders to keep Mitch off his partially paralyzed left leg, so coming and going meant carrying the boy up and down the stairs of their walk-up apartment building. When he was deemed recovered, his mother bought him low-top saddle oxfords. “That seems like such a small thing, but to me, it was huge,” he said later. “Now I was just like every other kid.”
In later years, McConnell often pointed to his recovery from polio as the foundational event in his life, a declaration often paired with an expression of “a great deal of gratitude toward his mother,” says Meme Sweets Runyon, who worked for McConnell in his first campaign and elected office. His parents’ approach to that battle, he’d tell people, turned him into a person who “liked to solve problems.” “His parents were very organized and methodical. They had that methodical way of addressing a problem,” says Runyon. It also explained his determination. “It taught him that you can get through a really crippling situation—literally—by putting one step in front of the other,” Runyon says. Charles Musson, a Louisville lawyer who also worked on McConnell’s first campaign, was blunter: “It made him a fighter,” he says.
In what realm to fight and strive? Young Mitch loved sports, but while he did manage to play baseball with his slight limp, dreams of sports stardom were out. (A meticulously detailed score sheet he kept at age thirteen shows him with a .295 regular season batting average but an .074 playoff one.) Instead, in high school McConnell gravitated to that other realm favored by competitive young American men with a head for stats: politics. He was a serious history buff, steeped in the lore of great Kentucky statesmen such as Henry Clay, and at age fourteen he watched every minute of coverage of both party’s 1956 conventions. It was easy to imagine him growing up to be part of the political support staff that would soon dominate Washington, the pundits and aides and strategists who can recite election results from decades past and who advise the candidate out front on what to say and how to vote. It was harder to imagine McConnell as the front man himself, what with his blinking bearing and introverted nature.
But young Mitch wanted to be a candidate after all. Runyon points to a simple explanation: “Mitch is an only child. Only children love attention.” He was introverted, but not so shy that he disliked the spotlight. Shortly after arriving in Louisville, by far the largest city he’d ever lived in, McConnell became vice president of the junior high student council. At duPont Manual High School, he set about improving on that rank and by junior year managed to win election as student body president, with a methodical effort that included stuffing pamphlets into each locker, even those belonging to students in the lower grades whom upperclassmen candidates often looked past. One pamphlet announced his endorsements from, among others, “the fastest halfback in the city” and “the president of the key club.” At the University of Louisville, which he chose to attend to spare himself another move and stay close to Dean, the mother with whom he was so close, he kept on running—for freshman class president, for president of the student senate, for president of the student council of the College of Arts and Sciences. He lost all three, and took it hard despite the low stakes, as depicted in Republican Leader, a 2009 authorized biography of McConnell by John David Dyche. “McConnell realized that he had not worked as hard as he should have, and vowed to never make that mistake again,” writes Dyche, a Louisville lawyer and conservative commentator. Once again, vindication arrived in junior year: he won the presidency of the student council.
It was time to get into politics for real. There was no question which party McConnell would associate himself with—the Democrats’ Solid South had started splintering, and he’d had a sentimental attachment to the Republicans from a young age, largely out of loyalty to Dwight Eisenhower, the general who’d led his father in Europe. (In his third-grade class photo, Mitch wears an “I Like Ike” button.) And in Kentucky, Republicans were ascendant—the state went for Richard Nixon in 1960 (McConnell slapped a Nixon bumper sticker on the family car) and two well-regarded Republican senators represented the state.
The real question was not which party Mitch McConnell would sign up for. It was which kind of Republican he’d be.
It is nothing short of astonishing to contemplate just how ideologically diverse the Republican Party was a half century ago. Coming out of the relative stasis of the Eisenhower years, the party was in a free-for-all, with a new wave of combative conservatives, many of them hailing from the boomtowns of the Sun Belt, challenging the party’s old-guard Midwestern centrists and conservatives and its Northeastern liberals. The dividing line in the mid-1960s was Lyndon B. Johnson’s civil rights legislation, which passed with the staunch support of old-guard Republicans (17 of Ohio’s 18 congressional Republicans backed the bill, notes Geoffrey Kabaservice in his 2012 history of moderate Republicanism, Rule and Ruin), even as many of the new-wave conservatives opposed it. The showdown came at the 1964 Republican National Convention, held at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, where Nelson Rockefeller was jeered to the point of inaudibility as he spoke in favor of a platform plank against extremists groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. The convention ended with the nomination of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act, passed earlier that year, and who punctuated his acceptance speech with a line that became the rallying cry for this new brand of conservatism: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Back in Kentucky, Mitch McConnell had before him vivid representatives of both of the widely disparate poles of his party, and, like any young person finding his way, he sampled both. Under the influence of a conservative political science professor, McConnell invited Goldwater to campus, where McConnell introduced his speech. In the summer of 1963, he headed to Washington to intern for Gene Snyder, a highly conservative rookie congressman from Kentucky who warned of “creeping socialism” afoot in the land. McConnell was in Snyder’s office for the March on Washington by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, but he couldn’t show his excitement, not in front of Snyder—he slipped out on the steps of the Capitol to take in the crowds, but dared venture no further than that.
McConnell’s desire to be out on the Mall for King’s speech suggested the Goldwater wing of the party was not for him. Instead, he latched onto a more suitable model. Both of Kentucky’s senators were well to the left of Snyder. It was Thruston Morton who would unsuccessfully try to gavel into silence the jeering crowd at the Cow Palace so that Rockefeller could be heard. And it was John Sherman Cooper who, far more than anyone, would shape the Republicanism of young Mitch.
Cooper was a remarkable figure, a patrician Yalie who had quit Harvard Law School on learning that his family’s fortune had been wiped out by the recession of 1920 and had returned home to sell the family mansion, settle his father’s debts, and set about putting his six siblings through college. He won a Bronze Star for his work rebuilding the Bavarian judicial system at the end of World War II and served as a special assistant to Secretary of State Dean Acheson during the creation of NATO. Arriving in Washington, he was one of the first Republicans to speak out against fellow Republican Joe McCarthy, and he voted with his party barely half the time. He became close friends with John F. Kennedy, a regular guest at the famous Georgetown soirees hosted by Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, and an ardent opponent of the Vietnam War, joining with Idaho Democrat Frank Church to draft an amendment barring further action in Cambodia. He might well have run for higher office were it not for one shortcoming: he was, in his own words, “a truly terrible public speaker.”
In 1964, that year of turmoil and soul-searching for the Grand Old Party, Cooper became Mitch McConnell’s lodestar. After returning to Louisville in the fall of 1963, out from under Snyder’s baleful eye, McConnell fired off a column urging Republicans to get on board with strong civil rights legislation at the state and national levels. Brimming with earnest idealism, the piece anticipates the main argument against civil rights reform and demolishes it: “Property rights have always been, and will continue to be, an integral part of our heritage, but this does not absolve the property holder of his obligation to help ensure the basic rights of all citizens.” McConnell disputed the opposition’s claim to constitutional rationales against the legislation: “One must view the Constitution as a document adaptable to conditions of contemporary society,” he wrote, and any “strict interpretation” was “innately evil” if its result was that “basic rights are denied to any group.”
By early spring, McConnell was speaking in a racially mixed assemblage at a campus “Freedom Rally” urging others to join King in marching on the state capital. As the divisive GOP presidential primary of that year took shape, McConnell sided against Goldwater and for two moderates—first Pennsylvania governor William Scranton and then ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. And at the end of the school year he was back in Washington, interning for the representative who was by this time the right fit: Cooper. That June, Cooper played a lead role in finagling just enough Republican votes to help break the filibuster of the Civil Rights Act led by Southern Democrats. And a year later, when McConnell was in Washington for a visit, Cooper brought him along to witness the signing of the Voting Rights Act.
Looking back, McConnell repeatedly cited Cooper’s leadership on civil rights legislation, despite hailing from a Civil War border state, as his model for being a senator. He recounted asking Cooper at the time, “How do you take such a tough stand and square it with the fact that a considerable number of people who have chosen you have the opposite view?” To which, he says, Cooper responded: “I not only represent Kentucky, I represent the nation, and there are times when you follow, and there are times when you lead.” McConnell expanded on this in his interviews with Dyche and in the annual oral history interviews McConnell has been giving for years to Kentucky historian John Kleber, which McConnell made available to Dyche. Cooper, he said, had often put him in mind of Edmund Burke’s famous dictum: “Your representative owes, not his industry only, but his judgment, and betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Cooper, McConnell said, “always carried out his best judgment instead of pandering to the popular view.” He “was sensitive to what his constituents were interested in, but not controlled by it.”
And Cooper showed that a senator with such independence of mind, forthrightness, and conviction could flourish. In 1966, he was reelected with nearly two-thirds of the vote.
As riveted as McConnell was by the civil rights battles in Washington, it was the other great issue of the 1960s that threatened a more personal impact. And on this score, he again followed Cooper’s lead. In the fall of 1964, McConnell enrolled in law school at the University of Kentucky (thus allowing him to later claim both of the state’s major colleges as alma maters). There, like many other students, he grew opposed to the war in Vietnam—though there is no record of him speaking out as he did on civil rights. He received his degree in the spring of 1967, making him eligible for the draft just as the war, in which more than a thousand Kentuckians lost their lives, entered its deadliest two-year stretch for American soldiers.
McConnell decided to enlist in the army reserves. With remarkable candor, he later said that the reserves represented a kind of “honorable alternative that wouldn’t ruin my career or taint my advancement.” Left unsaid was that the reserves also were much less likely to put him in harm’s way, as they were used sparingly in Vietnam.
He reported for basic training with the 100th Division of the U.S. Army Reserves at Fort Knox in early July. Barely a month later, he was out, free on a medical discharge.
In McConnell’s later telling, as related by Dyche, he discovered soon after he arrived at Fort Knox that he was having trouble keeping up with basic training, which he attributed to residual effects of the polio. A subsequent physical examination, he says, found that he suffered from optical neuritis, a condition most often associated with multiple sclerosis that can cause foggy vision or partial loss of vision. The condition can often be treated with steroids, but McConnell says the diagnosis of optical neuritis prompted the medical discharge. McConnell’s Selective Service records, obtained from the National Archives under a public information request, do not specify the grounds for his discharge, and in fact show no record of his having received a physical examination prior to his discharge.
As short as his stay at Fort Knox had been, McConnell was growing impatient that his exit was taking as long as it was. By his own admission, he had his father place a call to his mentor in Washington. And on August 10, Senator John Sherman Cooper sent a wire to the commanding general at Fort Knox, stating: “Mitchell anxious to clear post in order to enroll NYU. Please advise when final action can be expected.” Five days later, McConnell was discharged. Effective as Cooper’s intervention had been, McConnell downplayed it years later, saying Cooper’s office had been doing “routine case work” in trying to help a constituent deal with army bureaucracy. He had, he said, “used no connections getting in” the army reserves and “no connections getting out.”
Freed from Fort Knox, McConnell did not go to New York University, where there is no record of his ever having applied for classes, despite the claim in Cooper’s missive. He’d had plenty of schooling, after all, and was ready for the business of politics. The only question was where to begin. Ideally, he’d have gone right back to Washington. But there wasn’t all that much demand for a graduate of a non-elite law school with undistinguished grades. Even Cooper was disinclined to help out in this regard, telling McConnell he had no need for a young counsel.
He’d have to settle for Kentucky, for now. He took the first legal job he could find—working for a pro-union labor law firm. But the drudgery of his first regular job would last barely longer than his military sojourn. In early 1968, Morton, the state’s other senator, announced his retirement amid deep disillusionment over the urban riots and war in Vietnam. Marlow Cook, the moderate Republican executive for Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, announced his candidacy, and invited McConnell on as his campaign’s “state youth chairman,” a paid position. Mitch McConnell’s near lifelong career as a political professional had begun.
He had some campaign experience. Back in 1966, in his campaign debut, he had helped out on a primary challenge of none other than his first Capitol Hill boss, Gene Snyder, by a liberal Louisville Republican—further confirmation of where McConnell had lined up in his party’s internal conflicts. (Yet more evidence was the name he gave the cat he soon acquired: Rocky, after Nelson Rockefeller, the moderate Republican governor of New York.) But now he was a full-time campaign staffer for the first time, and he took the task earnestly, recalls John Yarmuth, then a younger campaign worker who was paired up with McConnell. It was quite a spectacle: there, in 1968, at the height of the youth rebellion, was the unimpeachably square law school graduate going from one campus to another, urging students fixated on Vietnam, Bob Dylan, and the assassinations of King and Bobby Kennedy to vote for a county executive many had never heard of. If he got a cool response, it did not deter him—he worked relentlessly, not even letting his marriage shortly before the primary to Sherrill Redmon, a history Ph.D. student at the University of Kentucky, slow him down. “He was incredibly serious even then,” says Yarmuth, who went on to work alongside McConnell in Washington and Louisville and was later elected to Congress as a Democrat. “I was having fun or trying to have fun. Even though it was going to play a very small part of the election—organizing campuses in 1968 was a fragment of the whole election—to him it was very important.”
The grind paid off—Cook won, and invited McConnell to Washington. Officially, McConnell was Cook’s chief staffer on the Judiciary Committee. He helped his boss reckon with Richard Nixon’s Supreme Court nominations, two of whom were rejected, one as too conservative and the other as underqualified. And he helped handle Cook’s correspondence. In March 1970, he sent the Republican National Committee two speeches by Cook, which, McConnell wrote, “might be useful to you in your task of convincing both Blacks and other minority groups in the country that the Republican party is a logical home,” a preoccupation of moderate Republicans at the time. Three months later, he declined the invitation of an honorary membership for himself and Cook in the Kentucky State Rifle & Pistol Association, writing that “this would probably hinder effectiveness in fighting [strict gun control] laws, if we were members of the association.”
Unofficially, McConnell was a frontline foot-soldier in the era’s intensifying battle for his party’s soul. He lined up on the side of the moderates—his boss was a leading advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights for women—but was wary of any talk among his increasingly despairing fellow moderates of breaking away from the GOP.
This debate even led McConnell to the pages of Playboy—not for the pictures, but for the articles. In 1970, the magazine published a manifesto by Lee Auspitz, president of the Ripon Society, the organization founded in 1962 to promote moderate Republicanism. McConnell fired off a letter to Auspitz praising the piece as the “most definitive explanation of liberal Republicanism I have read,” while taking issue with the suggestion that had been made recently by some moderates that they ought to consider bolting the party. “The quickest way to completely eliminate our effectiveness within the GOP is to even suggest the possibility of withdrawing from our party,” McConnell wrote. “The Nixon administration, to this point, has been at worst completely reactionary and at best totally indecisive. No one is more frustrated with this state of affairs than I. However, for all the reasons you stated in your Playboy article, this is the logical home for us and we must not give up.”
He was a party man, above all, and the only question was when he’d make his official entrance under its banner. When the Nixon White House invited him to join the administration later in 1970, he fatefully declined, deciding it was time to head back to Kentucky and start his ascent from there. No sooner had he arrived home than he filed to run for a newly formed district in the Kentucky House of Representatives. He had moved to the district only two weeks before it became official, and his primary rivals challenged his candidacy under the Kentucky constitution, which requires candidates to reside in a given city or district for a year before running for office there. (McConnell, in an amusingly legalistic gambit, tried to argue that he could not have lived in the district for a year prior because the district hadn’t existed yet.) It was an embarrassing debut for the candidate-in-waiting, already sensitive to his status as a nonnative of Kentucky. He was tossed off the ballot.
Launch aborted, the thirty-year-old McConnell pinged back and forth between home and Washington: he worked on an unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in Kentucky, returned to Washington to help prepare William Rehnquist for his Supreme Court hearings, took an undemanding law job at the firm of a successful lawyer-turned-entrepreneur in Louisville just in time for the birth of his first child, then returned to Washington to serve as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Ford administration, deputized as a liaison to Congress on judicial appointments. On weekends, he’d fly home to Kentucky to see Sherrill and their baby.
Someone who didn’t know any better might have taken McConnell as directionless, casting about while trying to care for his growing family (with three daughters, eventually). In fact, McConnell picked out his next target not long after his failed first run: the county executive job in Jefferson County, which had propelled his former boss Marlow Cook into the U.S. Senate. It was an unusual position—technically called “County Judge/Executive,” with some vestigial and nominal purview over the county courts—but essentially the elected chief administrator for the county, with particular purview for the fast-growing suburbs that extended beyond the Louisville city line, where the Louisville mayor’s bailiwick stopped. It was the ideal position for an ambitious first-time candidate—unglamorous enough to be attainable, but with real responsibilities, in the state’s largest jurisdiction, which held one in five Kentucky residents and many of the moderate to liberal Republicans, or even freethinking cosmopolitan Democrats, who fit McConnell’s profile. He had positioned himself well by getting involved in the Jefferson County Republican Party, succeeding its deceased chairman in 1973.
Crucially, the incumbent was vulnerable. Todd Hollenbach was a handsome Notre Dame alumnus in a heavily Catholic city, but he’d come under fire for running a crony-laden, ethically challenged administration. The Binghams, the liberal-minded owners of the influential Louisville Courier-Journal, didn’t care for him. (The feeling was mutual: “I didn’t see eye to eye with young Barry Bingham,” the publisher, Hollenbach says. “I told him respectfully that I didn’t think there was anything wrong with this city that a handful of well-placed funerals wouldn’t cure.”) Hollenbach had also been having marital troubles before getting a divorce.
He’d won reelection by a huge margin in 1973. But shortly into his second term, he’d been caught up in the biggest storm to hit Louisville in decades—in 1974, a federal judge acting at the behest of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a desegregation order for the Louisville schools, leading to the merger of the city and county districts, forced busing of 19,500 children, and protests from many white residents beyond the city line—Hollenbach’s constituents. Hollenbach had tried to position himself as a reasoned critic of the rulings, saying he supported desegregation but preferred means other than busing to achieve it. He was, in any case, powerless to do much about them.
Into this opening stepped McConnell. The thirty-five-year-old had, to this point, done barely anything in Kentucky except some law firm drudgery and helping manage other people’s campaigns. But he’d long been preparing for this moment, as suggested by his October 1975 letter offering President Gerald Ford his resignation from the Department of Justice job. After thanking Ford for the opportunity to serve, McConnell launched into a lament about the “discord” that busing had caused in Louisville, stated that he supported a constitutional amendment to prohibit it and, barring that, pleaded with Ford to nominate antibusing justices to the Supreme Court. It was a striking appeal from a junior staff member, particularly one who had a decade earlier joined the civil rights cause in Louisville.
But the motivation was plain to Bob Wolthus, a senior aide in the Ford administration, who wrote a memo to his supervisor that explained the context of McConnell’s letter: “In 1977 Mitch plans to run for the post of county judge in the Louisville area as a Republican. He says the busing issue down there is a very big political factor and he would like to position himself to take advantage of it in the 1977 election.”
As this plotting was under way, its target had no notion of what was coming his way. “I had never, quite frankly, heard of Mitch McConnell,” says Hollenbach.
The young people on the campaign—that is, those even younger than the candidate himself—liked to practice a gentle sort of humor on him. McConnell slouched so much that Zane Griffin, his twenty-one-year-old scheduler, would pat him down and say, “What’s all this stuff in your pockets?” “We’d give him posture lessons,” she recalls. “We had fun with him—on his own terms.”
It was hard to figure how someone who had spent so much of his first dozen years out of college—or even longer than that—preparing for this moment could seem so ill-matched for it. To help loosen him up when he was out meeting voters, the campaign made sure he was always accompanied by his personal assistant, a handsome and affable young man by the name of Mike Baer, who radiated such confidence that a little of it couldn’t help but pass into Mitch by osmosis. Aides with the candidate in public were charged with remembering names.
And it wasn’t just in interacting with voters that McConnell’s greenness shone. It was also in some of the basic backroom strategizing, recall Goodman and Plesser, his adman and pollster. “He was very ingenuous and very earnest—he did not have any of the sophistication or sensitivity to the political process and communications and the strategic management of elections,” says Plesser. “Like a lot of newcomers, he’d think about it straightforwardly: let’s speak to the issues. That’s something that came to him a little later, the mechanics. For us, it was about giving him some orientation and insight into the ways that campaigns really worked.”
Luckily, their candidate was open to that orientation. He assented to the consultants’ suggestion that he break up the electorate into segments, by neighborhood and interest group, and create not just a message for each but, essentially, an image of himself for each. This strategy was not only a good way to relate to voters but was all but mandatory for someone like McConnell, who had such a nondescript profile. “Rather than being ‘Mitch McConnell the lawyer,’ and using that as a credential—that was meaningless—he became ‘Mitch McConnell the county judge candidate who feels very strongly about the highway light,’ ” says Plesser.
One of the key segments McConnell set out to pursue was organized labor. For a Southern state, Kentucky had strong unions—unlike every state to its south, it is not “right to work”—and McConnell was running as such a moderate-to-liberal Republican that it was not inconceivable that he could get some labor support. Over and over, his scheduler, Griffin, tried to set up a meeting with one of the top leaders of the local AFL-CIO labor council. “I used my sweetest soft sell,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Can you meet him Monday? No? Tuesday? No? Wednesday? No? Thursday?’ And he said, ‘Thursday, that’s my bowling day.’ So I actually sent Mitch to bowling.”
McConnell did not just go to the lanes. He told the unions that he would support passing a state law to legalize collective bargaining for public employees, a liberal position that even Hollenbach, the Democrat, had reservations about. It paid off: the labor council endorsed McConnell.
That McConnell was running to Hollenbach’s left on some issues—he ran separate from the rest of the local Republican slate, and even got the endorsement of the Courier-Journal—complicated the question of how to go after Hollenbach over the busing issue. It was tempting to do so, given how much ill will it had stirred up in the county, and how well McConnell had set himself up as an opponent of busing with his letter to Ford. McConnell had the consultants make up a spot with him standing in front of a school bus saying, “Some say Judge Hollenbach could have done something about this. Some say he couldn’t.” But the campaign decided not to air it: the issue had already done its damage to Hollenbach.
Not that McConnell was going to play nice across the board. Goodman came up with a memorable spot, the defining one of the campaign, showing a farmer mucking out a horse’s stall while commenting on Hollenbach’s claim to have cut taxes four times. “When Hollenbach says he cut my taxes, he doesn’t credit me with any more sense than old Nell here. Maybe Hollenbach ought to have my job, because in my business, I deal with that kind of stuff every day.” The farmer closes by pitching a load of manure right at the camera. The ad, which debuted during the first game of the World Series, appalled some of McConnell’s supporters in Louisville high society, but was a hit in less tony quarters. “Some of the nice people said, ‘Ooh, that’s pretty rough,’ ” says Goodman, the ad maker. “But the guys around the feed store said, ‘Hey, that guy’s got balls.’ ” One person who had no reservations about the ad was the candidate himself. “Oh, God, he loved it,” says Goodman.
A couple of other ads turned the knife more subtly—the campaign went heavy on spots showing McConnell smiling happily with his wife and children, an obvious contrast with Hollenbach’s splintering marriage, which also provided the subtext for an ad with a man in a clerical collar intoning, “Speaking for myself, I think that Mitch McConnell has the character that’s been missing.” (Hollenbach stews over this line of attack to this day. “It was just the snideness of his remarks, about how ‘I feel so sorry for the children.’ In my judgment, it was disgraceful and disgusting how he talked about it.”) To cap it off, McConnell ran an ad showing himself strolling with his mentor John Sherman Cooper in Washington’s Lafayette Park, with Cooper (who’d left the Senate in 1972) remarking, in an implicit rebuke to Hollenbach, that two terms was enough time for anyone to serve in office.
McConnell won by six percentage points. A giddy, raucous crowd assembled at the campaign office off Bardstown Road. It seemed like everyone who was anyone in Louisville had turned out for it. McConnell was beaming, and did something his staff had never seen him do before or in the years that followed. He told them he was taking them to lunch the following week at the Galt House, the city’s new riverside hotel.
Mitch McConnell had made it into office, and seemed to have a good idea of what to do when he got there. He overhauled the upper levels of most departments and launched a methodical search for replacements that extended well beyond Louisville, a process that riled some old-timers in the county. (One of the Democratic county commissioners threw a punch at McConnell’s closest aide, former college classmate Dave Huber.) He stocked his inner office with his top campaign aides—Huber, Runyon, and campaign manager Joe Schiff—but also brought in Minx Auerbach, a leading Louisville liberal. He followed through on priorities he had laid out in the campaign, like the creation of an office of historic preservation and boosting spending on libraries.
One campaign pledge, though, was strikingly dropped: he never did push for collective bargaining for public employees. He later acknowledged, as related by John David Dyche, that his pledge was nothing more than “open pandering” to the unions.
Another of McConnell’s most notable accomplishments as county leader was barely discernible to the public. With Roe v. Wade having legalized abortion in Kentucky only a few years prior, abortion opponents were trying to rein in the procedure via local ordinances that, among other restrictions, required married women to get their husbands’ approval and imposed waiting periods. Abortion rights supporters had an ally in McConnell: every time one of the ordinances was introduced, McConnell would see to it that it never came up for a vote, much less a public hearing, says Jessica Loving, who was then the director of the Kentucky chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “He was one of the best elected officials I ever worked with in terms of dealing with the issue,” she says. “He said, ‘You’re right, this flies in the face of Roe v. Wade,’ and he just stopped the legislation dead in its tracks. . . . Mitch understood procedural ways to stop legislation, and that’s what he did.”
It was clear to her, she says, that McConnell was screening the ordinances not only on legal grounds but also because they clashed with his pro-choice leanings. “He had a very feminist perspective on it and I appreciated it,” she said. Indeed, when Dolores Delahanty, another feminist activist in town, approached McConnell and asked if he would lend his name to a fund-raiser being held by the pro-choice Kentucky Women’s Political Caucus, he assented. “He fully understood what the caucus was all about and where we stood on abortion,” Delahanty says. “It was obvious to me that he supported the caucus in that regard.” And Yarmuth recalls McConnell as having been pro-choice when they worked together in Cook’s office. In turn, Schiff, McConnell’s chief strategist, praised Yarmuth as a “good, progressive, pro-choice Republican” when he ran for the county board.
Loving kept McConnell’s cooperation quiet at the time—one of the local ACLU’s then-board members, Suzy Post, says she had no inkling of McConnell’s assistance. And it wasn’t hard to deduce why McConnell was happy to forgo public credit for these efforts. Just days into his county administration, Meme Runyon, now his press secretary, was given a list of all of Kentucky’s newspapers and was instructed to start sending her news releases about McConnell across the state. McConnell was already thinking how he would get to Washington—specifically, the Senate he so revered—which meant running for office beyond relatively liberal Jefferson County. “We were planning in those first three months a campaign that was going to take place eight years away,” she says.
The problem was there was another election standing in the way, his county reelection in 1981. McConnell nearly lost it, to an uninspiring county commissioner. He’d lost his support from the unions after his betrayal on the collective-bargaining pledge; the recession of the early 1980s had voters in an anti-incumbent mood; and McConnell could no longer feature his family in ads, having divorced his wife, Sherrill Redmon, just a few years after so effectively deploying her against Hollenbach. (Dyche describes the end of the twelve-year marriage as “amicable” but “personally unpleasant.” He also quotes Redmon hinting at the challenge of being married to a man whom she describes, euphemistically, as a “self-contained person.”)
And McConnell by his own admission simply hadn’t focused enough on the race. On election night, even as it became clear that he would survive, he was stewing over the numbers, wondering how he didn’t get a bigger margin in this or that precinct. “Here’s a guy winning reelection in this tough battle . . . and Tully and I are saying, this is real good, winning is better than losing,” says Goodman. “But Mitch wasn’t all that happy.”
“He damn near got beat, which would’ve ended him—it would’ve ended his life,” says Larry Forgy, a veteran Republican lawyer in Kentucky who served as Ronald Reagan’s state campaign chairman in 1980, and later had a falling-out with McConnell. “I don’t know what Mitch McConnell would do if not for politics.”
McConnell had learned his lesson. He would never let his guard down, never take his eye off the next election.
And so he resumed the preparation that Runyon had started for him in 1978 with those statewide press releases on the doings of the Jefferson County judge/executive. Even better than sending press releases to every county paper, he realized, was having a reason to visit every corner of the state himself. And partway through his second term, he found a reason: his aide Bill Bardenwerper returned from a visit to the Chicago police department, where he’d learned about an underage prostitution ring that had tentacles to Louisville. McConnell jumped on the issue—he called for expanded fingerprinting of children, held hearings across the state, and created a “Statewide Task Force on Exploited and Missing Children,” which produced state legislation, passed into law by the Democratic-led legislature, that included preventive measures and stiffer penalties for child trafficking.
Bardenwerper insists that the motivation was not entirely political. “Cynics criticized Mitch for making politics out of the issue, but I always said he could have been on the wrong side of the issue, like some members of Congress turned out to be in their various sordid personal lives,” he says. “If you get a politician on the right side of right, no matter the motivation, how can that be bad?” Still, he and others acknowledge the dividends that the crusade paid. It helped get McConnell to every one of the state’s 120 counties in 1983 and 1984, and gave him an identity that went beyond a lawyer turned county administrator from Louisville. “The child abuse thing went around the state,” says one former Republican officeholder in the state, “so it was, rather than ‘oh, that’s the lawyer guy,’ ‘oh, that’s the child abuse guy.’ ”
Preparation came in another form, too. Frustrated with how close he’d come to losing his reelection, McConnell decided it was time for a new media and polling team. Goodman and Plesser, who had delivered McConnell his big win against Hollenbach, were out. Now McConnell wanted nothing less than the best. In 1984, he hired Roger Ailes.
Ailes was still a dozen years from founding Fox News, but his reputation was already well established. After meeting Richard Nixon backstage at The Mike Douglas Show, which he helped produce, he’d been brought on to tutor the dour candidate in the ways of television for the 1968 campaign. After stormy forays into theater and TV news, he was by the early 1980s specializing in creating ads for Republican Senate candidates. There was no mystery what you were getting when you hired Ailes as your adman—hard-hitting spots that went straight for the opponent’s weak spot. Factual accuracy was not a priority. To elect Alphonse D’Amato senator in New York, that meant highlighting his opponent Liz Holtzman’s unmarried status. To reelect Harrison “Jack” Schmitt in New Mexico, that meant producing an ad that accused his opponent, state attorney general Jeff Bingaman, of having freed a “convicted felon” on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. As Gabriel Sherman notes in his biography of Ailes, the FBI had “requested [the convict’s] temporary release into its custody in order for him to testify as a key prosecution witness at a trial in Texas for the murder of a judge.” Asked about the ad, Ailes said it was Bingaman’s job to point out the context of the felon’s release. “My responsibility ends with the act. Maybe folks can say I’m an unethical guy. But it’s not my job to make . . . Bingaman’s case.”
Ailes brought with him not only an unrestrained approach to the business of making ads but a penchant for personal drama. He was known to get into physical scuffles with coworkers and once punched a hole through the wall of the control room of the NBC late-night talk show where he worked. His personal style could hardly have been in starker contrast to that of the buttoned-down McConnell, for whom cutting loose meant sitting back with his aides in the county office after work to sip from the bottle of Old Forester bourbon he kept on hand.
But Ailes and McConnell shared one thing in common. And it trumped all difference, as well as any misgivings McConnell might have about hiring someone with an unscrupulous reputation. As Janet Mullins, McConnell’s manager for the coming campaign, later recalled: “Roger lived it and breathed it and wanted to win as badly as Mitch did.” Or as Ailes himself put it in his favorite office mantra: “Whatever it takes.”
The person unfortunate enough to find himself in the sights of McConnell’s new hire was a second-term senator named Walter “Dee” Huddleston, a World War II tank gunner who’d entered politics after several decades in the radio business. He had won the race to succeed the retiring John Sherman Cooper. Now Cooper’s protégé wanted the seat back.
Huddleston was well liked and politically in tune with his constituents, a quintessential Southern Democrat. But like Todd Hollenbach, he did not realize what he was up against with this mild-mannered young Louisville lawyer. This miscalculation was understandable, to a degree—if Mitch McConnell had seemed ill-suited to campaigning among his fellow Louisvillians, he seemed even more so out in the state’s outlying areas. He did his best to develop what Joe Whittle, the Republican state chairman at the time, calls his “mountain presentation,” but he was never going to be as natural with rural voters as, say, Gene Snyder, who, on visiting country stores, was known to pull out a knife and start whittling some wood.
McConnell, on the other hand, “hasn’t enough personality to wash a shotgun,” as Forgy, who in 1984 was again serving as Reagan’s campaign chairman, puts it. It didn’t help McConnell in the common-touch department that he was often carrying around a briefcase, an accessory that Forgy suspected was totally for show—a ploy by Ailes to make the youthful-looking forty-two-year-old look more senatorial. “I remember once, in Bowling Green, [Vice President George H. W.] Bush came to speak and said, ‘What’s he doing? Why does he have that briefcase with him?’ ” Forgy recalls. But regardless of the quips, McConnell persisted. “Most people wouldn’t be willing to carry around a briefcase that’s empty,” says Forgy. “You’d say, ‘Shit, I’m not going to do that.’ But he did it. . . . Whatever they were telling him to do, he did.”
No Republican had won a statewide election in the state since Cooper’s big win in 1966. To plot a path to victory, McConnell’s new pollster, Lance Tarrance from Houston—whom McConnell had courted with two separate trips to the Kentucky Derby—had segmented the electorate into five different groups: registered Republicans, younger suburban ticket-splitters, white conservative Democrats, white liberal Democrats, and black voters, who tilted Democratic. Even if McConnell got nearly all of the first group and the vast majority of the second, that still left him only at about 40 percent. The “key to everything,” Tarrance says, was the white conservative Democrats. If he could get more than a third of them, then he might pull it off.
Except McConnell’s numbers with these conservative Democrats were, if anything, declining over the summer of 1984 in the surveys Tarrance was doing. “We were sixty days out, and I told him, if this continues, we’re not going to get it,” Tarrance says. As Ailes recalled: “He was so far behind we almost had to flip a coin about who was going to give him the bad news.”
One Saturday night, Tarrance received an excited call from Ailes. “He told me he’d just finished with some wild and crazy ads that might blow up the campaign or might save it,” Tarrance says. Ailes sent the scripts to Tarrance by express mail. “They were brilliant,” says Tarrance. “Even though they were right out of Hee Haw.”
As Ailes later told it, he’d been watching TV at home that weekend when an ad for dog food came on, with a pack of dogs scurrying after a bag of kibble. This ad had stirred a recollection of a tidbit a campaign researcher had noted, that Huddleston had missed several important votes while giving paid speeches around the country (which senators were then allowed to do). Sherman, in his Ailes biography, describes the rest of the creative epiphany:
Ailes jotted down the word “Dogs!” on a piece of paper. During a strategy meeting, Ailes presented his vision. McConnell’s campaign manager, Janet Mullins, recalled the moment: “There was Roger, sitting in a cloud of pipe smoke, and he said, ‘This is Kentucky. I see hunting dogs. I see hound dogs on the scent looking for the lost member of Congress.’ ”
Thus was born a classic of the attack ad genre. Larry McCarthy, the Ailes associate who would go on to fame for crafting the Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign, was put in charge of finding dogs and a trainer. This task proved difficult—McCarthy first came back with bluetick hounds, which were deemed not true Kentucky hounds. He went out for different ones. “If you’re going to be culturally calling someone on the carpet, you better have your cultural facts right,” says Tarrance. “We threw everything we had at this, because we had maxed out everything else we could do.” Finally, it was ready: A pack of bloodhounds straining on their leashes head off from Capitol Hill, through the woods, across a beach, past a swimming pool, with this voice-over, scripted by Ailes: “My job was to find Dee Huddleston and get him back to work. Huddleston was skipping votes but making an extra fifty thousand dollars giving speeches. Let’s go, boys!”
The charge that Huddleston was playing widespread hooky was, as Newsweek noted at the time, “baseless”: Huddleston was present for 94 percent of votes. McConnell himself later admitted that an accompanying radio ad attacking Huddleston for his attendance at committee meetings was “fundamentally unfair” and “kind of ridiculous.” But the line of attack rang true, given that the phlegmatic Huddleston was running such a lackluster campaign. Voters ate it up—especially the conservative Democrats who might otherwise be left cool by the Louisville lawyer with the briefcase. “People would say, ‘Mitch, what about the coon hounds!’ ” says Whittle, who was often with McConnell on the trail. And McConnell’s numbers with that key segment surged.
Still, McConnell had not yet closed the gap, and an air of desperation was settling over the campaign. Never had Tarrance seen a candidate as on edge as McConnell in those final weeks. “He was pretty psychologically uptight, that’s as nice as I can put it,” Tarrance says. “He knew this was his one chance to make a breakout. It was all on the line. He kept using the phrase ‘We need to find the silver bullet,’ something to put us over fifty percent. . . . I’ve never been on a campaign before or since with so much physical tension to find the key that would finally open the door.” He adds, “Everything you discussed with Mitch was how to climb the mountain. There was no laughing, no joking.” Tarrance and Ailes had no shortage of campaigns to advise that year, he said, but on none of them were they working nearly as hard as for Mitch McConnell.
The campaign decided their best bet was to go back to the dogs one more time, at the risk of overdoing it. They aired a sequel in which the hound dogs find Huddleston, played by a look-alike actor, cowering way up in a tree.
That might have done it. McConnell won, just barely, by a margin of five thousand votes—four-tenths of a percentage point, about one vote per precinct. At the Republican victory party in Louisville, Gene Snyder, McConnell’s first boss in Washington, was overheard remarking with wry wonderment that Kentuckians had just elected to the U.S. Senate someone who had fewer friends in Kentucky than “anybody elected to anything.”
McConnell’s margin of victory was particularly narrow in contrast to the more than 283,000 votes by which another Republican won that night in Kentucky: Ronald Reagan.
McConnell had an ambivalent relationship with the president. He was, after all, no Ronald Reagan Republican—in keeping with his John Sherman Cooper inheritance, he had backed Gerald Ford in 1976 and George H. W. Bush in 1980 over the conservative ex-governor from California (not only that, he had privately ranked Reagan fourth among Republican candidates in 1980). But with Reagan near the peak of his popularity in 1984 and running against Walter Mondale, a liberal Minnesotan with little appeal for Kentucky swing voters—especially those conservative Democrats who were the key to his election—McConnell had done his utmost to associate himself with the top of the ticket. Whittle, the state party chairman, had made it a refrain to tell voters around the state that Reagan “needs Mitch” in Washington. McConnell’s team, lacking campaign chairmen in many of the state’s counties, had asked the Reagan campaign if its county chairmen could double in that role for McConnell.
While the Reagan campaign agreed to that request, the eagerness for association had not been mutual. When Reagan came to Louisville for one of his debates against Mondale, a visit McConnell’s campaign hyped as much as it could, the president referred to the candidate as “O’Donnell.” But that slight had done nothing to diminish the tug of Reagan’s coattails. It was a political scientist’s axiom: if the top of the ticket is pulling 60 percent or more of the vote, there is a coattail effect for candidates farther down the ticket. “It helped a lot,” says Whittle. “Anytime you have someone like Ronald Reagan anyplace that’s conservative, it’s going to help the party down the line, down to sheriff. I hate to say that’s the whole thing, but in order to win Kentucky, you’ve got to get the Republicans out,” and Reagan did that for McConnell. Hollenbach, McConnell’s 1977 opponent, is blunter: “If you take away . . . Ronald Reagan, there is no Mitch McConnell.”
It was because Reagan’s impact on McConnell’s election was so obvious that people attending the GOP election night party in Louisville were so startled when McConnell, in his victory speech, did not acknowledge the president at all. After seeking to bask in Reagan’s reflected glow throughout the campaign, McConnell did not want to share the spotlight. “He never mentioned Reagan. He never said, ‘I appreciate the margin Reagan provided,’ ” says Forgy, Reagan’s Kentucky campaign chairman. When reporters asked Forgy that night about McConnell’s victory, he was candid. “I said, ‘Hell, Reagan’s coattails were as long as a bedsheet.’ ” When quotes to this effect appeared in the press the next morning, Forgy heard from McConnell. “He called me the next day and said, ‘Don’t say that anymore,’ ” Forgy says. “He didn’t want the Democrats to pick up on the fact that he was a political fluke—that he didn’t get there by an intentional process.”
McConnell was at a loss about how to discuss his victory. When Tully Plesser, his former pollster, called him after the election to congratulate him, McConnell told him that the press was “hounding him” about what he thought was key to his victory, and said that he had credited Ailes’s ad, rather than Reagan. Plesser told McConnell that this answer was wrong. “I told him to say that you won because your positions coincided with the interests of the voters. Not because a very skilled and manipulative operative pulled a stunt on your behalf.”
McConnell took this advice. From that point on, his account of his election to the Senate left out both Reagan and Ailes. This omission did not endear him with Ailes, or with others who had worked so hard on that high-pressure campaign. “McConnell read too much into himself instead of Ailes in the first case and Reagan in the second,” says Tarrance. The lack of gratitude became more glaring a few years later when McConnell put out word that he was going to make his 1984 team reapply for the job for his reelection, just as he had decided to shop around for new advisers after his county campaigns.
Tarrance found this obnoxious in the extreme. “We suddenly saw a different McConnell,” he said. “He was arrogant and disloyal to the people that put him there.” Tarrance flew up from Houston to meet with McConnell but found him “cold and arrogant and not very loyal to his team. He really pissed me off.” Tarrance told McConnell that he wasn’t going to take the job even if offered, and left. A McConnell aide called him at the airport to get him to change his mind, to no avail. Ailes grudgingly decided to stay on and do some ads for McConnell, though in a reduced capacity. “Ailes and I had put together a pretty good team, and it was like McConnell was breaking his team,” says Tarrance. “I’ll fight to the death, but not for someone I don’t believe in. Roger . . . said, ‘I’ll go and do it,’ but we both lost a lot of respect for him.”
The irony was, even as McConnell was seeking to downplay Reagan’s role in his election, he was working to align himself with the conservative president. Leading up to and during his campaign, the Ripon Society’s political arm, the New Leadership Fund, had touted McConnell as a moderate Republican on the rise. But on arriving in Washington, he confounded such expectations. He supported Reagan’s plan to arm the Contras against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. He won conservative plaudits for pushing tort reform proposals (he came up with a “Sue for a Million Award” gimmick to highlight egregious tort claims). He broke with the agreement Huddleston and his fellow Democratic senator Wendell Ford had crafted for picking federal judges in Kentucky, a judicial nominating commission that McConnell decided was undermining his and Reagan’s prerogative to select conservative judges.
And, to the dismay of Jessica Loving and his other abortion rights allies in Louisville, McConnell flipped to the pro-life side on votes such as blocking Medicaid funding for abortions in cases of rape or incest. (Years later, Loving ran into McConnell at a cocktail party at the University of Louisville and told him, “By the way, I’ve never properly thanked you for what you did—you were the best elected official for the pro-choice issue,” to which, she recalls, “he got this pained look, his face got paler than usual and his lips got thinner than usual and he said, ‘You know, I don’t really want anyone to know that.’ ”)
Most strikingly, perhaps, McConnell took up the fight for his party against legislation that was championed by his fellow Kentucky senator, Wendell Ford, calling for expanding voter participation by allowing citizens to register to vote when getting their driver’s license. McConnell was candid about his reasons for opposing the “Motor Voter” bill—expanded voter registration helped Democrats, he said. He went so far as to suggest that low voter turnout was preferable in general: it is “a sign of the health of our democracy that people feel secure enough about the health of the country and about its leaders where they don’t have to obsess about politics all the time.” (A decade later, he would take the lead in pushing for voter identification requirements in the big 2002 election reform bill, thereby opening a major new front in his party’s push to limit access to the polls.)
McConnell had warned of a coming rightward tack as he prepared to run for Senate, telling Keith Runyon, a Courier-Journal editorial writer and husband of McConnell’s former aide Meme Sweets Runyon, that running for statewide office would require some adaptive coloration. “He told me he was going to change, because his electorate would change,” Runyon says. But in later explaining to Kleber, the historian, and Dyche, the authorized biographer, the sheer extent of his rightward shift on arriving in Washington, McConnell pointed to a different explanation. Even if he had not been a Ronald Reagan man, he had watched Reagan win, and win big. The Senate Republican caucus he was arriving in was notably more conservative than it had been in the previous session. “The Capitol Hill rookie did not need a political compass to notice that the GOP had enjoyed considerable electoral success as it had moved rightward. Having gone with that flow, he now found himself in Washington,” writes Dyche, paraphrasing McConnell. “Ronald Reagan . . . provided a powerful example that conservatism could work both in practice and politically” and McConnell “saw [conservatism’s] adherents endure both bad polls and bad press and still win.”
For someone who had almost lost, and didn’t want to come that close to losing again, the moral of the story was clear.
Back in 1981, after his reelection as Jefferson County executive, McConnell had called up Harvey Sloane, the Democrat just elected to his second term as mayor of Louisville, and suggested they meet for breakfast. Sloane invited him to his house. There, the two agreed that it would be in the interest of both to work together as much as possible, given their overlapping jurisdictions and their shared ambitions for higher office. “We talked about the fact that we both had other aspirations, that the worst thing to do was to have two chief executives bickering,” Sloane recalls. “It was: ‘We’re going to run for future office, so let’s not cut each other up.’ ” The agreement held. The two men worked together on the delicate task of pushing for a merger of the city and county governments, which failed twice despite their effort.
There was no expectation the truce would outlive their time in adjacent office, and it did not. In 1989, Sloane announced he would challenge McConnell for the Senate the next year. He was a formidable candidate with a singular profile: the Yale-educated scion of a wealthy Northeastern family who had sloughed off his privilege to serve as a surgeon in eastern Kentucky and later in South Vietnam before setting up a clinic in Louisville’s mostly African-American west end. After his two terms as mayor, he’d gone on to serve in McConnell’s old seat as county executive. His fair and slender good looks recalled actor Alan Alda or former New York mayor John Lindsay.
McConnell wasted no time in turning that distinctive profile against Sloane. At Fancy Farm, the traditional political picnic in far western Kentucky that kicks off every election season, McConnell ripped into his former Jefferson County counterpart, the man who’d invited him over to his house, as the “wimp from the East” whose “mommy left him a million dollars” and who had “come down here to save us from ourselves.” He mocked Sloane’s vacation home in a “foreign country.” (Unmentioned: it was in the sunny paradise of Canada.)
Meanwhile, back in Washington, McConnell set about establishing a voting record that would position him well against the dashing doctor, even if it meant going against his better instincts on public policy. He introduced an amendment to the defense spending bill to allow police to shoot down planes they suspected of carrying drugs (it was, he later admitted, one of the “most ridiculous” legislative gambits he’d ever engaged in). He voted for family leave legislation opposed by President Bush to deny Sloane the issue on the trail (just “chickened out,” he later said). He introduced legislation for a $21 billion, five-year health-care program that went nowhere on the Hill but gave him something to counter Sloane’s top issue, a call for national health insurance. “He had never done anything before or since to help people get health insurance,” says Sloane, looking back.
By the summer of 1990, McConnell had outraised Sloane by a 3–1 margin, but was unable to open up a comfortable lead in the polls. His team resorted to a classic dirty trick: a McConnell campaign staffer called in to a TV show that Sloane was appearing on and, pretending to be an adulatory liberal, thanked him for making Louisville a “nuclear-free zone.” This call spurred Sloane into a critique of nuclear power. In no time, the McConnell team had a tape of Sloane’s comments circulating in western Kentucky, where the biggest employer was the Paducah nuclear enrichment plant.
Still, Sloane was making it competitive—a late October poll showed him slicing McConnell’s lead in half, to 10 points. But McConnell had one more card to play. Late that month, his campaign leaked to the press that Sloane had renewed a prescription for his sleeping pills using his expired Drug Enforcement Administration registration number (he’d stopped practicing some years earlier). Sloane said he needed the pills to deal with severe pain in his hip and back (he had hip replacement surgery after the election). The state’s medical licensure board chided Sloane for the self-prescription but said no formal sanction was warranted. This did not stop McConnell, who, with Ailes still overseeing his television ads, put out brutal spots with images of vials and pills and a narrator forebodingly describing Sloane’s penchant for prescribing “mood-altering,” “powerful depressants” for himself at “double the safe dose without a legal permit.”
Nearly a quarter century later, Sloane recalls the mortification of having a reporter approach him on the street the day of the leak and asking him about the prescription. But in a way, he knew it was coming. “Nothing surprised me about Mitch. That’s the way he acts and campaigns and any mole he can uncover, he’s going to do it. It’s as negative as you can get,” he says. “He’s a guy without a lot of qualms in terms of how he conducts himself in campaigns.” Frank Greer, Sloane’s campaign manager, still seethes over the prescription attack. “This was something private that shouldn’t have been public, that was distorted, that had to do with family issues.” When Jim Cauley, a Democratic operative from Kentucky working on the campaign, saw McConnell’s ad with the pills, he knew the race was over. “Oh my God, I just thought we were toast,” he says. “Harvey is a good, honest human. That they did that to him pissed me off more than it surprised me. You take a guy who moves to Kentucky and opens up a health center in West Louisville—how do you make that bad? Well, they did. They take good people and make them bad.”
On Election Day, McConnell edged Sloane by under 5 percentage points. It would be the narrowest of all his reelections, and one he was particularly proud of, relays Dyche: McConnell “considered his campaign as the best run in America that year.” After all, he had won.
The pattern had been set. Every six years, McConnell would deploy pretty much the same strategy against whichever Democrat emerged to challenge him.
He would cast votes in Washington with the election foremost in mind. In 1996, running against former state attorney general and lieutenant governor Steve Beshear, he voted for an increase in the minimum wage even though it came without the business tax relief he thought any wage increase should be paired with. In 2008, he voted to override President George W. Bush’s veto of a massive farm bill—he had managed to slip a special tax provision for racehorse owners into the bill, and breaking with the deeply unpopular president would help McConnell’s reelection odds.
He would build up so massive a campaign account that it would scare off credible potential challengers who lacked the personal wealth or tolerance for the fund-raising that would be necessary to compete. In 2008, a difficult year for Republicans, McConnell came into January having already raised nearly $11 million, a whopping sum for so early in the season. The best the Democrats could come up with to take that on was Bruce Lunsford, who had lost two gubernatorial primaries but had the advantage of a personal fortune made in the nursing home business. Even that only went so far—by the final weeks of the race, when Lunsford was closing in the polls following the worldwide financial collapse, McConnell had nearly $6 million of the $18 million he had raised still on hand. Lunsford had raised only a third as much and had less than a quarter as much left to use.
And with this money at his disposal, McConnell would set about countering voters’ lukewarm feelings toward him by doing what had worked so well against Sloane: He would make his opponents unacceptable. And he would make them unacceptable in the same way: he would cast them, as he had done Sloane, as elitists out of touch with working-class Kentuckians, even if it meant attacking wealth and success in business in ways that might make many Republicans uncomfortable. He mocked Beshear for his fondness for foxhunting: “Can you imagine a working-class hero who wears a hunting pink and brandishes a riding crop?” He ran an ad attacking his 2002 challenger, Lois Combs Weinberg, the daughter of a former Kentucky governor, for owning a house in the Virgin Islands. He hit Lunsford for owning homes in multiple states and for questions about his health-care companies.
It was a remarkable strategy, year in and year out, given that McConnell was not exactly tilling the bluegrass himself. He was as citified as they come. His Kentucky home was a townhouse in Louisville a few blocks from a trendy commercial district with coffeehouses and shops that now carry “Louisville: The Gayest City in Kentucky” T-shirts. (In Washington, he lived in a Capitol Hill townhouse where neighbors saw him come out on a regular basis with a broom in hand to sweep away every last bit of leaf or twig from his stoop.) Early in his career, he had tooled around Louisville in a little sports car. And he was, by his 1996 race, a wealthy man from his marriage in 1993 to Elaine Chao, the daughter of a Taiwanese shipping magnate.
Yet the populist attacks kept coming, to the astonishment of his opponents. “He did all that shit about [Beshear] foxhunting, about him being an elitist—Steve had two or three million dollars to McConnell’s nine!” says Jim Cauley, who’d gone on to manage Beshear’s campaign. Lunsford shrugged about the attack on his wealth and business, even if McConnell was, by 2008, himself worth as much as $13 million. “In a state as poor as Kentucky, that’s an easy target,” Lunsford said. “Why wouldn’t you do that?” Lunsford said he never thought of countering by pointing out McConnell’s own fortune, because he knew that much of it had come from Chao.
Chao’s wealth was not only hard to use against McConnell, but his campaign was adept at deploying Chao, with her cheery demeanor, to humanize her dour husband. Lunsford couldn’t help but wonder if Chao was so present on the campaign trail in 2008 to highlight that he himself was single. “My initial reaction was to say, ‘He brought in the secretary of labor [Chao’s government position at that point] to keep his job.’ ” But he decided that “that was hard to do when a woman is as nice as she is. If she was considered a bitch, it would’ve been different.”
McConnell’s approach of rendering the opposition unacceptable could be discerned in other political races, as well. In 1997, in his third try, he was named head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee—the campaign organ for GOP senators—thus extending his hand into races across the country. And he was also becoming active in races back home, taking it upon himself to speed the state’s shift into the Republican column (a 1994 victory he engineered in a special election for an open congressional seat in a Democratic-leaning Kentucky district was a harbinger for the GOP sweep that fall). In 1998, he encouraged state legislator Ernie Fletcher to run for Congress against a Democrat who, as a public defender, had represented a man charged with raping and shooting a woman. The victim appeared in a Fletcher ad attacking his opponent for taking the case. The Kentucky Bar Association and Lexington Herald-Leader editorialists protested, but the ad swung the polls toward Fletcher, and McConnell later said, as related by Dyche, that he found it “legitimate” to attack a lawyer in that way. “I mean, I think you make a conscious decision in picking your clientele,” he said.
That same year, the NRSC, under McConnell’s leadership, provided funding for an ad before Election Day attacking the Democratic congressman Scotty Baesler, who was running against Jim Bunning, the former major league pitcher, for Kentucky’s other Senate seat. The ad cited Baesler’s vote for the North American Free Trade Agreement—with a swarthy Mexican actor saying, “Muchas gracias, Señor Baesler.” This scene was followed by the line, “But he also voted to give China special trade privileges, even though they’re shuttin’ out Kentucky-made products,” accompanied with Chinese music and, in Cantonese: “Thank you, Scotty Baesler.”
Six years later, Bunning was flailing in his race against Daniel Mongiardo, a state senator and physician from eastern Kentucky. On a bus caravan around the state with Bunning eight days before Election Day, Republican state senate president David Williams, a longtime McConnell ally, called Mongiardo, who was unmarried, “limp-wristed” and a “switch hitter.” Another Republican senator, Elizabeth Tori, said she questioned whether “the word ‘man’ applies to” Mongiardo. Tori later said that if listeners took this to refer to Mongiardo’s sexuality, “so be it.”
By his own admission in later accounts, McConnell advised Bunning against rebuffing these comments. McConnell urged a redoubling of attacks on Mongiardo in the final days of the campaign on the issue that had emerged as a rallying cry for Republicans in that year’s presidential election: same-sex marriage. The issue was also boiling at the state level, with a question on the Kentucky ballot to amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage. That Mongiardo himself supported that amendment did not stop McConnell. He conceived of an ad that linked Mongiardo and John Kerry in their opposition to a national constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
Looking back, Mongiardo has no doubt that the Williams and Tori comments and same-sex marriage ads were an organized effort to “make people in Kentucky believe I was gay because I was single at the time . . . they were almost directly saying, this guy is gay—don’t vote for him.” And he has no doubt who was behind it. “Anything that happened in the Republican Party in the last twenty-five years in Kentucky, Mitch McConnell has been the orchestrator of. He has been the puppet master. Nothing happens in this state without his direct knowledge, his control. And while he’s good at keeping his hands off things, no question his fingerprints were all over it.”
The whole spectacle flabbergasted Mongiardo. He had closed to a tie in the polls with the increasingly erratic Bunning, who had at one point declared that Mongiardo resembled Saddam Hussein’s sons and at another point confessed to no longer following the news. Then came Williams’s and Tori’s comments, and there was Mongiardo, campaigning in front of a large crowd at a shopping center, when a TV reporter marched right up to him and asked him point-blank if he was gay. “I answered it truthfully, honestly. I just said, ‘No.’ ” What astonished him was how blatant it was. “They were desperate—they saw the direction the campaign was going in. They couldn’t take a chance on doing it quietly. And obviously they were right—it worked as far as politics goes, so, you’ve got to hand it to them.”
Mongiardo still runs his practice in Hazard. He is now married, and he and his wife have two children.
By the first decade of the twenty-first century, Mitch McConnell was claiming some big Kentucky marks. In 2002, he had broken John Sherman Cooper’s record for the biggest margin of victory in a Senate election in Kentucky, in a race that he declared he had run “stronger than mule piss,” better even than the “first-class ass-kicking” he had delivered to Beshear in 1996. In 2009, he had surpassed Wendell Ford’s tenure as the longest-serving senator in the state’s history. His work on behalf of other Kentucky Republicans, particularly in formerly Democratic western Kentucky, had put all but one of the state’s six congressional districts in Republican hands. (However, Kentucky lagged behind the Republican ascendance in the rest of the South, with its House of Representatives still in Democratic control and only a single Republican governor since 1971.)
It was an unlikely record of electoral success, says Don Vish, a Louisville lawyer who first met McConnell when they worked together on the 1966 primary campaign against Gene Snyder. “You would never think he was headed in the direction he ended up,” Vish says. “You think of political people with great charisma and smiles and pals and everybody’s a friend and hail-fellow-well-met—well, this is quite unfriendly territory for him. It’s like finding a plant that is growing in soil that shouldn’t really be able to support the plant. Mitch is fairly urbane and looks and talks like he is from the city, and Kentucky has always regarded Louisville like a foreign country. He’s always had so many strikes against him—he’s like a column of numbers that don’t add up—you always get more in the bottom than there was at the top.”
To what end? McConnell’s mentor Cooper had left his mark in any number of areas—standing up to Joe McCarthy; resisting a push to remove the Fifth Amendment’s protection for reluctant witnesses against self-incrimination; restraining U.S. military involvement in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand during the Vietnam War. Another legendary Kentucky senator, Democratic majority leader Alben Barkley, had helped power New Deal legislation through Congress before resigning his leadership post in protest in a dispute with Franklin D. Roosevelt over tax legislation. Long before that, of course, Henry Clay had brokered the great compromises that sought to resolve the growing nation’s burgeoning conflict over slavery.
McConnell had developed his own area of expertise, an issue he cared about deeply. It was not always the most popular thing to be seen fighting for, which might have seemed at odds with his perennial fixation on setting himself up for victory in the next election cycle. But at its essence, the issue was utterly consistent with that goal.