Bob Graham, the idiosyncratic Florida Democrat perhaps best remembered for keeping minutely detailed daily journals, joined the Senate in 1987, just two years after Mitch McConnell. Yet so much did McConnell keep to himself, and to his own party, that Graham had barely gotten to know his colleague from Kentucky—until, that is, they both had heart surgery within three days in early 2003 at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
McConnell had gone for a stress test recommended by the Capitol physician, and had failed it, leading to cardiac catheterization and instructions to undergo triple bypass surgery, pronto. Graham was there to have nonemergency surgery on his aortic heart valve. And in the week of convalescence that followed, they became postsurgical kindred spirits. Day after day, they walked up and down the hallways together to regain their strength. And they spent a lot of time talking, about, as Graham recalls it, “our families, what had brought us into politics, what we hoped to accomplish in politics.”
Somewhat to his surprise, Graham liked his fellow patient. “I developed a very warm feeling toward Mitch,” he says. “Mitch is by nature a little aloof—he doesn’t have what some in politics have, that natural affinity and warmth for people. When I got to know him, I found him to be a more open and sympathetic and friendly person than under previous circumstances.”
Yet that week away from the Sturm und Drang on Capitol Hill was not transformative in the broader sense. Both senators returned to a Senate more riven with every month. The upper chamber of the legislature had long prided itself on being less defined by partisan markers than the House of Representatives. The smaller size of the Senate gave it a clubby solidarity that the House lacked, its members served for longer terms and typically longer tenures than their counterparts in the House, giving them more time to get to know each other. They also represented entire states, encouraging a broadness of perspective that a House member representing a narrowly defined district might be less likely to have.
That singularity had been fading for some time, though. The parties had been sorting themselves out geographically and ideologically. One was far less likely than three decades prior to encounter a Northern liberal Republican senator or a conservative Southern Democrat. The increased cost of campaigning meant more time spent fund-raising and catering to party leaders or deep-pocketed funders who did not look so kindly on cross-aisle forays. Cable news had not helped matters. And the growing hegemony of the thirty-second ad as the ultimate campaign weapon had spurred senators to offer irrelevant amendments on bills to force the opposition to cast votes on hot-button issues that could be construed in unflattering ways in an eventual negative ad.
The evolution of the chamber could be traced in institutional increments, notably to the rise in the use of the filibuster—which in the past had been resorted to almost exclusively for the rare historic conflict, as on civil rights legislation—to stall or block routine legislation and nominations, to the point where it became necessary to have sixty votes to accomplish even the most rudimentary business. And it could be traced in episodes where the breakdown in comity was on display, from the judicial confirmation hearings for Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the ads run in 2002 against Georgia Democrat Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam War veteran, by his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, that linked Cleland to images of Osama bin Laden and declared Cleland did not have the “courage to lead” because he voted against Republicans on the structure of the new Department of Homeland Security. Chambliss won Cleland’s seat, only heightening the partisan ill will in the chamber to which McConnell and Graham returned after their bipartisan recuperation in January 2003.
And it would get much worse. In 2007, after Democrats reclaimed majorities in both chambers in 2006 and Mitch McConnell ascended to become his party’s leader in the Senate, the use of the filibuster soared—when Democrats were in the Senate minority during the Reagan years and George W. Bush years, there were, respectively, about 40 and 60 “cloture motions” to break or preempt filibusters filed per session, one commonly used measure of obstructionism. With the Republicans back in the minority in 2007 under McConnell’s leadership, cloture motions spiked to 140 per session. By 2009, when the Democrats gained back the White House, the use of the filibuster spread, far more than ever before, to block presidential nominees of even the most pedestrian offices. “The idea of a filibuster as the expression of a minority that felt so intensely that it would pull out all the stops to block something pushed by the majority went by the boards,” wrote Ornstein, the congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, in 2014. “This was a pure tactic of obstruction, trying to use up as much of the Senate’s most precious commodity—time—as possible to screw up the majority’s agenda.”
By 2011, the Senate and the rest of the gridlocked government found themselves on the brink of a national credit default, a brink reached again in another partisan standoff two years later, with the added bonus of a two-week-long shutdown of the federal government.
Bob Graham left the Senate in 2005, two years before McConnell took the helm of the Republican caucus. And from the vantage of southern Florida, Graham struggled to understand why the veteran senator whose company he had enjoyed in the hospital hallways had allowed Senate politics to come to this pass—in particular, why he had allowed the ideological wing of his caucus, a camp with so little regard for custom and comity that it often bordered on the gleefully nihilistic, to acquire such sway in Washington. Graham remembered other Republican leaders he had served alongside, and found it hard to believe they wouldn’t have responded differently.
“I don’t think that if the leader were of the ilk of a Bob Dole, if he had a sense of history and used history as a guide, that it would have happened like this,” Graham says. “I don’t know why they have fallen into what may bring short-term gains and maybe even some pleasure, but which maybe on a longer view of history is going to be very damning. . . . He is accommodating his hottest members, and they have not demonstrated any responsibility to the future or to how their actions are going to be seen in that long procession of time. I guess Mitch has made a decision that this wasn’t a battle that he was going to take on.”
The only thing Mitch McConnell wanted as much as winning elections for the Senate was winning elections within the Senate. Let other senators dream of running for president. For him, the dream was running the institution he had been revering since he was a boy. In this ambition, he was following the example of countless Southern politicians who had made the Senate their home in decades past, capitalizing on their own longevity in safe seats and the Senate’s seniority system to dominate the institution well into the twentieth century. The Senate, wrote veteran New York Times congressional correspondent William S. White in the mid-1950s, was “peculiarly Southern both in flavor and structure,” so much so that it had become, essentially, “the South’s unending revenge . . . for Gettysburg.” With its very Southern emphasis on courtliness and decorum—all those rules that “imposed a verbal impersonality on debate to ensure civility and formality,” as LBJ biographer Robert Caro puts it—the Senate was the one political venue where McConnell’s detached manner was not only not a hindrance, it was an asset. Here, formality conveyed authority, not discomfort.
Where other aspiring politicians steeped themselves in the legends of the White House, McConnell had immersed himself in the lore of the legislative branch’s upper chamber. “He’s a great student of the institution,” says Dave Schiappa, who until 2013 served as McConnell’s chief aide on the Senate floor. “He loves the history, loves to read everything he can get his hands on.” This study wasn’t just sentimental; it was geared toward learning the precedents and procedures that governed the chamber, a command that had helped McConnell’s Southern forebears gain control over the institution. The lords of the Senate were his idols, and he wanted to be counted among them: “He’s made a whole career of being the master of [the] Senate—the Republican version of LBJ, without the physical attributes,” says Al Cross, a longtime political reporter with the Courier-Journal who now works at the University of Kentucky.
Partly, the drive to be majority leader was just a matter of ticking off the top item on the checklist. “There are things that he wants to accomplish in his career—while he’s been majority whip, he’s never been majority leader, and that’s something he wants to have on his resume,” says Lula Davis, a former chief aide to Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader. But one former Senate caucus leader notes that it goes deeper than that. Leadership in the chamber comes with its own kind of power high, one that seems to have held an especially strong allure for introverts like McConnell and his eventual counterpart, Reid. “The intensity, the extraordinary rush to be in those positions, it’s addictive,” the former caucus leader said. “It’s the extraordinary exhilaration that comes with having these positions. . . . The intensity is almost like a drug.”
McConnell had tried twice for the job of National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman, losing both times to Phil Gramm of Texas, before getting the post in 1997. As successful as he was at fund-raising and as much goodwill as he’d earned from his colleagues for leading the fight against campaign finance reform, his record at the helm of the campaign committee was mixed. In 1998, the Senate balance remained unchanged despite Democrats having to defend more seats, and in 2000 the Democrats gained a net total of four seats. In 2001, the Senate Republican caucus voted to replace him with Bill Frist, of Tennessee.
This setback did not dissuade McConnell from continuing his climb. He set about lining up votes for the next election for majority whip, the second-ranking spot in leadership. He had in his favor the gratitude for his stand against McCain-Feingold, and his performance in the 1995 sexual harassment investigation of fellow Republican Bob Packwood, of Oregon. In the role of Ethics Committee chairman, McConnell had come down hard on Packwood while taking the heat from Democrats for not making the investigation more transparent. Working against his ascension, though, was the fact that plenty of Republicans had not warmed to their tightly wound Kentucky colleague. Sure, there were occasional flashes of a dry, almost English sense of humor. That said, McConnell was, as his former chief of staff observed to the Atlantic in 2011, “the least personal politician I’ve ever been around.”
But McConnell had a wingman. Bob Bennett, the towering senator from Utah who had stood almost alone with McConnell in opposing the anti-flag-burning amendment in 1995, would head out into the Republican caucus, one by one, feeling out senators about whether they might be inclined to support his friend over Larry Craig of Idaho, the other aspirant for the spot, who had not yet seen his career ended by a flirtatious encounter with an undercover male policeman in a bathroom at the Minneapolis airport. “He would go through every Republican in the Senate and say, ‘This one doesn’t like me,’ ‘You go see this one, I’ve talked to him as far as I can go, if I push any further I’ll push him over, you go see him,’ ” says Bennett. “He knew every single one of them.”
The wingman would head out. “I would size up the opposition. Many times it was ‘I really don’t like Mitch that much, but I really don’t like Larry.’ You had to be careful—you can’t be blatant about it. You go up and say, ‘There’s a leadership fight coming up, how do you feel between the two of them?’ ‘Well, you know, Mitch has his strengths,’ and then you get them talking about Mitch’s strengths. . . . Then I get the things he doesn’t like about Mitch. Pretty soon I get the sense of how he feels about Mitch. I go back and say, ‘He didn’t like what you did here, you need to have a conversation about this, you need to do that.’ So when Mitch would go see him, he was fore-armed with the intelligence I’d given him: ‘Senator, you probably don’t like what I did on such and such, I owe you an explanation on that.’ So the door opened and Mitch would come back and say, ‘Okay, we got him.’ ” When necessary, Bennett would try to undermine the opposition—subtly, of course. For instance, Bennett says, “John Warner [the former senator from Virginia] would say, ‘It’s far too early, I don’t want to discuss it,’ and I’d say, ‘Okay, that’s not a no,’ and I’d keep at it: ‘John, did you hear this [about Craig]?’ and he’d say, ‘I didn’t like that.’ ” To which Bennett would respond, “ ‘Well, there’s always Mitch. . . .’ ”
McConnell and Bennett started this process with a year and a half to go before the vote would be held, a lesson McConnell told Bennett he had learned from Bob Livingston, the Louisiana congressman who had lined up all the support he needed to become House Speaker long before Newt Gingrich stepped down. “McConnell said, ‘Livingston didn’t get the speakership because he was the best candidate—he got it because he was the first.’ ” The early start paid off. By the time the summer of 2002 rolled around with the leadership elections looming later that year, McConnell sat down with Craig and presented him with a list of all the commitments he’d gotten. “Mitch was elected whip unanimously and Larry Craig decided he was going to do something else, because Mitch had it all lined up,” Bennett says.
Soon afterward, McConnell and Bennett started using the same tactics to ready a run for the final rung, Republican leader—which at that point, in 2005, was also majority leader. They were well aware that Bill Frist had imposed a two-term limit on himself and would be gone after 2006—more aware than anyone else, says Bennett. “I don’t think anyone else was thinking about what to do when Bill Frist leaves. Well, Mitch was thinking the first day Frist was chosen [as leader in 2002], what do we do when Frist leaves. We were talking about it. He knew exactly what he had to say to each senator, what he had to do to neutralize the ones opposed to him.”
This calculus was rooted in McConnell’s acute political instincts. Even if he wasn’t close to that many of his colleagues, he knew where they were coming from, what they worried about, what they needed. “He knows what people are going to do long before they themselves see it,” says Judd Gregg, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire. On Election Night in 2004, when Lincoln Chafee—whose father had stood with McConnell and Bennett in opposing the flag-burning amendment—saw George W. Bush holding on for a second term, it occurred to him that his reelection campaign in 2006 as a Republican in Rhode Island was going to be a whole lot tougher with Bush, who’d lost Chafee’s state by 20 points, still in the White House.
The next day, McConnell called his liberal colleague to reassure him about his prospects two years hence—and to make sure he wasn’t toying with switching parties, as his fellow liberal New Englander James Jeffords of Vermont had done three years earlier. “I was considering options—do I change parties, what do I do here, and he called me right away and said, ‘Linc, I know what you’re thinking. We want you to stay a Republican.’ He was a mind reader that way. We all know you’re going to have a rough race, and we’ll get you the money we need.’ ” And they did. Asked by McConnell what sort of assistance he could use in Rhode Island, Chafee mentioned the hulking old bridge from the mainland to Jamestown, which the cash-strapped state had been meaning to take down for a dozen years. It cost $15 million. McConnell “immediately got it for me,” and the bridge was detonated at last. There was a road project in Warwick that had run out of money, which required another $9 million. McConnell got that, too. It irked many in the party, going to such lengths for a Republican who had voted against Bush’s tax cuts, the invasion of Iraq, and Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, and had even refused to support Bush’s reelection in 2004. “There are many that would rather just purge the party, but he knew it was all about the math—he was going to need a Republican to keep the majority,” Chafee says.
So determined was McConnell to hold the Senate majority in 2006, regardless of the cost, that in September of that year, with polls looking bleak for Republicans, he sought out Bush in a private meeting in the Oval Office to ask him to withdraw troops from Iraq to improve the party’s chances in that fall’s midterm election. Publicly, McConnell had been staunchly defending the war, but according to Bush, McConnell was so focused on the coming election cycle that he was willing to challenge Bush on the primary mission of his presidency. As Bush recounts in his memoir, McConnell told him, “Mr. President, your unpopularity is going to cost us control of the Congress.” Bush said he responded: “Well, Mitch, what do you want me to do about it?” McConnell, in Bush’s account, answered: “Mr. President, bring some troops home from Iraq.” Bush’s answer, as he recalls: “Mitch, I believe our presence in Iraq is necessary to protect America, and I will not withdraw troops unless military conditions warrant.” He would, he told McConnell, “set troop levels to achieve victory in Iraq, not victory at the polls.”
In the end, though, it was to no avail. Chafee lost his reelection, one of six incumbent Republican senators to lose that fall, giving the Democrats control of the chamber by a single vote. With his and Bennett’s groundwork laid, McConnell would be elected Republican leader, but not majority leader.
And as diligent as his pursuit of his party’s top spot had been, the effort required to attain it suggested that he would be able to rely less on sheer collegial affection to feel secure in his place than some of his predecessors had. It was a vulnerability that, if felt keenly enough, would have implications for managing the burgeoning right wing of his caucus, whose loyalties would come at a cost far greater than scattered millions for an old rusting bridge.
There was a taut silence in the room that day in the summer of 2007 as the Senate Republican caucus absorbed what their leader had just said. Mitch McConnell had assembled the caucus behind closed doors to address a major setback, the passage of a sweeping ethics reform package with barely any input from Republicans. The Senate had passed an ethics bill that did contain plenty of points of agreement between McConnell and Harry Reid, the new majority leader, but that bill had never made it to a conference committee, where it could be melded with the version passed by the House. The reason? Jim DeMint, the first-term, hard-right Republican from South Carolina, had placed a hold on the appointment of conferees, claiming that he could not trust the committee not to water down provisions he had gotten into the Senate bill requiring much greater transparency for earmarks. So House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Reid had figured out a way to pass a bill on their own, based primarily on the House version, and written to the liking of the Democrats.
Without naming DeMint, McConnell alluded to the hold and faulted it for leaving the Republicans in the lurch. It was an opaque allusion, but not so opaque that many members did not realize that McConnell had just called out DeMint in front of his colleagues. DeMint flared up and denied that he had forced the bad result, recalls Bob Bennett.
In a quiet but “very cold” voice, McConnell replied to the effect of: Yes. Yes, you did.
That’s not fair, protested DeMint.
No, Jim. You’re the one who did this, McConnell continued. You’re responsible for this outcome. . . . We did this to ourselves.
There had never been anything like it. “It was the only time I have ever seen Mitch McConnell deal with a colleague in that kind of manner,” Bennett says. “It was just a single sentence, but it left the whole room in stone-cold silence, because it was, ‘All right, this is a rebuke that really matters.’ ”
The confrontation helped cement the rivalry between McConnell and the South Carolinian who had arrived in the Senate in 2005 burning to take on not only Democrats but Republicans complicit in deficit-widening travesties such as the Medicare drug benefit supported by McConnell and signed by President Bush. DeMint was at the helm of a small but vocal group of senators who interpreted their party’s loss of the Senate as punishment for the party’s drift from budget-cutting orthodoxy. They had little patience for institutional niceties, among them deference to leadership.
What was most notable about the confrontation, though, was what Bennett stressed in recounting it—its singularity. McConnell was willing to give DeMint opaque reprimands behind closed doors on matters of institutional prerogative—senators’ right to award earmarks, or relying on seniority in making assignments to the influential Appropriations Committee, another issue where McConnell resisted DeMint. (“Jim, you can’t change the Senate,” he chided, according to DeMint.)
But when it came to the big issues, what McConnell would project to the public was the spectacle of a leader submitting to the gravitational pull of DeMint and the wing of the party he represented. Back home in Kentucky after the 2006 election, McConnell had predicted a productive session ahead of a meeting of the Farm Bureau. “Gridlock is not my first choice,” he said. “My first choice is to accomplish things for the country. You all didn’t send us up there just to play games and engage in sparring rounds.” To his national audience, though, McConnell was sounding a more defiant tone, as if already seeking to mollify the DeMints within his caucus. “It takes sixty votes to do just about everything in the Senate. Forty-nine is a robust minority,” he told the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “Nothing will leave the Senate that doesn’t have our imprint. We’ll either stop it if we think it’s bad for America, or shape it, hopefully right of center.”
Of course, it takes sixty votes to do just about everything only if the minority opts to use the power of the filibuster for, well, just about everything. And McConnell held true to his promise to Hewitt to do just that. He led his caucus to block Democratic efforts to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25, forcing them to add business tax breaks to the bill. They blocked Democratic legislation to start drawing down troops in Iraq. They blocked bills to make it easier for unions to organize workers, to provide in-state tuition at public universities for undocumented students, to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. In 2008, McConnell forced Senate clerks to read the entirety of a 492-page Democratic bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a process that took ten hours. Harry Reid linked this tactic to a Republican memo, given him by a lobbyist, that outlined the Republican plan to delay the bill before killing it to stoke voter upset at the Democrats about high energy prices. “You couldn’t make anything up more cynical,” Reid said on the Senate floor.
McConnell’s prominence in leading the opposition to all these measures made it all the more conspicuous when, on the legislation most important to President Bush, he vanished. Back in 2006, McConnell had supported the comprehensive reform of the nation’s immigration system that Bush had been seeking as part of his effort to salvage some “compassionate conservatism” and build his party’s appeal among Latino voters. Now, in 2007, Bush was making another try, this time with Harry Reid and John McCain as bipartisan allies. McConnell pronounced the bill an improvement over the 2006 version, but implacable immigration opponents, led by DeMint, did not agree, decrying the bill’s “amnesty” for illegal aliens. When the bill came to the floor the crucial vote to open consideration of the legislation, McConnell’s second and third in command, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Trent Lott of Mississippi, both from states with strong anti-immigrant sentiment, voted to allow consideration. So did Lindsey Graham, who was facing reelection the year following in DeMint’s home state, South Carolina.
McConnell waited until enough votes had been cast to make it clear that the bill was going to fall short of the necessary sixty, and then voted against it as well. In an unusual withdrawal, the Republican leader did not even speak on the floor until after the bill’s fate was known. He was, Roll Call reported, “a virtual no-show.” Conservative columnist Robert Novak went further, calling it a “truly major failure of leadership.” McConnell might have been willing to stand up to DeMint in private on a matter of importance to congressional insiders, but here, on an issue of far greater visibility and with his own reelection looming, he buckled to the wave DeMint and his camp had generated.
The stakes were even higher a year later, in 2008, when McConnell faced off against DeMint yet again. World financial markets were in free fall and Bush’s Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, readied a massive, $700 billion bailout for the banks to cushion the collapse. Once again, DeMint rallied opposition. His conservative counterparts in the House blocked the package, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging by 778 points. This market gyration helped drive home the gravity of the situation, and the rescue would pass on a second try. Over in the Senate, McConnell opted to stand against DeMint. But his willingness to act responsibly and get the package passed was grudging. Democratic staff knowledgeable about the negotiations say that McConnell’s contribution to the talks was, essentially, “How many votes do you really need?”—the implication being that, even with a Republican president making the request for the rescue and with crisis looming, he did not want to make any more members of his caucus go along with it than necessary. A third of Senate Republicans voted against the rescue.
Still, it seemed conceivable that with the immediate crisis past, McConnell may have reassessed his accommodating position toward the DeMint wing. Their recklessness had come close to exacerbating the biggest global financial emergency in decades. McConnell had survived his reelection and wouldn’t face voters again for another six years. And his party had just suffered its second consecutive thumping at the polls, leaving it without control of either the White House or Congress and underscoring the need for a period of rebuilding and self-examination.
A sign that he might be inclined to embrace such sobriety came with his Christmastime request to Richard Lugar, his veteran colleague from Indiana, now considered among the more moderate members of the caucus. He hoped Lugar would officially renominate him as caucus leader. “I got the call out in Indianapolis. He anticipated a challenge, and he was hopeful I would give a rousing speech nominating him for the new caucus—which I was delighted to do,” Lugar recalls. “He sensed that those forces were closing in on him, not to mention the rest of the party . . . and he thought I had the respect of the colleagues, that if I really took the thing in hand . . . that I was going to settle it.” And indeed, while there were “murmurs of some potential difficulties,” Lugar says, “after I spoke and someone called for a vote, he was unanimously elected.”
The retention of his leadership post, helped by one of the party’s old guard, might have led to a broader resolve on McConnell’s part to take on those “forces closing in” on his party.
Quite the opposite.
Jeff Merkley had known Congress when it functioned. He had been a Senate intern in the 1970s and worked as a congressional aide and a staffer for the Congressional Budget Office in the 1980s, which had left him with a “love for institution, a respect for it.” “I knew that senators may have carried different party labels, but they generally liked each other and generally wanted to work together. They realized that for twenty percent [of the issues], that’s what campaigns were about, but they could get a lot done addressing the other issues. What was particularly different was that there wasn’t an effort to just immobilize the Senate.”
Now, in early 2009, as a newly elected Democratic senator from Oregon, Merkley often had the rookie’s inglorious task of serving as the presiding officer who must watch over the chamber for hours on end while senators hold forth to a chamber empty but for tourists and pages refilling water glasses. And for much of that time in 2009, it seemed, the person whom Merkley found himself listening to was Mitch McConnell. Day after day, “he would just reel off the most partisan talking points possible, with no indication of advocacy or working together to solve the most pressing problems of the country,” Merkley said. Listening to McConnell, he says, “crystallized” what had gone wrong in the Senate since he’d been there as a young man. “It’s just a tremendous problem for America to have a perpetual partisan campaign, the inability to say, ‘The elections are over, let’s work together to solve some of these big issues.’ ”
That was not the path McConnell had chosen. In the midwinter of 2009, as Barack Obama assumed the presidency and the country was losing six hundred thousand jobs per month, McConnell assembled his caucus for a retreat in West Virginia and laid out a strategy that focused a whole lot more on undermining the former than addressing the latter. As Bennett recalls, “Mitch said, ‘We have a new president with an approval rating in the seventy percent area. We do not take him on frontally. We find issues where we can win, and we begin to take him down, one issue at a time. We create an inventory of losses, so it’s Obama lost on this, Obama lost on that. And we wait for the time where the image has been damaged to the point where we can take him on. We recognize the American people—even those who do not approve of him—want him to have success, are hopeful.’ ” In other words: wait out Americans’ hopefulness in a dire moment for the country until it curdles to disillusionment.
This strategy meant discouraging the sort of cross-partisan goodwill that Obama had held out as one of the central promises of his presidency, and that seemed within reach amid the celebratory feelings around his historic inauguration. So when New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg, who had served as a sort of untitled consigliere to McConnell, informed him that he was considering Obama’s invitation to become his secretary of commerce, McConnell did not congratulate him. “I went and told him and he understood I was going to do it, but he clearly thought it was a bad idea,” Gregg says. “It was obvious from his body language that he thought it was a bad idea.” Shortly afterward, Gregg withdrew his nomination, citing “irresolvable conflicts” with Obama.
The strategy meant seeking leverage, at a time when diminished Republican ranks would seem to offer little of it, by bogging down the machinery of government on even the most mundane matters. In the first weeks of 2009, a big omnibus bill to expand wilderness protection that had been cobbled together for months, with provisions to please just about every senator and state, was held up for days as Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma protested the measure. A few weeks later, Coburn was at the center of the attempted delay of another measure with broad support, a bill to reform the credit card industry—he managed to attach an unrelated amendment lifting the ban on loaded firearms in national parks, forcing Democrats to choose between accepting a pet issue of the National Rifle Association and postponement of reforms of an industry that had figured in the nation’s consumer debt crisis. Most vulnerable to delays were the administration’s nominations—Republicans mounted filibusters against obscure figures such as a deputy secretary for the Interior Department and counsel to the Commerce Department. By year’s end, seventy-five nominees were still hung up in the Senate.
The strategy meant seizing on the first signs of weakness—“issues where we can win,” as McConnell had put it—which is what Republicans did after Obama ordered, on his first day in office, the closure within one year of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Fomenting controversy around that issue was McConnell’s brainchild, says his friend Bob Bennett. “He came to us and said, ‘I’ve found the issue where he’s going to lose: Guantanamo. We’re going to oppose the closing of Guantanamo. There’s a majority out there that do not want Guantanamo closed. We can talk about taking terrorists and putting them on American soil and terrorists causing prison riots and things of that kind.’ ” Senate Republicans spent a lot of time talking about that, and by the time the administration proposed in late 2009 moving some detainees to a federal prison in Illinois, the public was primed for a backlash. Guantanamo remained open and became a glaring emblem of Obama’s unfulfilled promise. “It was the beginning of, ‘Maybe this guy doesn’t walk on water,’ ” says Bennett.
Above all, though, the strategy meant holding the Republican caucus together to deny Obama Republican votes on his highest-priority initiatives. The Republicans would not follow the lead of the Democrats who, in the early years of George W. Bush’s administration, had voted for his two rounds of tax cuts and the Iraq war resolution. Instead, they would form a cohesive opposition force, regardless of the inducements thrown their way. Achieving such unity was, on one level, not difficult to achieve—life in the minority lends itself to solidarity. “In the minority it’s easier to maintain control of your caucus,” says Lula Davis, the former chief aide to Harry Reid. “If you don’t stay together, you don’t have a chance in hell of getting anything done.” Still, it was hard to imagine someone better suited to keeping members in line than Mitch McConnell. He had his fund-raising largesse. He had a top-notch staff to keep on top of things. And he had the political astuteness gained from years in the Senate—and years prior studying it—to know what he needed to do to keep members from straying when it mattered. “He’s a good listener and can read his members very well,” says Davis. “It was fascinating, watching him shepherd them and keep them together all the time. . . . He understands every issue to the nth degree.”
There were, of course, weapons at a leader’s disposal—committee assignments, campaign cash, and the like—but rarely did McConnell apply them in the blunt fashion of Lyndon Johnson. The pressure was more modulated than that, says Bennett. “He very, very seldom lowers the leadership hammer, very seldom said, ‘I’m the leader and I want your support in this, you’ve got to be with me.’ But when he does, he’s very, very firm, and makes it extremely difficult for you to say no, because he doesn’t do it in a routine fashion, so that when he does do it, you know this is really serious and important and if I disappoint Mitch this time, he’s going to remember.”
At times, Bennett says, he’d gone to McConnell and said, “Look, I can’t be with you because of stuff at home, or this is a really dumb idea and my conscience won’t let me,” to which McConnell would respond, “That’s okay, Bob.” But that allowance comes with a cost: “He lets you off the hook enough times so that when he comes to you and says, ‘I need you,’ you have to,” says Bennett. “He’ll say, ‘Bob, you’re my best friend in the caucus and everyone knows it—if you don’t come with me on this one . . . ’ How do you say no?” So implicit was the pressure that its traces often weren’t immediately discernible after the fact, Bennett says. “I have never seen him say, ‘If you do this, I’ll see to that.’ But some people will say, ‘How did [this or that senator] get on [the Finance Committee]? Why did Mitch do this or that? I can’t understand,’ . . . and I’ll say, ‘Wait a minute, look back at this [vote], and this, and this,’ and they’ll say, ‘Ah, okay.’ ”
On the first big Senate vote of Obama’s presidency, the unit held—almost. The White House and congressional Democrats had filled the economic recovery package with $288 billion in tax cuts, more than they wanted and more than many economists thought useful for effective stimulus, in an effort to win Republican backing. The inducements managed to win zero House Republicans and only three in the Senate—far short of the consensus Obama wanted for his big measure to address the economic collapse, but just enough to get the bill passed and enough to allow Democrats to claim, in a bit of a stretch, that the bill was “bipartisan.”
Mitch McConnell would make sure that did not happen again.
Max Baucus, the senior senator from Montana and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, had a list. From the start of the Obama administration, Baucus had taken it upon himself to lay the groundwork for one of the new president’s top priorities, achieving near universal health coverage in a country where some 50 million lacked insurance. Baucus developed a white paper sketching out a legislative framework, and a long list of Republican senators who he thought might support the bill.
Why bother with the list? After all, by the time Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter switched parties in late April from Republican to Democrat, the Democrats had enough votes in the Senate to break a filibuster. But Baucus knew how much Obama spoke about transcending partisan divides—and he knew how important it was to get bipartisan backing for major changes in social policy. Implementation and national acceptance would be hard without some measure of consensus. After all, Social Security and Medicare had both gotten more than a dozen Republican votes in the Senate. Even in the more polarized twenty-first century, the Medicare drug benefit had passed in 2003 with a dozen Democratic votes—including Baucus’s.
Baucus had reason to believe he might get some Republican support. After all, the framework he was drawing up was modeled on proposals that had been offered by the conservative Heritage Foundation and by Republicans seeking an alternative to Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan in 1993. Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, had signed similar legislation into law in Massachusetts. Baucus’s approach did not seek to replace private insurers with government-run, “single-payer” insurance like Medicare, but rather sought to cover the uninsured via private insurance, with subsidies and a mandate requiring individuals to get coverage to make the system work.
And at first, Baucus was getting encouraging responses. No small number of Republicans told him they might just be able to sign on to his plan, particularly if he left out the “public option,” a government-run insurance plan to be offered alongside private plans.
As the spring of 2009 wore on and as the debate began in earnest on Baucus’s committee and several others in both chambers, the Republicans who’d earlier expressed interest started falling away. By summer, Baucus was left communicating with three Republicans—Mike Enzi of Wyoming, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Enzi was the most conservative of the three and Snowe the most moderate, but Grassley, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, was the one Baucus was most counting on to bring a substantial minority of Republicans onto the bill. The debonair Baucus and the ornery Grassley had, even in these partisan times, worked together on major legislation that came through their committee—including on the Medicare drug benefit and George W. Bush’s tax cuts, all of which Baucus had supported, to the dismay of many of his Democratic colleagues. And Baucus had filled his draft with items he knew Grassley favored, such as a requirement that drug and device makers disclose financial relationships with doctors and hospitals, and rewards to hospitals that provide high-quality care under Medicare.
But if Grassley was tempted by these inducements and any feeling of obligation to Baucus for the Democrat’s support of Bush’s big initiatives, he was also getting persuasive warnings to resist them—not from DeMint or other archconservatives in the caucus, but from its leader. McConnell, Grassley says, made it clear that he found the legislation misguided, whatever its ideological origins. “Mitch had his mind well made up that this sort of approach that could lead to the nationalization of health care wasn’t right and wasn’t good for the country and might happen as a result of those meetings” with Baucus, says Grassley.
McConnell did not outright order Grassley and the two other Republicans against participating in the discussions. Rather, Grassley says, he told them, “I just think you ought to be cautious.” As effective was the persistent message the three Republicans were getting at caucus meetings held every Wednesday at 4 P.M. at a big square table in the Mansfield Room in the Capitol to discuss the health-care legislation. Grassley would update his fellow Republicans on what was going on in the talks with Baucus and the two other Democrats in the “Gang of Six” (Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Kent Conrad of North Dakota). The reaction he encountered every week made it clear that it was going to be very difficult to bring a critical mass of Republicans around. “Those regular meetings led people around to the point [of thinking] that this isn’t something as good as when we first started talking about it,” says Grassley. “I’m not sure if [McConnell] led them there but he put in place a process that brought around the consensus that Obamacare wasn’t good.”
Others at the meetings say it was plain that Grassley’s heart wasn’t in going up against McConnell and the prevailing sentiment, so grudging were his attempts to sell the Gang of Six’s work to the caucus. “Grassley never committed to anything” with Baucus, says Bob Bennett. “It was ‘I’ll take that back and see if that would fly’ and it never would—all of the stuff he brought back to us, including some of the stuff he felt might work, he never came back and advocated for it.” And once Grassley started hearing from his Iowa constituents attacking the legislation at town hall meetings in August, he turned critical of the legislation, telling three hundred Iowans at one event that they had “every right to fear” that the bill’s provision of Medicare coverage for end-of-life-counseling—a provision he had recently championed—could turn into a “government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.” For the Democrats in the Gang of Six, this distancing was confounding, because there was no concrete point of disagreement to negotiate over. “I didn’t identify any specific policy issue where if we’d agreed to make a change in that aspect of the bill,” agreement would be reached, says Bingaman. “I didn’t detect that. They just became less and less willing to sign on to the bill as we got further and further into the discussions.”
Grassley’s turn against his former positions and Baucus prompted speculation on the Hill about what McConnell might have offered or threatened to effect the switch—say, the loss of Grassley’s top spot on the Finance Committee. Grassley dismisses the committee rumor, but in doing so lends some credence to another version of the speculation, that McConnell had made clear to him that if he went along with Baucus, he’d face a primary challenge from the right in 2012—and would not get help from his party in fending it off. “There was no threat [over committee rank], never a discussion like that,” Grassley says. “Probably more of a concern would’ve been in the state of Iowa, whether I would have had Tea Party opposition.”
Snowe was facing a similar prospect—if anything, more so than Grassley. Every few days, it seemed, another busload of conservative activists would come down from Maine to confront her. And just as often, a member of the Senate Republican leadership of their staff would demand to know: was she switching parties? Senate Republicans deny that she was coming under collegial censure for her negotiations with Baucus—“You never knew where Olympia was going to end up on something like this,” says Judd Gregg. “No one tried to influence Olympia.” Still, she, like Grassley, had reason to fear she could not depend on McConnell and the rest of the party to back her up if she broke from them on the legislation and faced a primary challenge as a result. Snowe voted for the legislation in the Finance Committee, but when it reached the Senate floor two months later, she joined every other Republican in voting against it. Her vote against the bill was so conflicted to the end that, as one observer of the roll call noted, she could barely get out her “no”—it sounded more like “nyeo.”
The legislation did not pass into law until the following March, after being postponed and nearly derailed by the election of a Republican to fill Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts. So tortured and drawn-out had the process been that, historic as the law was, its public reception was cool. And credit for this reception, Senate Republicans say, went to McConnell. Rather than trying to block the bipartisan negotiations from the outset, he had let them proceed, knowing that they were unlikely to bear fruit (especially if subtle pressure was applied throughout to the participants) and that the longer they went on, the more unpopular the legislation would become with a public that has little patience for endless haggling. “He said, ‘Our strategy is to delay this sucker as long as we possibly can, and the longer we delay it the worse the president looks: why can’t he get it done? He’s got sixty votes? We’re gonna delay it, delay it, and delay it as long we can,’ ” says Bennett. “Every time something would come up, he would find a way to delay it.”
When the senators headed out for that 2009 summer recess, Bennett says, McConnell told his members “your goal is to have Congress come back more hesitant about Obamacare than they were at the end of July.” And indeed, when Bennett spoke with Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat, after the break, Wyden told Bennett, “You Republicans won August—this turkey is a whole lot less popular now.” After which, Bennett says, “we dragged that sucker out until December.” He concludes: “You look back on it and that’s a virtuoso performance when you only have forty votes. That’s why Mitch was encouraging the Gang of Six—that was a way to delay this. He was on top of the whole thing.”
One day in the first half of 2009, as the health-care debate was heating up, McConnell approached Chris Dodd in the Senate and told the Connecticut Democrat what Max Baucus would learn months later: “I can’t think of a formulation for health care we’re going to be able to support.” As Dodd recalls, McConnell went on to say: “With financial reform there is, there’s space there” for agreement.
So, Dodd made far less effort than Baucus would to get Republican backing for the portions of the health-care bill moving through the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which Dodd chaired. But when it came time to take up the big financial reform bill, Dodd was confident he could engineer the sort of consensus that the health-care legislation had been denied. “I was determined to demonstrate how the Senate could work,” he says. After all, this bill wasn’t legislation to expand the safety net at a cost to wealthy Americans, but to fix a financial system so out of whack that the American economy had entered its biggest slump since the Great Depression. Dodd worked closely for weeks with Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican, hoping that the former construction and real estate magnate could bring a whole swath of his caucus onto the bill. He included plenty of provisions that Corker wanted in the draft, including limits on the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
But just as Baucus had found with Grassley on health care, Corker began to back away. Dodd was pretty sure he knew what was up: that McConnell had told Corker, “Don’t you dare negotiate with Dodd.” In the end, Dodd managed to get four Republicans: the three New Englanders and, ironically enough, Chuck Grassley. Once again Obama was denied a big, truly bipartisan achievement, and the bill became more partisan fodder. As it moved through Congress, pollster Frank Luntz was coaching Republicans to cast it as a “bailout for the banks”—never mind that Wall Street lobbyists were fighting it every step of the way.
Another seeming opportunity for a consensus arose earlier in 2010—a proposal by the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Budget Committee—Conrad and Gregg—to establish an eighteen-member bipartisan commission to come up with recommendations to reduce the federal deficit that would be “fast-tracked” through Congress. The bill had nineteen Republican cosponsors—and the seeming support of Mitch McConnell. On the Senate floor in May 2009, McConnell had said, “We must address the issue of entitlement spending now before it is too late. As I have said many times before, the best way to address the crisis is the Conrad-Gregg proposal, which would provide an expedited pathway for fixing these profound long-term challenges. . . . So I urge the administration, once again, to support the Conrad-Gregg proposal.”
The administration did just that. Shortly before the bill was to come up in the Senate, Obama came out in favor of it, to the consternation of many liberals who thought the administration should still be pushing for more stimulus for the listing economy, rather than austerity measures. But on January 26, 2010, the bill fell short of a filibuster-proof majority, 53–46. McConnell voted against it—as did seven of the Republicans who originally cosponsored it. McConnell’s shift on the bill drew a harsh condemnation from, among others, Fred Hiatt, the deficit-hawk editor of the Washington Post editorial page:
No single vote by any single senator could possibly illustrate everything that is wrong with Washington today. No single vote could embody the full cynicism and cowardice of our political elite at its worst, or explain by itself why problems do not get solved. But here’s one that comes close. . . . It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that the only thing that changed since May is the political usefulness of the proposal to McConnell’s partisan goals. He was happy to claim fiscal responsibility while beating up Obama for fiscal recklessness. But when Obama endorsed the idea, as he did on the Saturday before the vote—and when the commission actually, against all odds, had the wisp of a chance of winning the needed 60 Senate votes—McConnell bailed.
Gregg, who left the Senate at the end of 2010, says he never found out from McConnell why he had turned on the proposal. “I never asked that question. I accepted the fact some of us didn’t like the idea and didn’t vote for it,” he says. “At one point he thought it was a good idea but he didn’t vote for it. . . . I didn’t follow up on it—there was no point in asking.”
Conrad, who retired two years later, is more open about the disappointment. “None of those guys ever talked to me about it,” he says. “But to lose when seven of your original cosponsors vote against it, that was a surprise, that’s for sure. . . . We didn’t know if we’d prevail, but we knew if the seven cosponsors had voted for it, we would have.”
In the months that followed, McConnell offered a reply of sorts to Conrad, Hiatt, and others bothered by that vote. In a candid comment to the New York Times in March 2010, McConnell explained why he had worked so hard to withhold Republican support on big issues like health care: “It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public this this is okay, they must have figured it out.” He elaborated on this to an Atlantic reporter, later in 2010: “We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”
It was a revealing window into McConnell’s thinking: in an institution that had prided itself so much on bipartisan comity—that had evolved to require bipartisan comity, thanks to the expanding use of the filibuster and other procedural customs—here the Republican leader stated that he had done his utmost to deny bipartisan support to the president’s initiatives as a matter of policy, across the board. The strategy was devious and brilliant. McConnell knew how much voters hated partisan strife, that it soured them on government in general, and that this souring would hurt the party in power—particularly if the party in power was also the party that advocated for more government. He knew that the public tended to tune out the details of partisan haggling, and that his party would therefore be unlikely to suffer for blatant reversals such as the flip on the deficit commission. He knew that he not only had Fox News and the rest of the conservative media on his side, but that the mainstream press would be reluctant to enlighten the public about who was at fault for gridlock—many commentators were loath to get into policy particulars, and even more loath to be seen as favoring one side over the other. McConnell, while no media darling like his rival John McCain, had been adept at stoking the perception of liberal bias in the media, thus making image-conscious reporters wary of describing dysfunction fully. Again and again, reports on bills blocked by GOP filibusters would refer to Democrats’ failure to pass a bill, without noting that it had received a majority of votes in the Senate—just not the sixty to break a Republican filibuster.
And McConnell knew how much Obama had staked on the promise of transcending partisan divides in Washington, and that denying him the opportunity to do so would come to seem like a defining failure of his presidency.
This strategy came at a cost to McConnell’s party—on major issues of the day, legislation that would shape whole swaths of American life and business for years to come, Republicans had ceded influence over the final product. So desperate were Baucus, Dodd, and Obama for bipartisan credibility that serious concessions were well within reach. “I don’t think there’s anything [Obama] wouldn’t have given away to get a couple Republicans,” says Dennis Kelleher, a former top Democratic Senate leadership aide. One of the Republican staffers who worked on the bill says Grassley and others should have made the most of that leverage: “The way it’s always worked is, if you see the other side is going to win, you’re going, let’s sit down and get some stuff your way.” Several conservative commentators noted this lost opportunity after the health-care legislation passed. “We went for all the marbles [and] we ended with none,” wrote former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum.
And several Democrats expressed bemused gratitude that Republicans had allowed them to shape both the health-care and financial reform bills as they saw fit. Yes, the Democrats would suffer at the polls in 2010, but they had also managed to pass transformative legislation when they had the opportunity to do so. “No question, McConnell basically told them, ‘No cooperation,’ ” says Barney Frank, the since-retired Massachusetts Democrat who led the financial reform push in the House. “But heck, he did us a favor! Chris [Dodd] was hoping for a seventy-five-vote bill. Well, a seventy-five-vote bill would have been weaker. McConnell gave us the freedom of ‘nothing left to lose.’ ”
But the opportunity for his party to shape legislation on big issues was, for McConnell, secondary to the overriding goal, which he laid out in another interview, one month before the 2010 midterm elections. A National Journal reporter asked McConnell what his party would tell voters if it won back Congress that fall.
“We need to be honest with the public,” he replied. “This election is about them, not us. And we need to treat this election as the first step in retaking the government. We need to say to everyone on Election Day, ‘Those of you who helped make this a good day, you need to go out and help us finish the job.’ ”
“What’s the job?” the reporter asked.
“The single most important thing we want to achieve,” McConnell answered, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
It was, without a doubt, the most-quoted remark Mitch McConnell had ever uttered. In fewer than twenty words, he had managed to crystallize his strategy of obstructing and undermining Obama above all else. To Kelleher, the former Senate Democratic leadership aide, the quote confirmed what he had observed since the start of 2009—that McConnell seemed to harbor a deep contempt for the new president. “The Obama election reinvigorated Mitch McConnell and gave him a reason for being,” says Kelleher. “He genuinely dislikes him . . . and thinks the guy has no business being in the White House.” Here, after all, was a president who’d arrived in the Senate only four years earlier from the Illinois state legislature and barely been able to conceal his bored disdain for the institution that defined McConnell’s entire existence. McConnell and his Republican colleagues “all thought he was a lightweight—‘there’s a guy who can give a speech, big fucking deal,’ ” says Kelleher. “Obama is the ultimate kind of outsider, and outsiders who don’t adhere to the [institutional] mores are never liked.”
But there was another explanation for McConnell’s bald declaration of his supreme motivation. Quite simply, it sprang from the mind-set that had been governing McConnell since his arrival in Washington more than a quarter century earlier: What mattered above all else was that you and your party prevailed in the next election cycle. “You are only as good as the next election,” McConnell liked to say. And: “You have to be elected before you can be a statesman.” Seen in this light, McConnell was not expressing some special animus against Barack Obama; he was giving a clear insight into his political philosophy.
First, though, there was the matter of winning the most immediate cycle, the 2010 midterm election, and with it, perhaps, the Senate majority and thus the majority leader job McConnell had thought he was going to assume four years earlier. The party’s prospects were looking good, with its base voters energized by their anti-Obama fury, his big spending and his “overreach” on health care. Conservative Republicans were so furious, in fact, that one of their first elective acts was to jettison from the party’s ticket in Utah McConnell’s closest ally in the Senate, Bob Bennett. At the state’s GOP convention, an archconservative lawyer replaced him.
Bennett’s defeat was a blow to McConnell. He had lost a confidant, and Bennett had been targeted precisely because he was a member in good standing of the Republican establishment in Washington. Like McConnell, he had voted for the financial bailout in 2008. But it was not hard to see the defeat another way, too—that McConnell himself had helped fuel the Tea Party insurgency that had toppled his friend. It was McConnell’s strategy to withhold any Republican participation in Obama’s top legislative initiatives, which had guaranteed that Obama and the Democrats would appear to be pushing through their agenda with brute partisan force. It was McConnell’s decision to torpedo the proposed debt commission in 2010, which had guaranteed that no grand effort would be undertaken to narrow the deficit, one of the Tea Partiers’ main fixations. And it was his persistent drumbeat against the “far left” Obama that helped fire up the grass roots. If even the sedate Mitch McConnell was so outraged by Obama, the situation must be really bad—but why weren’t McConnell and his establishment allies doing more to stop him?
Bennett, for one, declines to speculate whether the insurgency that ended his Senate career would have been less out of control had McConnell approached the role of opposition differently. “I would be very loath to challenge his motives or his decisions,” he says. “Mitch had to make a decision as to what would work and what wouldn’t, what would preserve his power over the long term and what he had to concede over the short term to do that. I can’t second-guess his decision about what he did.”
McConnell was reckoning with the insurgency closer to home, as well. There, he had pressured the increasingly unpredictable Bunning, his fellow Republican senator from Kentucky, to retire and had selected secretary of state Trey Grayson, a mild-mannered Harvard graduate, to replace him. A libertarian ophthalmologist from Bowling Green had another idea. Rand Paul came into the race with a profile that tested the bounds of acceptability—he opposed key elements of the Civil Rights Act, for instance—but by tapping into the same vein of outrage as had Bennett’s challenger in Utah, he pulled even with Grayson—and then ahead of him. Implicit in Paul’s challenge of Grayson was his challenge of McConnell, who had for some time now called the shots on who ran for what in the Kentucky GOP. And on the weekend of the Kentucky Derby, with two weeks remaining before the May primary, McConnell decided to make his support for Grayson explicit, even if it meant violating general party protocol. Grayson’s campaign aired, in heavy statewide rotation and with “everything we had behind it,” says Grayson, an ad with McConnell declaring: “I rarely endorse in primaries, but these are critical times. I know Trey Grayson and trust him. We need Trey’s conservative leadership to help turn back the Obama agenda.”
When the ad went up, Grayson’s internal polling showed him within reach of Paul. Two weeks later, Paul won by 20 percentage points—a shift that Grayson now views as not unrelated to the ad, which he says failed to account for the anti-establishment fervor on the right. “We all thought it was going to put me over the top,” says Grayson. “We were wrong.”
On primary night, McConnell called Grayson from Washington. But it wasn’t to commiserate about the failure of McConnell’s whole plan to elevate Grayson. It was to make sure that Grayson knew he needed to get on board with Rand Paul, quickly and convincingly. “Mitch encouraged me . . . be a good loser, endorse the candidate, and don’t delay,” Grayson says. “He was encouraging me, do the right things that are the hard things. . . . You have to do this, not for yourself, but for the party. It’s gonna be hard, but it’s the right thing to do.” Grayson did as he was told and went to the state capital, Frankfort, and party headquarters—which are named for McConnell—for a “unity rally” a few days later. His deed done, he wandered out of the building while, inside, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, two people who barely knew each other, began the task of building one of the stranger alliances American politics has ever seen. The speed with which McConnell had embraced Paul perhaps should not have come as a surprise. In his memoir The Great American Awakening, Jim DeMint describes the meeting in which he told McConnell that he would be supporting Paul over Grayson. He expected McConnell to be angry, but found instead that McConnell was relieved to hear that DeMint’s endorsement of Paul would make clear that he still supported McConnell as leader. “After that a lot of the tension in the room evaporated,” DeMint writes. As much as McConnell preferred Grayson over Paul, his priority above all was that the insurgents in his state did not turn against him, too.
There was more of the fallout to come. In September, Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski lost her state’s Republican primary to a highly conservative challenger. Instead of stepping aside, Murkowski opted to stay on the November ballot—as a write-in independent candidate. This decision brought the party’s civil war to the doorstep of the Republican Senate caucus, in the form of a concrete question: what to do with a Republican member now running against someone who had won the party’s primary? Murkowski resigned her caucus leadership position, but there remained the question of whether to strip her of her rank as the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, a crucial slot for a senator from Alaska who relied on the support of energy industry lobbyists. There was a “big fight” within the conference, says Bob Bennett, with DeMint leading the charge to punish Murkowski. McConnell initially suggested that Murkowski be replaced with an acting ranking member on the energy committee, but after a debate, the conference voted—in secret ballot, with the tally undisclosed even to the conference—in favor of keeping Murkowski in the top spot. McConnell instructed members not to discuss the fight beyond a one-line public statement: “Lisa has stepped down from her position on [the NRSC] and we took no further action.”
This result did not sit well with DeMint, who, Bennett recalls, “gets on the Internet and puts out an email denouncing all of us and screams and yells and tries to create fund-raising for Miller.” (“The good ol’ boys Senate club, which always protects its own, prevailed,” DeMint wrote.) The result, says Bennett, was that “every member of the conference comes out furious at DeMint and completely supportive of Mitch.” As Bennett concludes: “That’s the way Mitch gets to be leader and maintains people’s respect and backing. . . . No one remembers that it was his proposal that wasn’t adopted—they just remember that DeMint was a real pain—and Mitch came out unscathed.”
McConnell was unscathed within the conference, perhaps, but he was unable to avoid the ultimate consequence of the insurgency. Despite a historic triumph for Republicans in the 2010 midterm election—sixty-three seats gained in the House, plus a surge in state capitals—McConnell came up four votes short of a Senate majority. Almost certainly, he would have achieved his life’s goal had the conservative uprising not left the party with fringe candidates in eminently winnable races, in Nevada, Colorado, and Delaware, where the party’s nominee took to the airwaves late in the race to address her previous admission to having “dabbled in witchcraft.” It was a classic example of blowback: standing by as the party cast Barack Obama as the devil incarnate, and winding up with an ex-sorceress on the Republican ballot.
By 2011, the DeMint wing of the Republican caucus had grown larger. Privately, McConnell was losing his patience with them. As one longtime associate of his recalls, McConnell cut loose once in the associate’s presence: “He said, ‘Those idiots, those people come up here and have never been in office and know nothing about being in office. . . . They don’t sit and learn, they just decide they’re going to take away every law that’s been on the books for fifty years. They want to create chaos—and it worries me a lot.’ ”
Indeed, chaos arrived halfway into 2011, in the form of the refusal by congressional Republicans to raise the nation’s debt ceiling in the absence of deep spending cuts, thus hastening the possibility of a market-shaking credit default. But if McConnell worried about that chaos, he didn’t let on—for weeks he deferred to the Republican House leaders driving the confrontation with Obama. When he did speak out, it was to express hope that a deal could be reached—not for the sake of the economy, but to deprive Democrats of a campaign talking point: “If we go into default, [Obama] will say that Republicans are making the economy worse,” he said. “All of a sudden we have co-ownership of a bad economy. . . . That is very bad positioning going into an election.”
Only in the final moments did McConnell help negotiate a deal that infuriated many Democrats—no new tax revenues and the threat of big future spending cuts. With the crisis averted, McConnell seemed to gloat about the episode, casting it as a clever use of leverage. “I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” he told the Washington Post. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this—it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.” He promised that when it came time for another debt ceiling increase a few years later, “we’ll be doing it all over.”
That was hardly the sort of language that was going to restrain the hostage takers McConnell was privately criticizing. And they were not about to be restrained. In the spring of 2012, they claimed another of his few confidants in the Senate—Richard Lugar, who had done McConnell the favor of renominating him as leader just a few years earlier. McConnell had, more recently, been keeping his distance from Lugar, who noticed that McConnell had not exactly been jumping up to support him in his push in 2010 and early 2011 to get their fellow Republicans to vote for the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, which Obama was seeking with Russia. “Some of the positions I took were not necessarily ones he wanted to support, and sometimes if he did want to support it, he was very quiet about it,” says Lugar. That was the case with New START, which McConnell barely mentioned at the caucus’s weekly luncheons. “I understood where he was,” says Lugar, “and that I had to go about getting the votes on my own.”
McConnell was more willing to lend Lugar assistance behind the scenes, as he urged his friend to play rough with his primary opponent, state treasurer Richard Mourdock. Lugar was reluctant to take the advice. “Hitting hard has usually been very effective for Mitch, and he’s found it to be so effective that he’s been impatient with others who . . . are not willing to sock it to somebody,” says Lugar. “He knew I was working hard at [the campaign] but was not being supercritical [of Mourdock] and he’d say, ‘You really have to sock it to him.’ ” Lugar chose not to do so, and was overwhelmed by the same archconservative anger as Bob Bennett had been, losing by 20 percentage points. McConnell was open with Lugar about who was to blame: the outside groups whipping up a frenzy on the party’s far fringe. “In private conversation, he very well understood what was happening with Freedom Works and Club for Growth and the Koch brothers and whoever else you wanted to talk about,” Lugar says. But hadn’t McConnell spurred that wave in his own right with his whole approach to the Obama presidency? “Mitch has been so successful that I’m not going to argue with it,” Lugar says.
By McConnell’s own terms, he hadn’t been successful: that November, Obama was elected to a second term—and Republicans were left with two fewer seats in the Senate, including Lugar’s. Rather than preparing for a Republican administration, McConnell was left reckoning with another precipice created by the brinkmanship his anti-Obama strategy had encouraged, the “fiscal cliff ” the country was facing at end of 2012 with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, and the arrival of the deep sequestration cuts that had been part of the 2011 debt-ceiling deal. With his talks stalling with his Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid, McConnell called up Vice President Joe Biden, his longtime Senate colleague. “Does anyone down there know how to make a deal?” he demanded to know. He and Biden hashed out a deal that, once again, upset many Democrats—making permanent the Bush tax cuts for all income under $400,000, a far higher threshold than Obama wanted, and delaying the spending cuts by only two months. “You could argue persuasively, that—in a government controlled two-thirds by the Democrats—we got permanency for ninety-nine percent of the Bush tax cuts,” McConnell said in persuading his fellow Republicans to vote for the package, according to the Washington Post.
Those who benefited from McConnell’s preservation of so many upper-end tax cuts did not need persuading. Back in Kentucky, McConnell won great gratitude from the likes of Bill Stone, the owner of a large glass manufacturer in Louisville and former chairman of the Jefferson County GOP. Stone especially appreciated that the deal had prevented a big increase in the estate tax—the tax-free exemption stayed above $5 million, and the top rate went to 40 percent, far less than the exemption of only $1 million and rate of 55 percent that would have gone into effect without the deal. “Mitch is a hero—every small businessman and farmer with a ranch who’s got a small fortune ought to kiss his feet,” Stone says. As soon as the deal was struck, a tired McConnell got on a plane to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl, where Louisville was playing Florida. Waiting for him was Stone, who thanked McConnell for his work keeping the estate tax in check. “Mitch staggered into a brunch with the president of Louisville and dropped into a chair and said, ‘Bill, given the position we were in, we did the absolute best we could,’ ” Stone recalls. Stone assured McConnell that he had done more than enough. “I got to be the one that thanked him. He gave that smile of understanding, that knowing smile.”
McConnell’s success in closing the deals on the debt-ceiling crisis and fiscal cliff was a reminder of his skill as a negotiator. (Chris Dodd jokes that working with McConnell on the 2002 bill to repair the country’s broken voting system put him in mind of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s line that negotiating his peace deal with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin was the “most dreadful and most beautiful thing I ever did.” McConnell, Dodd says, is “the toughest guy—every article, semicolon is a wrestling match, and that was the dreadful thing. When I was done I slept like a baby because I knew it was golden—I knew it was going to happen. . . . Every penny of that four billion dollars got through the appropriators.”) But the deals also pointed to the way in which McConnell was learning to capitalize on the Tea Party element within his caucus that he privately deplored. After all, his bargaining hand was strengthened by that faction’s extremism, its willingness to press its case to the point of threatening real harm to the national and world economy—with Republicans so willing to risk a credit default in 2011, the White House had had to settle for a deal in which it got almost nothing it wanted except for being spared a credit default. If McConnell was not doing more outwardly to restrain the far wing of his party and his caucus, even now that the goal of preventing a second Obama term had been dashed, this dynamic was perhaps one reason why. As unrealistic as their demands were, the insurgents were an effective weapon in his showdowns with the administration he had set out to defeat.
It was hard to see how even McConnell was supposed to capitalize on the next showdown, the government shutdown forced by congressional Republicans’ insistence on defunding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare.” McConnell made no secret that he found the gambit foolhardy, but instead of trying to quash it, he absented himself even more than he had done in the early stages of the prior crises. His most notable appearance, as the shutdown ticked on and eight hundred thousand federal workers were furloughed, was a private exchange with Rand Paul, picked up on a hot mike, in which the two discussed the shutdown in purely partisan, tactical terms: “We’re gonna win this, I think,” said Paul. Predictably, McConnell once again made his last-minute arrival to negotiate a conclusion to the shutdown with Harry Reid.
As Judd Gregg, McConnell’s former ally in the Senate, sees it, McConnell’s handling of the shutdown episode exposed his caucus’s archconservatives, such as Texas’s Ted Cruz, for the self-aggrandizing extremists they were, without requiring a confrontation by McConnell (DeMint himself had already departed for a high-paying job running the Heritage Foundation, which, awkwardly enough, was also where Elaine Chao was now installed). “He handled it in true Mitch style—give them enough rope so they self-destruct,” Gregg says, embarking on a mixed-metaphor riff. “Mitch gave them the running room to do what they needed to do. It’s Mitch’s management style—he lets the cards play out until he plays his cards and then he wins. . . . It would’ve been whistling in the wind to step in at an earlier point.”
Perhaps so—but McConnell’s “win” had come at a major cost, not least what economists estimated was the shutdown’s $24 billion setback for the national economy. It’s not hard to imagine another approach by McConnell in handling his caucus’s right wing, says Merkley, the Oregon Democrat: “There was no apparent effort by senior leaders . . . to convey the destructive nature of this paralysis . . . to pull in members who had come here with ‘Government is the enemy and we’re going to melt down the Senate as part of hatred of the government,’ ” he says. “It would have taken senior members to say, ‘That doesn’t work here. We are here with a constitutional responsibility and we have an obligation to address the issues and are not going to tolerate folks unilaterally melting this place down.’ ”
Far from it. Post-shutdown, McConnell showed no sign of a break in approach. In what Reid called a “breach of faith” with an informal earlier agreement to let more nominations through, McConnell led his caucus to block three of Obama’s nominees for the influential D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, to keep the president from tilting the court’s ideological direction, just as he had led a filibuster of Obama’s nominee to lead the new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to keep that agency, a creation of the financial-reform law, from functioning.
As always, McConnell and his closest allies in the Senate argued that these tactics were only ripostes to Reid’s domineering ways, notably his limitation on Republicans’ ability to offer amendments on bills. Democrats, of course, countered that it was the Republicans’ predilection since 2007 for troublemaking amendments and for the filibuster that had forced Reid’s hand. “It’s a question of chicken and the egg, and to me it’s abundantly clear what came first. What came first is Republicans using the filibuster,” says Conrad, the former senator from North Dakota. Norman Ornstein, the congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says there is simply no question who had done the most to explode long-standing norms. Under McConnell, he says, Republicans had regularly used filibusters on motions to proceed, not just on legislation, and had insisted, after a successful sixty-person vote for cloture, to use the full thirty hours allotted for debate—not to actually debate, but simply to chew up time. Yes, Reid was limiting amendments, but even that rationale for obstructionism fell away when it came to using the filibuster and “blue slips” to block lower-level administration nominees and federal judges. “The use of the filibuster to deny the president his team, or to block judges when there were no real quibbles about qualifications or ideology, is a major breach of Senate norms, and Mitch McConnell is responsible,” Ornstein wrote in 2014.
Some Republicans seemed to agree: When Merkley tried in late 2012 to coax some Republicans into a deal to limit filibusters, he says the response from several was: “The ideas you’re putting forward are reasonable, but there’s no way I can be out there . . . out of sync with McConnell and his agenda of paralyzing this place.” When McConnell told his fellow Republicans in a closed-door meeting in July 2013 that he could’ve done better than the deal they negotiated without him to approve some of Obama’s nominations, an exasperated Bob Corker, the Tennessee senator, called “bullshit” loud enough for the room to hear, reported Roll Call. Ira Shapiro, a former Senate staffer, Clinton administration trade official, and author of a history of the Senate, argued in a May 2014 opinion piece that the Senate would be functioning better with just about any other Republican in McConnell’s place. “Virtually every serious observer thinks that the Senate would be a far different place if the Republicans were led by someone else, such as Lamar Alexander, Rob Portman, Susan Collins or Bob Corker,” Shapiro wrote.
At one point, McConnell and Reid had enjoyed the modicum of a working relationship. They had in common their affection for Washington’s new baseball team, their avoidance of the Beltway social circuit, and their devotion to the Senate, an institution that they, unlike many of the chamber’s presidential wannabes, were content to spend their careers in. The breakdown of the Obama years, though, had frayed whatever tenuous bond there had once been. Reid was still smarting over the intensity of the Republican leadership’s push against his reelection in 2010 (in one particularly personal attack, the NRSC ran ads ridiculing Reid for staying at a condo unit in the Ritz-Carlton while in Washington). Their meetings on major legislation and the various fiscal crises too often ended with the more blunt Reid having made his position clear but being left with no idea of where the more reserved McConnell stood—McConnell would insist on running everything past his kitchen cabinet and caucus before making a counteroffer. Their regular Monday meetings sputtered to a halt, leaving their brief exchanges on the floor after convening the Senate each day as the extent of their communication. The low point for Reid may have come in June 2012, when, after much haggling to build broad support for a flood insurance bill, Reid brought it to the Senate floor only for Rand Paul to demand to hold it hostage until the Senate allowed a vote on an unrelated “personhood amendment,” giving legal protections to fetuses right at fertilization.
Reid’s payback gathered over time. In the summer of 2013, a SuperPAC run by his close allies started running ads attacking McConnell, eighteen months before his next election. In September, Reid held a reunion dinner in the Senate for all of the living Senate majority leaders—a category defined to exclude McConnell. The break was made final, though, with Reid’s announcement in late 2013 that the Democrats would vote by simple majority to undo the filibuster for most presidential nominations—the oft-threatened “nuclear option” that McConnell had warned would make Reid the “worst Senate leader ever”—and thereby fill long-vacant slots in the judiciary and administration. Republican indignation followed: “The Senate is being destroyed as an institution,” says Gregg. In January, McConnell gave a lengthy floor speech deploring what Reid had done to the Senate: “What have we become?” he said. “The Senate seems more like a campaign studio than a serious legislative body. . . . We’ve gotten too comfortable with doing everything we do here through the prism of the next election, instead of the prism of duty. And everyone suffers as a result.”
If there was any self-criticism in this indictment—after all, it was McConnell who had declared in 2010 his overriding goal a partisan victory in the election two years hence—it was hard to discern. He pledged that if Republicans gained the majority the following year, they would do things differently, by reempowering committee chairmen, restoring a robust amendment process, and lengthening the Senate workweek. As the Washington Post noted, though, McConnell himself had played a role in each of the tendencies he deplored—he had weakened committee prerogative with his undermining of Baucus’s work with Grassley on health care, abetted the use of poison-pill amendments by fellow Republicans, and was himself often skipping out of the Senate early for fund-raisers around town. “McConnell,” wrote Ornstein, “is much less a victim and much more a perpetrator.”
That last tendency McConnell had mentioned—cutting out early for fund-raisers—was especially strong come early 2014. McConnell was himself, now more than ever, seeing his work through the prism of the next election.
The aroma of some twenty thousand pounds of barbecued pork and mutton hung in the midsummer air as Mitch McConnell stepped to the podium beneath the pavilion at Fancy Farm, the annual church-picnic-meets-political-festival hosted yearly by a Catholic parish in rural western Kentucky. In August 2013, it represented the unofficial kickoff to the 2014 campaign season. Fancy Farm is politics at its most archaic and elemental—not only are barbed speeches and raucous audiences permitted, they are demanded.
It is a perennially uncomfortable setting for Mitch McConnell. Dressed on this day in a denim shirt and pleated khakis, he gave it his best—his voice cracked at the outset but rounded into a full growl as he laid into his Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, the young secretary of state and daughter of Kentucky power broker Jerry Lundergan. “How nice it is to see Jerry Lundergan back in the game. Like the loyal Democrat he is, he’s taking orders from the Obama campaign on how to run his daughter’s campaign,” McConnell began, to hollers from the college Republicans in matching red T-shirts, whom his campaign had bused in for the event. From there followed a barrage linking Grimes with faraway liberals conspiring against the Bluegrass State: “We’re going to decide what kind of America we’re going to have: Barack Obama’s vision for America or Kentucky’s. You know, I’ve brought Kentucky’s voice to Washington, and the Obama crowd doesn’t like it because the Kentucky voice is often the voice of opposition to the Obama agenda. That’s why every liberal in America wants to beat us next year. You know, the liberals are worried because just as I predicted Obamacare is a disaster for America. I fought them every step of the way on the government takeover. And we stand up to their war on coal. As long as I’m in the Senate, Kentucky will have a voice instead of San Francisco and Martha’s Vineyard. Look, all these liberals coming down here to push me around, they’re not going to get away with it, are they? . . .” And on it went.
Grimes dished out plenty when it came her turn—“If the doctors told Senator McConnell he had a kidney stone, he would refuse to pass it,” she said. She offset her pugilistic speech with her move, in a detour from her way back to her seat, to greet McConnell and Elaine Chao with a big smile. McConnell, caught off guard, stayed frozen in his seat and stared at Grimes while his wife jumped up for a handshake.
But Grimes wasn’t McConnell’s real concern that day. His confidence in regards to his Democratic opposition was on display a few months earlier, when it looked as if he might be facing Ashley Judd, the Kentucky-bred Hollywood actress turned liberal activist. “When anybody sticks their head up, do them out,” McConnell said in a secretly recorded meeting where he and his aides discussed possible attack targets for Judd (her admission to considering suicide in sixth grade was one). No, McConnell’s real concern early in the campaign, as it had been for the past few years in Washington, was about keeping abreast of his party’s rightward lurch, which now meant fending off a conservative challenger, a wealthy businessman and Tea Party acolyte named Matt Bevin. So McConnell had locked down an early endorsement from Rand Paul—a gesture as expedient as could be expected between the man who had introduced the 2007 legislation that loosened restrictions on National Security Agency eavesdropping and the man who had staged a thirteen-hour filibuster over the threat of surveillance drones. Asked by a constituent in Edmonton, Kentucky, in April why he had endorsed McConnell, Paul “declined to answer the question publicly,” the Glasgow Daily Times reported, “saying he would speak with her in private and explain his reason for supporting the senior senator.”
To secure Paul’s support, McConnell had joined Paul’s filibuster of the nominee for the CIA and his bill to cut off military aid for Egypt and even taken up a pet cause of Paul’s and many of his Kentucky followers: the legalization of hemp. Most conspicuously, McConnell hired as his campaign manager Jesse Benton, the husband of Paul’s niece and the manager of Paul’s general election campaign in 2010. Benton, so youthful that he was barely indistinguishable from the students at Fancy Farm whom he was leading in cheers and jeers that afternoon, let it be known just how expedient his new role was when he told a conservative activist, in a call that was taped and later released, that “I’m sorta holding my nose for two years” to work for McConnell. McConnell, in turn, confirmed the transactional nature of the arrangement when he opted to keep Benton in the job despite this remark. The team led by the Tea Party consultant, Benton, set about savaging the Tea Party candidate, Bevin, by, among other things, putting out an ad charging that he had falsely claimed a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—a charge based on a stray mention on a LinkedIn page.
It was a formidable show of force on McConnell’s right flank, but its intensity revealed the odd reality of his position in Kentucky. For someone who had represented the state in the Senate for three decades, his standing was shaky. Somehow, over all that time, he had failed to build up the residual goodwill that most veteran politicians accrue simply by showing up, reaching out, and spreading favors. It wasn’t for lack of trying. In the glory days of congressional earmarks, before Congress curtailed them in 2011, McConnell had snared dollars for his state with the best of them: $38 million for a parks venture in suburban Louisville led by the CEO of Humana, the giant health insurer based in Louisville, a top McConnell donor; millions for the Land Between the Lakes recreational area in western Kentucky; $199,000 for “beaver control” in Kentucky. “My definition of pork is a project in Indiana,” he once quipped. Many of the earmarks ended up with his name attached to them: money for the Mitch McConnell Park in Bowling Green, the Mitch McConnell Plaza and Walkway in Owensboro, the Mitch McConnell Integrated Applications Laboratory at Western Kentucky University, the Mitch McConnell Center for Distance Learning at the University of Kentucky. “He’s quite adept at building monuments to himself,” says Hollenbach, his first opponent. “Everything he brought back was to memorialize or perpetuate his name.”
McConnell had played a part in crafting the $10 billion buyout to compensate tobacco growers for the end of price supports for the crop. He had helped set up a compensation fund and cancer screening program for workers exposed to plutonium at the big uranium-enrichment plant in Paducah, albeit only after long-standing concerns about the plant became a national story. His plying of his constituents’ attention extended to his diligence about staying visible back home. He made a point of doing his own grocery shopping at the Kroger near his house, and could be spotted at University of Louisville football games.
But the affection didn’t follow—far from it. McConnell found himself the subject of nationwide ridicule for an ad his campaign posted online in March showing him looking even more bloodless than usual. “Nobody in the state loves him—hell, his friends don’t love him. It’s not about love,” says Jim Cauley, the consultant who worked on Sloane’s and Beshear’s challenges. McConnell’s success at mastering the institution he loved in the city he’d been so eager to flee to as a young man had left a sense of distance between him and his constituents. In a state with a strong populist streak, no number of sightings in the soda aisle could repair this estrangement. (It didn’t help that his and Chao’s net worth was now up to somewhere between $9.2 million and $36.5 million, according to his finance closure statements—an astonishing sum for a man who had spent barely any time working in the private sector.) “He can’t connect with anybody here,” says Mark Guilfoyle, a northern Kentucky lawyer who served as general counsel to one of the state’s former Democratic governors. “He’s inside the Beltway—you just listen to him talk about all these arcane rules of the Senate . . . and it puts you to sleep. Mitch McConnell is an elite, end of story—and they don’t play well in Kentucky.”
Recognizing this reality, McConnell had all but stopped seeking his state’s love and had taken up a line that tried to turn the distance to his advantage: a state so removed from the nation’s power structure should count itself lucky to have one of its own at the table when the big decisions are being made. “You can’t get any of those things done from the back bench,” he said in his Fancy Farm speech. Touting his role in the deal to end the government shutdown, he said: “I’ve demonstrated, once again, that when the Congress is in gridlock and the country is at risk, I’m the guy who steps forward and tries to get us out of the ditch.” It was as persuasive an argument as McConnell could hope to make, says Al Cross, the former political writer for the Courier-Journal. “Kentuckians have an inferiority complex—we know we lag behind other states for so many things,” says Cross. As a result, the state’s voters “are glad to have a Kentuckian in a position of power—not just to bring home the bacon, but to make Kentucky look better.”
The rest of the campaign followed in the lockstep McConnell had adopted for some time now. In March, he came onto the stage at CPAC, the big convention of conservative activists in Washington, gripping a rifle in his right hand. He railed against the new health-care law, even as it flourished in his state, covering more than four hundred thousand Kentuckians thanks to the enthusiastic implementation by Beshear, now the state’s governor. (McConnell eventually wound himself into knots trying to argue that the law’s benefits for Kentucky were separate from the Obamacare he wanted to repeal.) He led the way in the Senate in blocking Democratic efforts on an array of measures—extended benefits for the unemployed, increases in the minimum wage, funding for veterans’ health care. He led a filibuster on one bill, a bipartisan series of energy-efficiency measures, only to deny an accomplishment for the Democratic senator from New Hampshire who was facing a competitive reelection campaign that could determine the Senate majority. He sought revenge for Reid’s elimination of the filibuster for presidential nominations the previous fall by leading Republicans in stalling, by other procedural tactics, so many uncontroversial nominations that by August 2014 a backlog of more than a hundred had developed, including ambassadorships to the highly relevant posts of Russia and Turkey.
He was as locked into his partisan warrior mode as ever before: when, on one occasion, he encountered John Yarmuth, the former colleague turned Democratic congressman whom he has since broken sharply with, at the VIP lounge at Reagan National Airport, he did not greet him. “He was staring straight at me as I walked in, and no one else was there except his security people,” says Yarmuth. “He looked at me and there was not a muscle in his face that moved.”
Bevin’s campaign fizzled in the homestretch, beset by a lack of finances (he got some help from a conservative group founded by McConnell’s nemesis DeMint, but many others who preferred him lacked assurance he had enough of a shot at beating McConnell for them to risk incurring McConnell’s ire). McConnell refused to debate Bevin, depriving him of an opportunity to confront McConnell directly. The revelation that Bevin had signed a 2008 investment report praising that year’s financial bailout deprived him of the ideological purity claimed by the little-known economics professor who would upset House majority leader Eric Cantor in June. There were also distractions like the report of Bevin’s attendance at a pro-cockfighting rally. On May 20, McConnell beat Bevin by 24 percentage points—a margin so wide that one couldn’t help but think back to all the rightward tacking that had been undertaken, all for the sake of countering an underfunded challenger left to seek votes from aggrieved cockfighters.
This victory left Grimes, McConnell’s Democratic opponent. She had improved as a candidate and was quite deft at attacking McConnell—she criticized him for governing “out of spite” and “acting petty and small” and compared him unfavorably in this regard with the great senators of Kentucky past. But she still could appear stilted and overprogrammed, particularly when discussing her party’s agenda in Washington. (“She has an odd way about how she comes across,” says Ted Jackson, a top Republican strategist in Kentucky who backs McConnell. “She has hollow eyes. . . . I’m not saying she’s stupid, but she doesn’t look prepared. She just has that look—her eyes kind of pop out at you.”) She had raised impressive amounts of money, but was short of McConnell’s $10.4 million pile, which was just waiting to be deployed against an untested challenger in a state that had gone Republican by 22 points in the 2012 election. A betting man would still go with Mitch McConnell winning his sixth term, and, along with that, achieving his life’s dream of being Senate majority leader.
Which would then raise an important question: Once in that high position, what would McConnell seek to do with it? What, really, had been his purpose all along?
In the lower level of the University of Louisville library a visitor finds a curious display in the large anteroom to the Senator Mitch McConnell and Secretary Elaine L. Chao Archives. Opened in 2009, with a Ronald Reagan quote about freedom emblazoned on its entrance, the “Civic Education Gallery” is a shrine to McConnell and, secondarily, his second wife. (Unmentioned is his first wife, Sherrill, who ended up in western Massachusetts, overseeing a women’s history archive at Smith College. Speakers at her 2013 retirement party included Gloria Steinem; Alison Bechdel, the author of the syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For; an advocate for mothers in prison; a Native American rights activist; and the former black nationalist leader of a rape-crisis center.)
The basement gallery is an unusual memorialization for an elected official still in the fray. But then, Mitch McConnell has long had an eye on his place in history—there are the lengthy oral history interviews he’s been giving for years now to the Kentucky historian, John Kleber. And there is the big portrait he sat for, on his parents’ dime, in 1984—the year he was first elected to the Senate. It hangs in a second, smaller display upstairs in the library.
What is most striking about the gallery is not its mere presence but how McConnell has chosen to celebrate his career. There are some mementoes from his youth—his baseball glove, the RCA Victor radio that he and his father followed sports on, the honorary paddle from his fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau. But when it comes to his actual political career, the overriding focus of the gallery is not on McConnell’s achievements while in office in Louisville and Washington, but on the elections that got him into those positions. There are framed newspaper front pages from each of McConnell’s victories. There are video clips of his campaign ads—and even a small sculpture given to him by an admirer depicting the hound-dog ad used against Huddleston. There is a photograph from a 1986 McConnell fund-raiser attended by Vice President Bush: the caption announces it “broke all previous Kentucky records.”
The gallery’s focus on McConnell’s electoral successes is true to the man. Those who have worked alongside McConnell, friends and rivals alike, struggle to identify the governing purpose that has motivated him throughout decades of exertion in the public sphere. “I don’t have the vaguest idea,” says Chris Dodd, who spent a quarter century alongside McConnell in the Senate and who was once invited to give a lecture at the McConnell Center in Louisville.
What has motivated McConnell has not been a particular vision for the government or the country, but the game of politics and career advancement in its own right. “It’s to win and have power,” says Harvey Sloane, McConnell’s 1990 opponent.
“He literally eats and sleeps and digests politics every hour,” says Lance Tarrance, the pollster for McConnell’s first Senate campaign. “I don’t think I ever met anyone who was so hardwired for politics.”
“He’s playing the game,” says Brian Atwood, the former USAID administrator who faced off against McConnell over foreign aid budgets. “He’s doing it for himself and his game.”
Politics “is his avocation, vacation, vocation, all three,” says Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming.
“I don’t think he stands for anything. Politics is sport to him. It’s how he lives,” says Frank Greer, who managed Sloane’s 1990 campaign.
“He’s like Bobby Fischer,” says Bruce Lunsford, McConnell’s 2008 opponent. “Fisher could only do chess—he was so socially inept, he couldn’t do anything else. That’s what Mitch is like.”
“It’s always been about power, the political game, and it’s never been about the core values that drive political life,” says John Yarmuth, the Democratic congressman from Louisville who used to work with McConnell. “There has never been anything that interested him other than winning elections.”
“What drives him is absolute dedication to political activity,” says Larry Forgy, Reagan’s Kentucky campaign chairman. “If he was not elected he would be like a TB victim when you remove the oxygen—it’s what feeds him.”
Love for the sport of politics is embedded in our nation’s fabric and integral to any well-functioning democracy—it is what helped give rise to the press in the new America, it is what helped make nominating conventions such great theater, and it is what helps sustain many unpaid and underpaid campaign foot soldiers toiling long hours for their party’s side. But in its extreme form, shorn of principles or convictions, the political game becomes a hollow endeavor, barely less meaningless or self-interested than the competition on display in a smoke-filled off-track betting parlor.
The political culture of the nation’s capital has been overtaken by this way of thinking. Newly elected House members on Capitol Hill have barely arrived in Washington when party elders instruct them to start doing “call time” to raise money for their reelection two years hence. Party leaders announce early in midterm election years or even late the year before that no legislation carrying the potential for strife or controversy will be considered until the election—at which the point the cycle of deferral soon begins again. Much of the capital’s commentariat, meanwhile, is more than satisfied with this state of affairs: elections are, after all, more entertaining to cover than drawn-out legislative morasses. They make it possible to declare winners and losers without having to weigh policy particulars or worry about being accused of partisan favoritism. As the Beltway has become increasingly prosperous and removed from the rest of the country, it has become more acceptable for elected officials to fixate on doing whatever they must to remain there.
And no one in Washington embodies this prevailing mind-set more than Mitch McConnell. It is he who, with his ardent defense of the flow of big money into campaigns, has helped make it so incumbent on elected officials and challengers alike to obsess about their fund-raising accounts long before the proper campaign season. It is he who has demonstrated the power that can accrue to those who simply guard their rank in their party, wherever the party may lead them. And it is he who, with that one declaration elevating above all the defeat of Barack Obama, articulated the ethos of the permanent campaign as no one else could. “When he came out and said his number-one priority was not solving the problems of the country but that his number-one priority was defeating the president, that crossed the line for me,” says Kent Conrad, the retired Democratic senator from North Dakota. “Partisans have to understand there is a limit to partisanship and in that statement he completely lost perspective. . . . I mean, my goodness, that’s your top priority?”
There was once a time when McConnell had held up models for a different approach to public service. The display in the university library basement plays up his early bond with John Sherman Cooper, whose portrait still hangs in McConnell’s Senate office. A touchscreen scroll through McConnell’s career quotes him saying that Cooper was “the first great man I ever met.” A wall prominently carries this quote from McConnell: “Senator Cooper taught me to remain true to my convictions, and to remember that there are times when you follow and times when you lead. I’ve never forgotten that.” And a TV ad from McConnell’s first campaign, for Jefferson County executive, includes a shot of his father saying, “Mitch got a lot from John Sherman Cooper. I think if he was like that, his mother and I would be very pleased.”
McConnell has not been like that. Where Cooper retired from the Senate after his second full term—and then shot an ad for McConnell’s run for county executive, declaring, in a dig at the incumbent, that two terms sufficed for any elected official—McConnell is now on the verge of stretching his Senate career into his sixth term. Where Cooper took positions on weighty issues that put him at odds with many in his party and many of his constituents—on civil rights, Vietnam, and much else—McConnell has, by his own admission, been forever attuned to his self-preservation within his party and state.
In his sessions with Dyche and Kleber, McConnell attempted to claim the Cooper mantle, suggesting that his rightward turn was in its own way following the Cooper example: “I could have been a John Sherman Cooper Republican and been praised by the Courier-Journal and Herald-Leader. That would have been a much easier path to take for me, but that would have, frankly, not been consistent with my convictions, so I have chosen to do it the hard way.”
This claim is as disingenuous as it gets. Yes, McConnell’s rightward shift cost him the approval of local liberal elites that he enjoyed when entering politics in Louisville. Shortly before his death in 2006, Barry Bingham Jr., the former publisher of the Courier-Journal, declared to a former colleague that “the worst mistake we ever made was endorsing Mitch McConnell.”
But the shift had also, by McConnell’s own candid admission, made it much easier for him to win elections in an increasingly Republican-leaning state, and to rise within his increasingly conservative party. In moving rightward with his party, he surrendered himself to the current, rather than fighting against it. The capable young moderate who in his early years governed in the mold of Cooper might have opted to serve as an anchor as his party began to drift. With his historical perspective and political instincts, he might have saved the GOP from the fate that Geoffrey Kabaservice, the historian, describes for today’s Republicans: a dysfunctional party that is “in the process of shucking off most of its history and heritage,” with leaders who show “little interest in appealing to moderates, repudiating extremism, reaching out to new constituencies, or upholding the party’s legacy of civil rights and civil liberties,” leaving “little likelihood that the GOP would take the lead in working toward bipartisan solutions to the economic crisis or present itself as an effective governing party.”
More broadly, with his deep understanding of the Senate, McConnell could have recognized how destructive the realignment of the parties into ideologically cohesive units (especially on the right) would be for a constitutional system that, with its multiple channels for obstruction, had not been designed with such a stark partisan divide in mind. That realignment was being driven by historical forces greater than any one politician, but with his grasp of the institution’s dynamics he could have sought ways to mitigate the consequences and prevent the federal government from falling into utter dysfunction.
Endeavoring to avert these fates for his party and the Senate might have ended McConnell’s Senate career short of its fourth decade. But it might also have produced the sort of greatness that the library display seeks to conjure through sheer artifice.
McConnell chose otherwise. Staying in Washington became an end in its own right, justifying accommodations on just about every issue short of causing an outright global financial collapse. Having chosen as his animating issue the preservation of politicians’ ability to raise enormous sums of money, rather than a cause rooted in the needs of his country and constituents, there was little ballast with which to counter the latest upsurge of the right-wing anger Cooper had pushed against years earlier. If anything, McConnell’s fight to preserve the flow of big money in politics had intensified that corrosive anger by fueling the sense among Americans that government had been corrupted by deep-pocketed special interests.
Cooper was alive to witness only the first few years of his younger admirer’s drift—he died in 1991. But the other moderate Republican senator with whom McConnell spent even more of his formative years, Marlow Cook, is with us, living in Sarasota, Florida. Cook still follows Washington, and has been discouraged by what’s become of McConnell. “Mitch is one of the sharpest politicians that the state of Kentucky has ever seen,” he says. “He’s smart and he is wise. But I think he is far more interested in election success within the Republican Party than in whether or not we should insure fifty million people who have no insurance or funds to have insurance for themselves. . . . What he’s done with his life is become a United States senator. He has shown his political capacity . . . but if you gave him grades for political activity and grades for legislative activity, certainly the first would be by far the greatest accomplishment.”
Cook stops short of saying whether he wants to see his former aide elected to his sixth term. “That’s the prerogative of the people of Kentucky,” he says. “They will make that decision. And we will all be anxiously looking forward to seeing what the result was.”
But in one sense, the outcome has already been determined. At some point along the way, Mitch McConnell decided that his own longevity in Washington trumped all—that he would even be willing to feed the public’s disillusionment with its elected leaders if it would increase his and his party’s odds of success at the polls. That he has come as close as he has to achieving his life’s dream of becoming the master of the Senate while surveys show Americans more despairing of their own government than ever before suggests his insidious strategy worked. In the contest of cynical striving versus earnest service, Mitch McConnell already won.