The young man seemed hopeless. He was an underwhelming specimen, with a wan complexion, thin lips, and doughy features, as well as a slight limp, the legacy of a childhood bout with polio. “Doesn’t make a dominant physical presentation,” was how the pollster, Tully Plesser, put it years later. “He wasn’t like a man’s man, really,” said the ad maker, Bob Goodman. The candidate was even less commanding in his speech, with none of the rhetorical vigor expected of politicians in Appalachia and the upland South. And he offered precious little material for the image shapers: the son of a middle manager, not even a native of the state in which he was running for office, with nothing in his background but a few years of low-level lawyering and Washington paper-shuffling. “He isn’t interesting. He doesn’t have an aura, an air of mystery about him,” said Goodman, the man charged with conjuring something out of these paltry fixings.
Yet in another light, Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr. was an ideal project. For one, he was unburdened by any illusions about his shortcomings.
For another, he wanted to win.
And so the young man submitted to the consultants’ instructions like no candidate they had known. “He was wonderful,” said Goodman. “He was like a kid doing a new thing. He was very easy to deal with. He was like the kid who never was in the school play, who really didn’t have talent that way, but was very willing to do the things asked of him.” Said Plesser: “We didn’t have to deal with the ego. Mitch was the best client to have. He really listened, he didn’t argue. . . . We were absolutely starting from scratch. We could build something just the way we wanted, with no pushback.” And when the candidate proceeded to exceed the low expectations others had for him—finally nailing the clip on the seventh or eighth take—he glowed with gratification, said Goodman: “He appreciated a compliment: ‘You did that great!’ It was like the kid who says, ‘Gosh, I really can do the school play.’ ” One of the guys on the film crew came up with a behind-his-back nickname for the eager striver: “Love-me-love-me.”
The challenge was obvious, said Goodman. “Being dramatic was not his style. We saw it as his weakness as a politician and we said, ‘How do we take this fellow who doesn’t do all the political things and endear him to a constituency that just wants to talk common sense? How do we lighten him up and make him human, reach the human feelings of hope and love?’ He was open to that, because he recognized that wasn’t his strength.”
The consultants did their job, and their man won, narrowly defeating the incumbent Democrat to become, in 1978, the head of government for Jefferson County, Kentucky, which includes Louisville. To their astonishment, he did not stop there. This man so ill-suited to the business of running for elected office went on to knock off an incumbent U.S. senator in 1984, becoming the first Republican to win statewide in Kentucky in sixteen years, and then to win reelection four times, and then to find himself in 2014 on the verge of achieving what fairly early in his ascent he had identified as his life’s dream: Senate majority leader.
But it was not just their former client’s climb up the ladder that startled the consultants. It was the way his ascent transformed him. The guileless young man who was conspicuously uninformed about the mechanics of politics grew into a steely influence broker, proud of his growing sway on Capitol Hill. More than that, what struck Goodman was how his former client was using that power—to obstruct the agenda of President Barack Obama and, with it, the workings of the federal government. The young man who had run in Louisville as a pragmatic moderate—who had won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO by supporting collective bargaining for public employees, who had earned the gratitude of local feminists by standing up for abortion rights—was now the symbol of the willful intransigence that had brought the nation’s capital to the brink of utter dysfunction. And this change pained Bob Goodman.
“It’s so sad and disillusioning to me,” said Goodman. “I guess it’s part of his pragmatism: it was his strategy to say no to Obama on everything. It obviously works. But it works to the detriment of the country. I hate it. I hate the fact that he was right there.” Goodman pores over the recollections of his years working with McConnell but can find no premonitions of what came later. “There were no alarm bells coming out of him,” he said. “He was a perfectly reasonable guy.”
There is an understandable inclination to tell political history through its most colorful characters—Teddy Roosevelt, LBJ, Bill Clinton. But our times are often shaped as much, if not more, by our more nondescript figures. To understand what has happened in Washington over the past few decades, as our government has become increasingly incapable of tackling the problems of our times—sluggish wages, a broken immigration system, and climate change, to name just a few—we must seek to understand Mitch McConnell. It is he who symbolizes better than anyone else in politics today the transformation of the Republican Party from a broad, nationwide coalition spanning conservatives, moderates, and even some liberals into an ideologically monolithic, demographically constrained unit that political scientists judge without modern historical precedence.
But the story of Mitch McConnell is about more than ideology. It is about character. For under that inexpressive visage that Goodman and Plesser sought to break through, there lies a morality tale that goes to the heart of our country’s political culture—and the weakness within it.