Still, McConnell had not yet closed the gap, and an air of desperation was settling over the campaign. Never had Tarrance seen a candidate as on edge as McConnell in those final weeks. “He was pretty psychologically uptight, that’s as nice as I can put it,” Tarrance says. “He knew this was his one chance to make a breakout. It was all on the line. He kept using the phrase ‘We need to find the silver bullet,’ something to put us over fifty percent. . . . I’ve never been on a campaign before or since with so much physical tension to find the key that would finally open the door.” He adds, “Everything you discussed with Mitch was how to climb the mountain. There was no laughing, no joking.” Tarrance and Ailes had no shortage of campaigns to advise that year, he said, but on none of them were they working nearly as hard as for Mitch McConnell.
The campaign decided their best bet was to go back to the dogs one more time, at the risk of overdoing it. They aired a sequel in which the hound dogs find Huddleston, played by a look-alike actor, cowering way up in a tree.
That might have done it. McConnell won, just barely, by a margin of five thousand votes—four-tenths of a percentage point, about one vote per precinct. At the Republican victory party in Louisville, Gene Snyder, McConnell’s first boss in Washington, was overheard remarking with wry wonderment that Kentuckians had just elected to the U.S. Senate someone who had fewer friends in Kentucky than “anybody elected to anything.”
* * *
McConnell’s margin of victory was particularly narrow in contrast to the more than 283,000 votes by which another Republican won that night in Kentucky: Ronald Reagan.
McConnell had an ambivalent relationship with the president. He was, after all, no Ronald Reagan Republican—in keeping with his John Sherman Cooper inheritance, he had backed Gerald Ford in 1976 and George H. W. Bush in 1980 over the conservative ex-governor from California (not only that, he had privately ranked Reagan fourth among Republican candidates in 1980). But with Reagan near the peak of his popularity in 1984 and running against Walter Mondale, a liberal Minnesotan with little appeal for Kentucky swing voters—especially those conservative Democrats who were the key to his election—McConnell had done his utmost to associate himself with the top of the ticket. Whittle, the state party chairman, had made it a refrain to tell voters around the state that Reagan “needs Mitch” in Washington. McConnell’s team, lacking campaign chairmen in many of the state’s counties, had asked the Reagan campaign if its county chairmen could double in that role for McConnell.
While the Reagan campaign agreed to that request, the eagerness for association had not been mutual. When Reagan came to Louisville for one of his debates against Mondale, a visit McConnell’s campaign hyped as much as it could, the president referred to the candidate as “O’Donnell.” But that slight had done nothing to diminish the tug of Reagan’s coattails. It was a political scientist’s axiom: if the top of the ticket is pulling 60 percent or more of the vote, there is a coattail effect for candidates farther down the ticket. “It helped a lot,” says Whittle. “Anytime you have someone like Ronald Reagan anyplace that’s conservative, it’s going to help the party down the line, down to sheriff. I hate to say that’s the whole thing, but in order to win Kentucky, you’ve got to get the Republicans out,” and Reagan did that for McConnell. Hollenbach, McConnell’s 1977 opponent, is blunter: “If you take away . . . Ronald Reagan, there is no Mitch McConnell.”
It was because Reagan’s impact on McConnell’s election was so obvious that people attending the GOP election night party in Louisville were so startled when McConnell, in his victory speech, did not acknowledge the president at all. After seeking to bask in Reagan’s reflected glow throughout the campaign, McConnell did not want to share the spotlight. “He never mentioned Reagan. He never said, ‘I appreciate the margin Reagan provided,’ ” says Forgy, Reagan’s Kentucky campaign chairman. When reporters asked Forgy that night about McConnell’s victory, he was candid. “I said, ‘Hell, Reagan’s coattails were as long as a bedsheet.’ ” When quotes to this effect appeared in the press the next morning, Forgy heard from McConnell. “He called me the next day and said, ‘Don’t say that anymore,’ ” Forgy says. “He didn’t want the Democrats to pick up on the fact that he was a political fluke—that he didn’t get there by an intentional process.”
McConnell was at a loss about how to discuss his victory. When Tully Plesser, his former pollster, called him after the election to congratulate him, McConnell told him that the press was “hounding him” about what he thought was key to his victory, and said that he had credited Ailes’s ad, rather than Reagan. Plesser told McConnell that this answer was wrong. “I told him to say that you won because your positions coincided with the interests of the voters. Not because a very skilled and manipulative operative pulled a stunt on your behalf.”
McConnell took this advice. From that point on, his account of his election to the Senate left out both Reagan and Ailes. This omission did not endear him with Ailes, or with others who had worked so hard on that high-pressure campaign. “McConnell read too much into himself instead of Ailes in the first case and Reagan in the second,” says Tarrance. The lack of gratitude became more glaring a few years later when McConnell put out word that he was going to make his 1984 team reapply for the job for his reelection, just as he had decided to shop around for new advisers after his county campaigns.
Tarrance found this obnoxious in the extreme. “We suddenly saw a different McConnell,” he said. “He was arrogant and disloyal to the people that put him there.” Tarrance flew up from Houston to meet with McConnell but found him “cold and arrogant and not very loyal to his team. He really pissed me off.” Tarrance told McConnell that he wasn’t going to take the job even if offered, and left. A McConnell aide called him at the airport to get him to change his mind, to no avail. Ailes grudgingly decided to stay on and do some ads for McConnell, though in a reduced capacity. “Ailes and I had put together a pretty good team, and it was like McConnell was breaking his team,” says Tarrance. “I’ll fight to the death, but not for someone I don’t believe in. Roger . . . said, ‘I’ll go and do it,’ but we both lost a lot of respect for him.”
The irony was, even as McConnell was seeking to downplay Reagan’s role in his election, he was working to align himself with the conservative president. Leading up to and during his campaign, the Ripon Society’s political arm, the New Leadership Fund, had touted McConnell as a moderate Republican on the rise. But on arriving in Washington, he confounded such expectations. He supported Reagan’s plan to arm the Contras against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. He won conservative plaudits for pushing tort reform proposals (he came up with a “Sue for a Million Award” gimmick to highlight egregious tort claims). He broke with the agreement Huddleston and his fellow Democratic senator Wendell Ford had crafted for picking federal judges in Kentucky, a judicial nominating commission that McConnell decided was undermining his and Reagan’s prerogative to select conservative judges.
And, to the dismay of Jessica Loving and his other abortion rights allies in Louisville, McConnell flipped to the pro-life side on votes such as blocking Medicaid funding for abortions in cases of rape or incest. (Years later, Loving ran into McConnell at a cocktail party at the University of Louisville and told him, “By the way, I’ve never properly thanked you for what you did—you were the best elected official for the pro-choice issue,” to which, she recalls, “he got this pained look, his face got paler than usual and his lips got thinner than usual and he said, ‘You know, I don’t really want anyone to know that.’ ”)
Most strikingly, perhaps, McConnell took up the fight for his party against legislation that was championed by his fellow Kentucky senator, Wendell Ford, calling for expanding voter participation by allowing citizens to register to vote when getting their driver’s license. McConnell was candid about his reasons for opposing the “Motor Voter” bill—expanded voter registration helped Democrats, he said. He went so far as to suggest that low vo
ter turnout was preferable in general: it is “a sign of the health of our democracy that people feel secure enough about the health of the country and about its leaders where they don’t have to obsess about politics all the time.” (A decade later, he would take the lead in pushing for voter identification requirements in the big 2002 election reform bill, thereby opening a major new front in his party’s push to limit access to the polls.)
McConnell had warned of a coming rightward tack as he prepared to run for Senate, telling Keith Runyon, a Courier-Journal editorial writer and husband of McConnell’s former aide Meme Sweets Runyon, that running for statewide office would require some adaptive coloration. “He told me he was going to change, because his electorate would change,” Runyon says. But in later explaining to Kleber, the historian, and Dyche, the authorized biographer, the sheer extent of his rightward shift on arriving in Washington, McConnell pointed to a different explanation. Even if he had not been a Ronald Reagan man, he had watched Reagan win, and win big. The Senate Republican caucus he was arriving in was notably more conservative than it had been in the previous session. “The Capitol Hill rookie did not need a political compass to notice that the GOP had enjoyed considerable electoral success as it had moved rightward. Having gone with that flow, he now found himself in Washington,” writes Dyche, paraphrasing McConnell. “Ronald Reagan . . . provided a powerful example that conservatism could work both in practice and politically” and McConnell “saw [conservatism’s] adherents endure both bad polls and bad press and still win.”
For someone who had almost lost, and didn’t want to come that close to losing again, the moral of the story was clear.
* * *
Back in 1981, after his reelection as Jefferson County executive, McConnell had called up Harvey Sloane, the Democrat just elected to his second term as mayor of Louisville, and suggested they meet for breakfast. Sloane invited him to his house. There, the two agreed that it would be in the interest of both to work together as much as possible, given their overlapping jurisdictions and their shared ambitions for higher office. “We talked about the fact that we both had other aspirations, that the worst thing to do was to have two chief executives bickering,” Sloane recalls. “It was: ‘We’re going to run for future office, so let’s not cut each other up.’ ” The agreement held. The two men worked together on the delicate task of pushing for a merger of the city and county governments, which failed twice despite their effort.
There was no expectation the truce would outlive their time in adjacent office, and it did not. In 1989, Sloane announced he would challenge McConnell for the Senate the next year. He was a formidable candidate with a singular profile: the Yale-educated scion of a wealthy Northeastern family who had sloughed off his privilege to serve as a surgeon in eastern Kentucky and later in South Vietnam before setting up a clinic in Louisville’s mostly African-American west end. After his two terms as mayor, he’d gone on to serve in McConnell’s old seat as county executive. His fair and slender good looks recalled actor Alan Alda or former New York mayor John Lindsay.
McConnell wasted no time in turning that distinctive profile against Sloane. At Fancy Farm, the traditional political picnic in far western Kentucky that kicks off every election season, McConnell ripped into his former Jefferson County counterpart, the man who’d invited him over to his house, as the “wimp from the East” whose “mommy left him a million dollars” and who had “come down here to save us from ourselves.” He mocked Sloane’s vacation home in a “foreign country.” (Unmentioned: it was in the sunny paradise of Canada.)
Meanwhile, back in Washington, McConnell set about establishing a voting record that would position him well against the dashing doctor, even if it meant going against his better instincts on public policy. He introduced an amendment to the defense spending bill to allow police to shoot down planes they suspected of carrying drugs (it was, he later admitted, one of the “most ridiculous” legislative gambits he’d ever engaged in). He voted for family leave legislation opposed by President Bush to deny Sloane the issue on the trail (just “chickened out,” he later said). He introduced legislation for a $21 billion, five-year health-care program that went nowhere on the Hill but gave him something to counter Sloane’s top issue, a call for national health insurance. “He had never done anything before or since to help people get health insurance,” says Sloane, looking back.
By the summer of 1990, McConnell had outraised Sloane by a 3–1 margin, but was unable to open up a comfortable lead in the polls. His team resorted to a classic dirty trick: a McConnell campaign staffer called in to a TV show that Sloane was appearing on and, pretending to be an adulatory liberal, thanked him for making Louisville a “nuclear-free zone.” This call spurred Sloane into a critique of nuclear power. In no time, the McConnell team had a tape of Sloane’s comments circulating in western Kentucky, where the biggest employer was the Paducah nuclear enrichment plant.
Still, Sloane was making it competitive—a late October poll showed him slicing McConnell’s lead in half, to 10 points. But McConnell had one more card to play. Late that month, his campaign leaked to the press that Sloane had renewed a prescription for his sleeping pills using his expired Drug Enforcement Administration registration number (he’d stopped practicing some years earlier). Sloane said he needed the pills to deal with severe pain in his hip and back (he had hip replacement surgery after the election). The state’s medical licensure board chided Sloane for the self-prescription but said no formal sanction was warranted. This did not stop McConnell, who, with Ailes still overseeing his television ads, put out brutal spots with images of vials and pills and a narrator forebodingly describing Sloane’s penchant for prescribing “mood-altering,” “powerful depressants” for himself at “double the safe dose without a legal permit.”
Nearly a quarter century later, Sloane recalls the mortification of having a reporter approach him on the street the day of the leak and asking him about the prescription. But in a way, he knew it was coming. “Nothing surprised me about Mitch. That’s the way he acts and campaigns and any mole he can uncover, he’s going to do it. It’s as negative as you can get,” he says. “He’s a guy without a lot of qualms in terms of how he conducts himself in campaigns.” Frank Greer, Sloane’s campaign manager, still seethes over the prescription attack. “This was something private that shouldn’t have been public, that was distorted, that had to do with family issues.” When Jim Cauley, a Democratic operative from Kentucky working on the campaign, saw McConnell’s ad with the pills, he knew the race was over. “Oh my God, I just thought we were toast,” he says. “Harvey is a good, honest human. That they did that to him pissed me off more than it surprised me. You take a guy who moves to Kentucky and opens up a health center in West Louisville—how do you make that bad? Well, they did. They take good people and make them bad.”
On Election Day, McConnell edged Sloane by under 5 percentage points. It would be the narrowest of all his reelections, and one he was particularly proud of, relays Dyche: McConnell “considered his campaign as the best run in America that year.” After all, he had won.
* * *
The pattern had been set. Every six years, McConnell would deploy pretty much the same strategy against whichever Democrat emerged to challenge him.
He would cast votes in Washington with the election foremost in mind. In 1996, running against former state attorney general and lieutenant governor Steve Beshear, he voted for an increase in the minimum wage even though it came without the business tax relief he thought any wage increase should be paired with. In 2008, he voted to override President George W. Bush’s veto of a massive farm bill—he had managed to slip a special tax provision for racehorse owners into the bill, and breaking with the deeply unpopular president would help McConnell’s reelection odds.
He would build up so massive a campaign account that it would scare off credible potential challengers who lacked the personal wealth or tolerance for the fund-raising that would be necessary to
compete. In 2008, a difficult year for Republicans, McConnell came into January having already raised nearly $11 million, a whopping sum for so early in the season. The best the Democrats could come up with to take that on was Bruce Lunsford, who had lost two gubernatorial primaries but had the advantage of a personal fortune made in the nursing home business. Even that only went so far—by the final weeks of the race, when Lunsford was closing in the polls following the worldwide financial collapse, McConnell had nearly $6 million of the $18 million he had raised still on hand. Lunsford had raised only a third as much and had less than a quarter as much left to use.
And with this money at his disposal, McConnell would set about countering voters’ lukewarm feelings toward him by doing what had worked so well against Sloane: He would make his opponents unacceptable. And he would make them unacceptable in the same way: he would cast them, as he had done Sloane, as elitists out of touch with working-class Kentuckians, even if it meant attacking wealth and success in business in ways that might make many Republicans uncomfortable. He mocked Beshear for his fondness for foxhunting: “Can you imagine a working-class hero who wears a hunting pink and brandishes a riding crop?” He ran an ad attacking his 2002 challenger, Lois Combs Weinberg, the daughter of a former Kentucky governor, for owning a house in the Virgin Islands. He hit Lunsford for owning homes in multiple states and for questions about his health-care companies.
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