The Cynic

by Alec MacGillis

  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 t
hat 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 Gr
ayson 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.