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 dista
nce 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.
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