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 ach
ieving 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.
CODA: VICTORY
The dream had been deferred for years, but when it was finally realized, how splendid it was. On November 4, 2014, McConnell trounced Alison Lundergan Grimes, winning by more than 15 percentage points, the second largest of all his reelection margins. He won just about the entire state outside of Louisville and Lexington—in Martin County, where the effects of the 2000 coal slurry spill live on, he won 74 percent of the vote. Barely had he received word of his own victory than news of the broader triumph arrived: Republicans were winning across the country, giving the party more than enough seats in the Senate to finally claim the majority with McConnell at the helm. “Tomorrow, the papers will say I won this race, but the truth is, tonight we begin another race . . . that’s the race to turn the country around,” he said in his victory speech at a hotel in the suburbs of Louisville—in Jefferson County, where he had celebrated his first victory thirty-seven years earlier.
The midterm election of 2014 had been, in a sense, the perfect Mitch McConnell election. It had been dominated, more than any cycle before it, by the dark money made possible by the court rulings championed by McConnell and by his blockage of legislation to require disclosure of the spending. Groups that did not disclose where their money came from spent more than $215 million, up by more than a third from the 2010 midterm election. More than two-thirds of this undisclosed spending was on behalf of Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
McConnell himself benefited hugely from this dark money in his race against Grimes. He received $23 million from outside groups, more than double what Grimes did. Some of the spending was from known entities like the National Rifle Association, but the single biggest outside spender was a mysterious group called the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, which spent more than $7.5 million on ads attacking Grimes. Because the organization classified itself as a group engaged in “social welfare,” not just elections, it did not need to disclose its donors. But its purpose was plain: the only name associated with the group was a veteran of McConnell’s prior two campaigns.
The election also suited McConnell in being even more devoid of substantive policy debates than is the norm for modern campaigns, freeing him from having to state what he believed on important issues of the day. McConnell struggled mightily on the few occasions when the subject turned to the success of the Affordable Care Act in Kentucky, where the gains in health coverage had been among the three largest in the country. In the campaign’s sole debate, he suggested that the state’s version of the law could continue in some form even if the federal law was repealed. The moderator declined to follow up, Grimes failed to challenge the claim nearly as aggressively as she could have, and in the days following it received far less attention than her refusal to say whether she had voted for Obama for president. As John Yarmuth, the Democratic congressman from Louisville who has known McConnell for years, put it in an interview with The Atlantic just before the election: “Margaret Mead once said that the only thing worth doing is to add to the sum of accurate information in the world, and Mitch doesn’t do a lot of that, especially when it comes to the Affordable Care Act.”
If the election had a theme, it was sourness—the sourness that Americans felt about an economy that was improving by many metrics but not enough for them to feel it themselves, and the sourness they felt about a government in Washington that seemed disconnected from their anxieties and was getting nothing done. Just as McConnell had calculated it would, this sourness rebounded against the party holding the White House, never mind who had engineered the standstill. And that fallout would now elevate him to the post he had aspired to for most of his life.
Given the nature of McConnell’s strategy, it was jarring to hear him declare in his victory speech at the suburban Louisville Marriott that he hoped that, with him in charge of the Senate, Democrats and Republicans could start working together once again. “Just because we have a two-party system doesn’t mean we have to be in perpetual conflict,” he said.
As brazen as this pivot toward comity might have seemed, it was not out of the realm of possibility that McConnell actually hoped to reach consensus on a few issues. As always, everything was about the next election, but the calculus around the next election might have changed now that his party was in the majority: where before it had helped his side to stymie the president, since the blame would accrue mainly to him, now the electoral consequences of dysfunction might also fall on a Congress under Republican control. Cooperation might now be in his self-interest.
There was, of course, another possible motivation for trying to accomplish some things in Washington, as Yarmuth noted in his Atlantic interview. Just moments earlier, Yarmuth had been telling a pro-Grimes rally that McConnell “doesn’t have any core values. He just wants to be something. He doesn’t want to do anything.” But now he noted that McConnell might just want to do something for the sake of his place in the annals of the institution he revered. “If he were to become majority leader, I think he actually will try to make things better,” Yarmuth said. “He will begin to think about his legacy, and he will not want the history books to write how he has been for the last thirty years.”
If so, it would be a long time in coming. But it would, in all likelihood, be too late.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alec MacGillis is a senior editor at The New Republic. He previously covered national politics and domestic policy for The Washington Post and worked as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun and Concord Monitor in New Hampshire, among other papers. A native of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he now resides with his family in Baltimore.
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ISBN 978-1-5011-1203-4 (pbk)
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The Cynic Page 15