SENTINEL
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Copyright © 2016 by Mitch McConnell
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
Insert here: From The Courier-Journal, November 7, 1999, © 1999 Gannett-Community Publishing; here: From The Courier-Journal, June 23, 1996, © 1996 Gannett-Community Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.
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ISBN 9780399564109 (hardcover)
ISBN 9780399564123 (ebook)
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
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To my mom and dad
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
A Fighting Spirit
CHAPTER TWO
From Baseball to Politics
CHAPTER THREE
Seeing Greatness
CHAPTER FOUR
“You Can Start Too Late, but Never Too Soon”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Mitch Who?”
CHAPTER SIX
Giving It All I’ve Got
CHAPTER SEVEN
Slow and Steady
CHAPTER EIGHT
Love
CHAPTER NINE
Standing My Ground
CHAPTER TEN
The Value of the Team
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Resilience
CHAPTER TWELVE
Practicing Patience
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Frogs in a Wheelbarrow
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Thick Hide
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Bad News
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Professor Obama
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
You Can’t Make Policy If You Don’t Win the Election
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Courage
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Making a Point or a Difference?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Victory
Epilogue
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Index
Introduction
Over the three decades I have been a US senator, I’ve been the subject of many profiles. I usually play the villain, according to the standard good guy/bad guy accounts favored by most Washington reporters. The more positive ones tend to focus on my ability to broker deals with supposed adversaries, keep my head when others don’t, and win elections I’m not supposed to. Until now, though, no one has ever tried to write the story as I see it, which is really my doing. I only talk to the press if it’s to my advantage, and I always discourage my staff from revealing details of my meetings with presidents and other public figures. It’s rare that I attend the kind of social events where people tend to engage in the gossip and intrigue for which Washington is famous. I’ve only been to Nantucket a few times, and I didn’t like it. My idea of a good time is a quiet evening at home with my wife, Elaine Chao, or—although I may hardly strike people as the tailgating type—gathered with friends in the parking lot of the University of Louisville’s Papa John’s stadium, before a Cardinals football game, a tradition I’ve enjoyed for decades.
Beyond that, the place I feel most at ease is the Senate, an institution that rewards patience and confounds those who lack it. Every serious student of the institution, from Tocqueville to my late colleague Robert Byrd, has viewed the Senate as uniquely important to America’s stability and flourishing. In their view, as well as in mine, it has made all the difference. Why? Because during the most contentious and important battles throughout our nation’s history—from the fierce early fights over the shape and scope of the federal government, to those that preceded and followed a nation-rending Civil War, to those surrounding the great wars of the twentieth century, or a decades-long Cold War, or the war on terror—the Senate is the tool that has enabled us to find our footing almost every time.
At its best, the Senate exists to keep the government from swinging between extremes as one party loses power and another gains it. The Senate is the only legislative body on earth where a majority is not enough—most things require sixty votes to pass. Without this moderating effect, today’s majority passes something and tomorrow’s majority repeals it; today’s majority proposes something, tomorrow’s majority opposes it. We see that in the House of Representatives all the time. But when the Senate is allowed to work the way it was designed to—meaning a place where nothing is decided without a good dose of deliberation and debate, as well as input from both the majority and minority parties—it arrives at a result that is acceptable to people all along the political spectrum.
In recent years, however, we’ve lost our sense for the value of slow and steady deliberation, for the type of work that depends more on patient diplomacy than on power plays and media manipulation. Under Democratic leader Harry Reid, the Senate Chamber frequently became little more than a Democratic campaign studio. Many of the bills that Reid allowed for consideration were bills his party did not intend to pass. And none of us—no senator, no American—should be at peace with that. Because if America is to face up to the challenges we face in the decades ahead, she’ll need the Senate the Founders in their wisdom intended, not the hollow shell of the Senate created in recent years under Reid.
No better example exists of this than the story behind the passage of Obamacare. When Democrats in the Senate couldn’t convince even one Republican that this bill was worth supporting as written, they decided to do it on their own and pass it on a party line vote. And now we’re seeing the result. The chaos this law has visited on our country isn’t just deeply tragic, it was entirely predictable. That will always be the case if you approach legislation without regard for the views of the other side. Without some meaningful buy-in, you guarantee a food fight. You guarantee instability and strife. It may very well have been the case that on Obamacare, the will of the country was not to pass the bill at all. That’s what I would have concluded if Republicans couldn’t get a single Democratic vote for legislation of this magnitude. But Democrats plowed forward anyway. They didn’t want to hear it and the results are clear. It’s a mess.
The problem, admittedly, originates not solely from the Left alone, but also, disappointingly, from a very few on the Right. Just as the Democrats have used every gimmick to push through radically liberal policies, some on the Right have demanded that if they don’t get every single thing they want, we may as well burn the place down, even if it means scorching the reputation and future success of our own party. People are not elected to the Senate to get everything they want. This is not an all-or-nothing place. And these are not the type of people we want to be the leaders in t
he Senate, or of anything else.
A big part of the problem with the Senate today is the way many politicians on both sides of the aisle style themselves as saviors. It’s not only self-serving nonsense in most cases, it’s exploitative of the voters. And it reflects a fundamentally un-American view of how our political institutions were meant to function. The proper basis of government, James Madison believed, was human frailty. That’s why it was just as important to Madison, in devising the government we have, not only to protect the people from their own worst impulses, but also to protect them from the worst impulses of those they put in office. And that’s also why the moment we conclude that our political institutions are no longer up to the task of resolving the challenges we face is the moment we give up on the American project altogether. Why? Because in the end it’s the institutions, not the flawed men and women who pass through them, that will save us from ourselves and from the politicians we’re all so fond of criticizing.
All these things have always seemed obvious to me, to the point that I never felt the need to unburden myself of any of it in a book, let alone tell my own story. But I’ve come to realize that those ideas—and many other constitutional principles—are anything but obvious to most people today. And when I was reelected in 2014, winning by a fifteen-point landslide against all odds and attracting a level of attention I could only find amusing, I realized it was time for me to write this book.
From the moment I made that decision, I was determined to make it true to who I am. So much of politics today is about artifice and obfuscation, and that extends to the standard political memoir, many of which seem artificial to me. They’re either cloyingly grandiose, or dishonest about what usually motivates people in my business. I didn’t want my book to be either. The truth is that very few of us expect to be at the center of world-changing events when we first file for office, and personal ambition usually has a lot more to do with it than most of us are willing to admit. That was certainly true for me, and I never saw the point in pretending otherwise. It doesn’t mean we don’t bring deep and abiding concerns to the job. It does mean that the standard story of the humble idealist who unexpectedly finds him- or herself in Washington, carried by a wave of encouraging friends in a selfless pursuit of justice and truth, is largely a fable. We’re all the flawed politicians Madison worried about, and the hero pose isn’t a good look for anyone.
I’m free to say all this because, unlike so many other senators, I’ve never had an interest in running for president. And since trashing the Senate seems to be a prerequisite for a presidential run these days, it falls on people like me to write books like this, defending this precious institution and telling the true story of what politics in America is actually like.
Anybody can enter politics, but I believe that being good at it—meaning winning elections so that you can impact policy—comes only as a result of an extraordinary amount of preparation. My ascension as leader of a new Republican majority was years in the making. Depending on how you look at it, preparation like the kind I’ve practiced seems either admirable or overly calculating. But it happens to be the new reality of politics in America. Unless you are blessed with extraordinary gifts of charisma or step into the national spotlight at a particularly opportune moment, making it in the world of politics today frequently involves incredible feats of preparation and endurance. Fortunately for me, that’s the only way I have ever approached life. Maybe that’s because I learned at an early age that nothing worthwhile comes easy. Maybe it’s because I’ve had to work hard to overcome obstacles of birth and circumstance. Whatever the reason, I have never had to quarrel with the realities of life as a senator. Success in politics is a lot of work, and pretending otherwise isn’t just pointless, it never seemed right to me.
This is a big, boisterous, complex country. Getting to the top in any field should be tough. The reward for that effort is the knowledge that you have truly earned your place at the table, and that, in politics at least, the privilege of serving your fellow citizens is something that’s been hard-won, and for that reason, worth the effort, before and after the votes are counted. This book is the story not of one particular campaign, but a lifetime of campaigns. It is the story of how patience and perseverance have been the keystone of my four decades in public life, and why I think both qualities are needed now more than ever if we are to meet our greatest challenges as a nation. It is the story of how a little kid from Alabama found his purpose in life and pursued it with everything he had.
It’s the story of the long game, and it begins in a small hospital room in Warm Springs, Georgia.
CHAPTER ONE
A Fighting Spirit
You can walk but you can’t walk. That’s what my mom would say to me after I was struck with polio at the age of two, to explain why she wouldn’t let me get up on my feet.
It was the summer of 1944, ten years before Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine. The disease was sweeping the nation, prompting full-blown hysteria not only in urban communities in the Northeast, but in rural towns like Five Points, Alabama, in a house like ours. Our real home was about two hundred miles north, in Athens, Alabama, a town of fewer than six thousand people, but my mom and I had come to Five Points to live with my mother’s sister, Edrie Mae, while my dad was off fighting World War II. Without even a single stop sign, there was little reason to slow down on your way through Five Points. Edrie Mae, who we called Sister, ran a country store she and her husband, Julius, owned. It was in their house, just after I turned two, and not long after my dad left for basic training, that I first came down with what my mother thought was the flu. But when she took me to see the local doctor, hoping for something to make me feel better, she learned the diagnosis was far more grim.
The thing about polio—a virus that invades the nervous system and can, within a matter of hours, cause total paralysis—was how unpredictable it was. Some kids might get it and be permanently paralyzed; others might never see any effects. The disease struck and weakened my left leg, the worst of it my quadriceps. It’s one of my life’s great fortunes that Sister’s home was only about sixty miles from Warm Springs, Georgia, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt had established a polio treatment center and where he’d often travel to find relief from the polio that paralyzed him at the age of thirty-nine. My mother took me there every chance she had. The nurses would teach her how to perform exercises meant to rehabilitate my leg while also emphasizing her need to make me believe I could walk, even though I wasn’t allowed to.
“If he tries to walk, his leg will stiffen and we won’t be able to help the muscle,” they told my mother. “So do not, under any circumstances, let him walk. But if he comes to believe he’s crippled, that’ll be just as bad.”
It was a distinction lost on me at two years old. All I knew was that as other kids my age were easily learning to run, jump, and climb, I was fighting from the confines of my bed for the chance to one day do the same. Four times each day—fiercely determined to keep me, her only child, from experiencing any disadvantage—my mother would lead me in long, aching exercises to stretch and tone my leg muscles. This went on for two very long years. She was both strict and emboldening, watching me like a hawk to keep me off my feet, and yet reminding me to deeply believe that this was temporary; that one day I would, in fact, walk.
My mom managed this with tremendous patience and grace, which was her way. She was from a little town called Wadley, Alabama, in a dirt-poor county about twenty miles from the Georgia border. She was the youngest of seven, born into a family of subsistence farmers in a region where the land was too dry to yield very much. Her mother died when she was five months old, leaving the job of raising her to Edrie Mae, just eight years old at the time. With the help of his five sons, my grandfather Shockley lived off the land: feeding his family with what they grew in the spring, and canning what they could for the winter. I was nineteen when Grandpa Shockley died in 1961, and unlike my patien
t and often reserved mother, I knew him to have a feisty, often angry, temper. Of course, I think he had good reason. As he was the youngest of seven kids, his parents never got around to giving him a name. After his birth, they called him Babe, and it stuck. The fact that he was never officially named made him mad as hell.
While her own parents didn’t make it out of grade school, my mother graduated from Wadley High School in 1937. Soon after graduation, she found her way out of rural Alabama and into Birmingham, where she moved in with a brother who worked in a factory there. She’d been known her whole life not by her first name, Julia, which she loved, but by her middle name, Odene, which she detested. So in Birmingham she began to call herself Dean, and with no thought of ever returning to Wadley, she took a job as a secretary at CIT, a finance company. It was here that she met A. M. McConnell II.
My dad was born in Limestone County, Alabama, near the Tennessee line, to a long line of hardworking and often colorful McConnells. James McConnell, from County Down, Ireland, who came to this country as a young boy in the 1760s, went on to fight for the colonies in the American Revolution. My dad’s grandfather was a circuit-riding Calvinist preacher who sermonized at a different church every Sunday, carrying his Bible in the saddlebags I still have.
When my dad was born in 1917, his parents—known to me as Big Dad and Mamie—harbored high expectations for him, their youngest son. They sent him to Darlington, a respected prep school in Rome, Georgia, where he was good enough at football to go on to play for Wake Forest. He transferred to Auburn his sophomore year, but stayed only a year before dropping out of college.
My dad was known to be stubborn, at times impetuous, and was extremely outgoing—open, bold, and often unfettered. At CIT, he found a job to match his personality and physical brawn: repossessing cars from customers who hadn’t paid their loans. But he held greater ambitions than this job and soon left for the so-called oil patch of Baytown, Texas, just south of Houston. Arriving in Texas, he had quite a difficult time forgetting about Dean Shockley, the pretty twenty-one-year-old secretary he’d left behind. The fact that she was already engaged to another man didn’t discourage my father’s pursuit of her one bit. Luckily for him, she was mutually enchanted; by his warmth and good-natured obstinacy, not to mention his promise to do everything he could to provide her a stable and happy life. On September 19, 1940, she boarded a train to Houston with the few possessions in her hope chest—some bedding and dishes, an apple corer, and a can opener—and the next day, in a simple dress and fur stole, she married my father.
The Long Game Page 1