The Long Game

by Mitch McConnell

  I spoke to a few Kentucky reporters at the convention, and one would go on to write that he found me rather quiet and subdued. He wasn’t wrong—there was a reason I was a bit deflated. Shortly after returning home from the convention, Sherrill and I announced that we had chosen to divorce. The divorce was mutual and amicable, and we would share custody of our three daughters, but a change like that is never easy, especially when you are in the public eye. Throughout my career, I’ve been asked about my daughters, with whom I’m very close. However, I’m the one who has chosen a career in the public spotlight, not them. I’ve always protected their privacy, and I will continue to do so throughout this book.

  In 1981, I was elected to my second term as county judge, and soon after, once again applying Happy Chandler’s maxim, I immediately began to lay the groundwork for a run for the Senate. I was more convinced than ever that the Senate was the place where I could have the most impact, serving the people of my state, working to solve problems facing Kentucky, while also tackling national issues.

  In three years, the Democratic incumbent senator Walter “Dee” Huddleston would be up for reelection for his third term. A former radio station manager who was first elected to John Sherman Cooper’s seat after Cooper’s retirement in 1972, Huddleston’s liberal ways were hurting not just Kentuckians, but all Americans. In his twelve years in the Senate, Huddleston had voted to create 116 new federal bureaucracies. He’d voted twenty-one times to increase the national debt. The National Taxpayers Union—a bipartisan, independent watchdog organization that rates members of Congress on how wisely they spend taxpayers’ money—had rated Huddleston an all-time big spender. This organization thought Huddleston was a terrible money manager, and I agreed. I formed a committee to begin to raise money to challenge him for his seat in three years.

  When I told people close to me about my decision, almost everyone told me I didn’t have a chance. But to me, the choice was easy. It was now or never to try to realize my dream to become a senator, to try to make the kind of difference I hoped to make, to have the type of impact made by people like John Sherman Cooper. After a decade of preparation and planning, and years spent gaining an understanding of the needs of Kentucky residents, it was time to put it all on the line.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Mitch Who?”

  When I announced my candidacy for the US Senate against Dee Huddleston on January 17, 1984, I knew that to win a statewide election in Kentucky, it helped to be three things: rich, well connected, and a Democrat. Because there was nothing I could do about that last one, I had to assemble the best team I could to help with the others.

  Even though I’d essentially been campaigning for this position for many years, I entered the race a fairly unknown candidate running against a two-term incumbent in a heavily Democratic state. This meant that very few people were knocking down my door with offers to help, with one exception. Soon after my announcement, a twenty-one-year-old named Terry Carmack showed up at my courthouse office. Terry was a student at Murray State University in western Kentucky. He’d grown up on a farm outside Benton, in the western part of the state, and had just two jobs to boast of: working at a gas station and, from a wooden table set up in his family’s carport, selling tomatoes to tourists driving past his house on their way to Kentucky Lake. He had no political experience, had not yet earned a college degree, and was, like everyone else in western Kentucky, a registered Democrat. But he was smart, ambitious, and for some reason, really wanted a job with me. I wasn’t in a position to turn away help, but I was curious as to why he seemed so eager to join a contest nobody expected I could win.

  “My dad’s an electrician and my mom’s a homemaker,” he told me. “But every night, we sit around the dinner table and we talk politics. I’ve watched every convention I can remember. I’m an average student at a small college twenty miles from my home, and I want to know what might be out there for me beyond Marshall County. Everyone thinks I’m crazy for doing this, sir, but I know it might be my one chance to make something bigger happen for myself.”

  That was certainly good enough for me. I offered him a job, paying him $9,800 to be my advance man, arriving first at events to manage the crowd and prepare the press. (It wouldn’t take long to learn there would be few crowds and even fewer members of the press at our events, prompting Terry to joke that being my advance man meant getting out of the car before I did.) Terry would go on to be one of my most trusted aides over the next thirty years.

  I opened my campaign headquarters, a small suite of offices I’d rented on the fourth floor of an office tower near the Watterson Expressway. Joe Schiff, who’d been instrumental in my two previous campaigns for county judge, was a family man whose wife liked to see him home in time for dinner. Knowing the long hours this race would require, I needed a new campaign manager. While Joe would remain very involved, I turned my attention to a Kentuckian named Janet Mullins. Although she had no experience managing a campaign, Janet, a young, smart single mom, had worked for three years for Oregon senator Bob Packwood, the last year as his chief of staff. She’d recently moved back to Louisville from Washington, and as soon as I met her in person—by chance one evening at a parent-teacher conference at our children’s school—I wanted her to run my campaign. Years later, Janet would be referred to in the Courier-Journal as having “a salty tongue.” That’s one way to put it. Another is to say she could hardly utter a few sentences without using a profanity. While it may have put others off, I found it amusing, and very much enjoyed being around Janet. She had a sharp political mind and the exact type of energy my campaign needed. When I called to offer her the position as my campaign manager, I was delighted to hear she was interested. But there was one caveat.

  “I have a teenage daughter who begged me to leave Washington,” she told me. “I moved to Louisville for her, and have promised her we’ll never go back to DC. If you win, I won’t be coming with you.”

  “I can live with that,” I told her.

  “Then count me in,” she said.

  While I didn’t know this at the time, Janet was able to accept the job in light of her promise to her daughter because she was absolutely sure I didn’t stand a chance.

  She was hardly the only one. From the day I announced, I was firmly aware of where I stood against Huddleston in the polls. I was doing best in Jefferson County, but even there, I was getting creamed. The rest of the state was much tougher sledding. My main priority was to get out, meet people, and help them learn my name. In the first two days of my candidacy, I visited nine cities.

  The campaign would quickly become characterized by Murphy’s Law. Whatever could go wrong, did. In late February, I opened my morning newspaper to read that my former boss, Marlow Cook, who’d become a Washington lobbyist since losing his Senate seat, was endorsing Huddleston. Even though Cook was quoted as saying he was out to lend aid and support to Dee, not to hurt me, I still considered this an act of betrayal.

  Things got more interesting two months into the campaign when, to everyone’s surprise, John Y. Brown Jr., the former Kentucky governor, announced he was mounting a primary challenge to Huddleston, filing six hours before the deadline. It was reminiscent of Brown’s last-minute entry into the Democratic gubernatorial primary race five years earlier, which he won after a two-month campaign among a crowded field of candidates.

  It’s a popular idea that divisive Democratic primaries are good for Republicans, but there’s little evidence to support that. In fact, I was concerned about the opposite: that with Brown’s decision, I’d be left out of the whole thing, seen as nothing more than a bystander to the Democratic contest that pitted a sitting senator against a former governor who was not only one of the (extremely wealthy) cofounders of Kentucky Fried Chicken but also married to a former Miss America, Phyllis George.

  But, of course, I didn’t voice these concerns publicly. Instead, I expressed my pleasure over Brown’s candidacy, s
aying that when the Democrats finished beating the hell out of each other, I’d be around to pick up the pieces. I urged the people of Kentucky to understand that there were three candidates in the race, not two, and I reminded the press it was their obligation not to turn this into a two-man race. I released a television ad and posters, describing myself as Kentucky’s next great senator.

  Brown, who would drop out of the primary six weeks later, probably summed it up best with his response to my comments: “Mitch who?”

  Four months into it, I needed to get more aggressive. Some ideas to accomplish this were better than others. My dad volunteered his time to help. I’m pretty sure he was the only person alive who thought I was going to win this thing, and I gave him the job of calling representatives of political action committees in Washington, trying to convince them to support me. If anyone could do this job well, it was my dad. He was not someone accustomed to being told no. As family legend has it, my mom was visiting her sister Edrie Mae in Five Points when my father first called to propose. My mom hung up, thinking he’d had too much to drink. He called back, eight more times. He’d propose every time, and every time, she’d hang up. While my mom was eventually persuaded by my father’s persistence, the PACs, unfortunately, were not. Despite his best efforts, he only got bad news—PACs are incredibly risk-averse and there was no way they were going to give money to a challenger trailing far behind in every poll.

  What we needed was a new campaign angle that would capture the attention of the voters and break the race open. Janet had the idea to host a press conference every Monday called “Dope on Dee,” in which we pointed out Huddleston’s problems and his lackluster performance during his two Senate terms. But these accomplished very little. Organizing them took too much of Janet’s time—looking for new places to hold the press conference, trying to find new things to say—and before long, we announced we were going to discontinue “Dope on Dee.”

  Yet I continued to believe if I could only show the voters how their senator had let them down, they would turn to me as the brighter, hardworking alternative. There was no disputing that Huddleston had been a mediocre representative of the state’s interests, not least because of his record of repeatedly missing important votes. I thought this was something to look into, and was especially curious if one reason for his having missed votes was the number of lucrative speeches he was giving. Janet told me this was a waste of our time. “I’ve worked on the Hill,” she said. “There are ways to hide this. If you miss a vote to give a speech, you wait a few days to cash your honorarium check. That way, it’s impossible to make a link between a missed vote and a paid speech. Everyone does it.”

  I trusted her experience, but still, I had to keep searching for the silver bullet—the thing that would bring us out of obscurity and into the race, because by midsummer, after six months of campaigning each and every day, my numbers had barely moved. Huddleston released the results of a poll that showed him up sixty-seven points to my twenty-three. I knew that when it came down to it, there were just two types of voters: those who didn’t support me, and those who did but were sure I was going to lose.

  On the first Saturday in August, it was time for the Fancy Farm Picnic, Kentucky’s most important political tradition. Begun in 1880, this gathering takes place at a Catholic church in Fancy Farm, a rural country town of about five hundred residents in western Kentucky. Against the backdrop of rolling hills, cornfields, and wide Kentucky skies, candidates vie for audiences and airtime. Thousands of people attend. While the children try out the carnival-like games, and bluegrass bands perform for the crowds, politicians prepare to give a stump-style speech the way we did in Kentucky decades ago, long before the advent of political ads and teleprompters. It’s where you get to broadcast your message in your own voice, and hope it connects with the people. Driving into Fancy Farm, along a street lined with Dee Huddleston signs, I was nervous but exhilarated.

  The morning I was slated to speak, I woke up before the sun rose in the budget motel room I’d rented, unsure of what I was going to say. Someone had prepared a perfectly awful speech for me, which I had no intention to use. I took a seat at the desk and began to write notes on the only paper I could find—the backs of envelopes. I took the stage later that day, feeling the prickly heat from the August sun, as well as from the crowd who welcomed me with a cacophony of boos and jeers. Steeling myself, I came out swinging, the same way I had thirty years earlier on Dicky McGrew’s front lawn. With everything I had, I made my most compelling case for why I was the best candidate. Not only because my opponent was no longer the right choice for our state, but because I would advance the ideas of limited government, fiscal restraint, and free enterprise. I would ensure a strong military, traditional values, and American exceptionalism. I would stand firmly on the side of constitutional principles and the rule of law. And I’d never tire of fighting for the safety and prosperity of our country.

  The next day I woke up expecting that, finally, my effort would have paid off and people would stop asking “Mitch who?” and begin to notice I was worth taking seriously. First thing, I went to get a copy of the Courier-Journal, and sure enough, there was a big story on Fancy Farm: the entirety of it about Wendell Ford, the junior senator from Kentucky who’d spent his time engaging in a shouting match with a constituent. It was utterly exasperating. He’d captured the headlines and he wasn’t even running for office that year.

  If there was one experience that summed up my campaign the best, it was a day not too long after this, in late September. I had been single for four years, and living alone in a small condo in Louisville, off Gardiner Lane. I was dating a woman who was getting increasingly aggravated by the fact I was never around. On this particular evening, I came home from another long day to find that the one tree in front of my condo had been struck by lightning, and had split down the middle. Inside the house, the goldfish I’d somehow managed to keep alive while on the trail was floating belly-up in the fishbowl. I went upstairs to check my answering machine, only to hear a message from my girlfriend saying she’d finally had enough. We were over. I am not a man who wavers from his mission, but I’ll admit that I went to bed that night questioning if this was all worth it when it seemed so clear that I didn’t have a chance. I knew that I needed to ask for some strength.

  As I lay there, my desperation reminded me of an experience I’d had as a child in Augusta, Georgia. During the many afternoons I spent playing in someone’s backyard, the other boys and I abided by one enduring rule: whoever called out “general” first got to be in charge. The self-declared general would choose the game we’d play, decide on the rules, and create the teams. I was very good at being the first one to think of doing this, and much to the irritation of my playmates, it was a rare occasion that I wasn’t the general.

  Until one afternoon, when another young boy named Stanley Martin responded to my call of general by looking me square in the eye.

  “God,” he said.

  I was dumbfounded. Standing there, I thought about protesting, but what could I say? I could hardly argue that a general should take the lead over God. After all, I did know my limitations.

  That night, alone in my darkened house, I considered if it was time to recognize that God was on the other side and perhaps I’d gone as far as I would go. I turned these doubts over in my mind and considered them fully, but by the time I fell asleep, I’d abandoned them. I’d spent my whole life preparing for this race. While it was getting increasingly difficult to walk out the door each day, having to pretend I had a chance at this, I simply didn’t know how to quit. Kentuckians, like most Americans, were commonsense conservatives. Most of them may have registered as Democrats, but when it came to the important issues facing our county, I believed they agreed with me. So even if I might eventually regret the outcome of this election, I didn’t want to ever regret my effort. I couldn’t leave anything behind.

  And if I couldn’t remai
n positive, at least I could maintain my patience and perseverance and do the one thing I had learned a long time ago, in the halls of Manual High School, on the advice of my dad: to win the election, I had to run a better campaign.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Giving It All I’ve Got

  As Election Day neared, I continued to travel the state. Sometimes I’d rent a small single-engine plane to cover as much territory as I could in a day. The pilot I found was Pat Datillo. She was a little old lady whose husband owned a local vegetable stand near the airfield, and even when she wore her thick, Coke-bottle glasses, she couldn’t see very well. One afternoon, she flew Terry and me from Louisville to Hazard, a small town located between two mountain ranges. As we approached, we dipped below the clouds. Suddenly the mountains of eastern Kentucky spread out in front us, as far as I could see. It was spectacular.

  After we were safe on the ground, I jumped out of the plane. Pat yelled after me from her pilot’s seat. “Hey, Judge, see the top of those mountains?”

  “Yes, sure do.”

  “If it gets too dark that I can’t see them, we ain’t taking off.”

  I rushed to the campaign event, and a little while later, I looked up to see that it was quickly getting dark. “We gotta go,” I said to Terry.

  We raced back to the plane, jumped in, and barely cleared the mountain before the sun went down.

  The moment felt undoubtedly risky, but I didn’t have much of a choice. Everything about my decision to run had been risky, and I had to work harder than I ever had. This meant getting to every event I could: the tobacco festival in Logan County, the Catholic picnics in eastern Jefferson County, the Sorghum Festival in Morgan County, the Hillbilly Days festival in Pikeville. At each, weaving my way through vendors selling barbecue and funnel cakes, and booths set up for bingo for the kids, I’d shake hands and introduce myself while Terry handed out postcards printed with my name on one side and the University of Kentucky’s upcoming football schedules on the other. He did his best to meet my request of adhering a “Switch to Mitch” sticker on the lapel of every passerby in his path. As dismal as my chances felt, I allowed myself to accept the fact that I really enjoyed campaigning. In fact, I was even beginning to have some fun.