While a lot of ink was spilled discussing my role as the dark knight of reform, there were scant articles about what was at the center of my case: the issues brought up by the McCain-Feingold bill are issues that go to the very heart of our democracy. What is permissible in terms of the raising and spending of money in political campaigns? How much freedom should individuals have when it comes to donating money to a political candidate? Who gets to say where the limits are on these issues? The McCain-Feingold bill was attempting to define those limits. Just as I had since entering this fight twenty years earlier, I deferred to the Constitution, which guarantees the broadest freedoms when it comes to speech of any kind, including political advertising.
When the three-judge panel in district court issued a mixed verdict on the constitutionality of the law, I appealed the decision, and on September 8, 2003, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in McConnell v. FEC. It took two months to issue a decision. At 272 pages long, and with an overall 5–4 majority, the court found that the McCain-Feingold bill did not violate the First Amendment. It was extremely disappointing, and though it wasn’t easy for me, I had to accept the ruling. While I’ve always had an open-door policy with my staff, in the days after the decision, I was distraught enough to want to spend a fair amount of time with my office door closed. From my desk in the whip office, I had a clear view across First Street to the Supreme Court Building. In the shadow of this view, and after all my years working to block this awful legislation, I found it nothing short of depressing that when it was finally enacted, it was under a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican president.
But I’d taken the fight as far as I could, and it was time to move on. I called John McCain to congratulate him. “You won and I lost,” I said. Although we were on different sides of this issue for many years, I like and admire John McCain. He and I would go on to become close colleagues and good friends, sharing many dinners together at Trattoria Alberto on Capitol Hill. John said, “There are few things more daunting in politics than the determined opposition of Mitch McConnell, and I hope to avoid the experience more often in the future.” This was gracious of him to say and I, too, paid tribute to his resolve. The bill never would have passed without him being as tenacious as he was. It was a terrible bill, but boy, was he tenacious about it. And that’s a quality I deeply respect.
When it was all said and done, even at times of differences like these, John and I, and all of our Republican colleagues, were united as a conference in the beliefs that united us as a party, and acting as a leader among my colleagues in the pursuit of those principles was a true honor. The only thing I didn’t like about the job of whip was that it was the second most important position in my party and I still had my heart set on getting the top job. Bill Frist, the current leader, had pledged to serve no longer than two Senate terms. If he kept that promise, the position would be open in another three years. I hoped that the work I was doing as the assistant leader of my party—trying to keep everyone together to enact the best legislation we could—was helping to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had the qualifications to be elected to replace him when the position opened. And according to the card I kept in my pocket, on which I was once again recording the number of votes I had secured for the position, it very well seemed that I was on my way to achieving my goal.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Thick Hide
If you were to stop by my office in the Russell building, you’d see that on a wall to the right of my desk, I have on prominent display a few dozen political cartoons that I find particularly amusing. One of my favorites depicts an entrenched DC politician who has chewed the meat clear off the bones of his critics. In others, he’s drawn as a prostitute to big money, the king of earmarks, someone beholden to special interests, and Howdy Doody, the puppet from the classic 1950s children’s show.
I am the politician in those cartoons.
Not only do they give constituents something interesting to look at when they stop by, but they remind me that in politics, you have to be humble and have a thick hide. As Harry Truman supposedly said, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
It’s no secret that being a member of Congress has always ranked up there with used-car salesmen in the affection of the American people, and every American—political pundits and cartoonists included—have the right to say what they want about us. I view it much like the experience of going to a ball game: you bought your ticket, and you’re entitled to scream at the umpires if you want. Though it might sting, hardy criticism of the people we’ve elected is a reflection of the health of our democracy. So today, when a political cartoon in which I appear strikes me as particularly comical, I call the cartoonist to ask for a signed copy to hang on my wall. (Those conversations are, themselves, often quite amusing. This is who and you want what?) I now have quite a robust collection.
That’s not to say that I quietly accept the point these cartoons are often trying to make, and I’ve exerted a fair amount of effort hitting back. More than once, after the Courier-Journal published a poll declaring how unpopular I was, I released the results of a poll of my own, showing that most of the paper’s readers found the paper to be out-of-touch and irrelevant, its political coverage biased. Perhaps my favorite article ever published in the Courier-Journal was one reporting the results of another poll we’d taken. It had found that readers of the Courier-Journal were actually less likely to vote for a candidate the paper endorsed.
I attribute my healthy attitude toward criticism to an important lesson I learned from, of all people, Ronald Reagan. He was often ridiculed during his time. We all remember Clark Clifford, an adviser to four presidents, calling Reagan an “amiable dunce.” But Reagan, seemingly impervious to the criticism, continued to govern not in a manner to appease his critics, or the employees of left-wing press outfits, but with conviction. Clark Clifford would go on to be charged in a banking scandal. And that amiable dunce? Well, he went on to end the Cold War, develop Reaganomics, help America regain its confidence, and serve as one of our greatest presidents.
In the summer of 2004, I had reason to contemplate President Reagan’s legacy with special attention because on June 5, 2004, he passed away at the age of ninety-three. Prior to the funeral, his body lay in state for thirty-four hours in the Capitol Rotunda. I spent a lot of time there, quietly paying my respects. Among the thousands of visitors who came to the viewing, standing in long lines, was a young soldier who’d fought in Iraq, accompanied by Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense. The soldier had lost both his hands, which made his salute to Reagan’s casket all the more moving.
President Bush declared June 11, the day of Reagan’s funeral at the National Cathedral, a national day of mourning and gave what I think just might be one of the most poignant eulogies ever delivered by a US president. He spoke of Ronald Reagan’s childhood in a small town, where your neighbor’s hardship was your own. He talked about his inherent goodness, which permeated everything he did. He paid tribute to Reagan’s boldness, his vision, his courage, and his optimism.
These are qualities that go beyond politics, yet they were also qualities the Republican Party desperately needed as we entered the 2004 election. Bush’s approval rating was at about 30 percent, and his critics had brought out their knives, calling him everything from a war criminal to a fascist. As a loyal Bush supporter I believed that, like Reagan, he could crush his critics and win the election and that his legacy, like Reagan’s, would stand the test of time. But things were looking bleak, and I tried to find hope where I could, including the fact that the Louisville Courier-Journal had endorsed John Kerry.
On October 13, 2004, I was at home with Elaine, watching the third and final presidential debate between President Bush and Senator John Kerry. We were six weeks from Election Day, and in this debate, Bush was holding his own. This was a relief, because his performance in the first debate had nearly sunk him. Bush ha
s many wonderful qualities. He’s astute, decisive, and never wavers from his beliefs. He has a much slyer wit than anyone gives him credit for. But he is not a great debater. During his first debate against Kerry, he’d had a particularly troubling performance, appearing to both smirk and slouch, and he missed many opportunities to hammer Kerry. It was as if he’d run out of things to say.
This night, in a debate moderated by Bob Schieffer, Bush was on point, and Elaine and I were both feeling pleased with his performance. At one point, Schieffer asked John Kerry a question about raising the minimum wage. Kerry took the opportunity to fire a few shots at Bush for opposing these efforts, and the president responded, “Oh, I’m in favor of the Mitch McConnell plan to raise the minimum wage.” Well, I nearly fell off the sofa. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t expected to hear my name in the debate, but I hadn’t the slightest idea that the McConnell plan for raising the minimum wage even existed.
I called Kyle. “Any idea what he’s talking about?”
“I was wondering that myself,” Kyle said. It turns out we had devised an alternative to the Democrats’ plan if the issue came to the Senate floor. But because they never offered their version, our amendment never got much further than a stack of papers on my desk.
Other than this amusing experience—and the fact that I spent a day at the Democratic National Convention, acting as a spokesman for my party and speaking to reporters to offer the Republican point of view, all while enjoying the utterly confused looks on people’s faces as to my presence there—there was very little that I enjoyed about the experience of Bush running for reelection against John Kerry. Due to the increasing casualties in Iraq, coupled with the scandal of abuse at Abu Ghraib, Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, and critical television spots from MoveOn.org, the public continued to turn against Bush. Then Howard Dean disappointed us by losing the nomination to John Kerry, and Kerry took the lead over Bush in the polls in August.
The race remained close over the next several months, and both campaigns deserve a lot of credit for their get-out-the-vote efforts. Come election night, voter turnout went from 50 percent in 2000 to 60 percent in 2004, making 2004 the highest turnout since 1960. Going into election night, I had a sense of foreboding that Bush might lose. I saw a political cartoon that summarized the way a lot of other Americans felt at this time. It shows a voter going into a booth. In his head is the word “Kerry,” but in his gut is the word “Bush.” In my own head, I was worried about a Kerry victory, but in my gut, I had to hold on to my faith in the American people and the rightness of Bush’s policies.
When the results came in, and the president was reelected with three and a half million votes more than Kerry, I was elated. The clear and decisive victory erased the memory of the difficult election of 2000 and gave President Bush and the entire Republican Party the blast of energy we needed. Now, with the mandate of the voters, I could continue with my job and begin to prepare for the biggest role of my career: the leader of my party.
A decade earlier, a special election was held in Kentucky’s second congressional district to fill the seat left vacant in 1994 by the death of longtime representative Bill Natcher. The district, which had not elected a Republican since 1865, was thought to be an easy win for the Democratic candidate, Joe Prather, the state’s secretary of transportation. Prather went on to lose by ten points. While there were several reasons for his loss—chief among them the fact that Republicans were able to successfully compare him to the very unpopular (at the time) Bill Clinton—Prather had made a stupid mistake that gravely hurt him. About one month before the election, Prather revealed that he had gone to Washington to rent an apartment in anticipation of being elected to Congress. His hubris did not sit well with the voters.
This was a lesson I would never forget. One should never, no matter how sure a victory seems, take that victory for granted. I had to keep this in mind in the fall of 2006. By this time, Bill Frist had announced he was not running for reelection in November. I knew from the tallied votes on my card that I had secured the position, and I anticipated that I’d run without opposition. Not wanting to appear overconfident, I kept this information quiet. But I also had every intention of beginning my tenure as the leader of my party as prepared as I could be, and I began to look for the most talented people in the business to join the team I would oversee as Republican leader. The only question that remained was if Republicans would continue to hold the majority in the Senate.
The night of the 2006 midterm elections, Elaine and I went to the offices of the National Republican Senatorial Committee to watch the results. There was a large crowd in the conference room on the first floor, and dozens of staff members in the war room on the second, but I chose to watch in a small conference room on the third, alone with Elaine and Billy Piper. By this time, Billy had worked his way up from my driver, to my legislative assistant, to my appropriations coordinator, to become the chief of staff for my personal office. Billy sat at his laptop monitoring the results, and he kept his back to us, likely so he wouldn’t have to see the look on my face as, one by one, our guys went down. Jim Talent in Missouri. Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania. Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island. By the time we were through, six Republican senators lost their elections, and with each loss, it was apparent that we were on our way to losing the majority.
I turned to Elaine. “It’s worse than I thought,” I said. I didn’t say much else for a while, allowing Elaine to speak for me. Every time another bad result came in, we all knew Elaine’s opinion on it pretty quickly.
We were there until 2:00 a.m., when the final results were in. We’d lost both the House and the Senate, and I felt the sinking disappointment that my hopes of being majority leader had been crushed. I now had forty-nine Republicans in a body that requires fifty-one for a majority and sixty to do most things. If there was ever a time I needed a thick hide, it was now. Before heading home, I picked up the phone and called Bob Corker, the former mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee. “Congratulations,” I said. “You’re the freshman class.”
The next morning, I woke up around seven o’clock feeling the disappointment of having to play defense to Harry Reid, now majority leader. I like Harry, and even invited him to come speak as part of our distinguished speaker lecture series at the McConnell Center. Reporters may want to believe there’s a personal animus at play, but there isn’t. I would never have gotten into this business, much less succeeded at it, if I took political differences personally. But Harry is rhetorically challenged. If a scalpel will work, he picks up a meat-ax.
He also has a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. In person, Harry is thoughtful, friendly, and funny. But as soon as the cameras turn on or he’s offered a microphone, he becomes bombastic and unreasonable, spouting things that are both nasty and often untrue, forcing him to then later apologize. For example, a year earlier, he’d called then–Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan a political hack and later decided to enlighten a group of sixty students by calling President Bush a loser during a speaking engagement at their high school. This lack of restraint goes against what is expected from a party leader, and I was skeptical, at best, about the direction of the Senate under his leadership.
The next morning, given our late night, I was surprised to find Elaine already awake and working in her home office. When I brought her a cup of coffee, she had a contemplative look on her face.
“It’s not what you were hoping for,” she said. “But you’ve been working toward this for more than twenty years. I know you’ll do everything you can to help govern in a responsible, wise way that will lead us in the right direction and benefit our country. Majority. Minority. Who cares? You’ll still get it done.”
I went back downstairs. She was right. And yes, while a small part of me may have wanted to spend at least a few minutes wallowing in disappointment over the loss of our majority and that, yet again, my chance of becoming majority leader had slipped away, I d
idn’t have the time for that. After all, the year I was first elected, I was one of just two new Republican senators. And I didn’t work my way out of that poorly lit seat in the back corner by wallowing. I picked up the phone. Billy was already at the office.
“We have a lot to do,” I said. “What’s next?”
The first thing on the agenda was attending the leadership elections a few days later. On November 15, my colleagues and I met in the Old Senate Chamber—the same room where Henry Clay and Daniel Webster famously debated, and which later housed the US Supreme Court, from 1860 to 1935. It looks exactly as you think it would: richly decorated with crimson drapery, dark wood paneling, and marble columns. Under a domed ceiling and a portrait of George Washington painted in 1823 by Rembrandt Peale, my Senate colleagues unanimously elected me to be the fifteenth Senate Republican leader, and Trent Lott as whip.
Kyle had assembled a great crew to work in the leadership office, identifying a number of talented new hires, like Brian McGuire—an exceedingly smart guy who would be my speechwriter—as well as some seasoned Hill veterans like Rohit Kumar, Meg Hauck, Libby Jarvis, Laura Pemberton, Malloy McDaniel, Mike Solon, Dave Schiappa, and Sharon Soderstrom, who was widely considered to be the best staffer in the Senate. Tom Hawkins made the jump from the Appropriations Committee staff, and most of the whip staff made the move down the hall to the leader’s office, including Don Stewart—or Stew, as everyone knows him—who had recently joined my staff as our communications director. John Abegg and Brian Lewis were brought on as my legal counsel. In addition, Billy Piper had an all-star team in the Russell office, including legislative director Scott Raab, communications director Robert Steurer, and my military and defense staffer Reb Brownell. I couldn’t have been better prepared.
The Long Game Page 16